Tracing Influence (English)

The performance series Tracing Influence: Intervening in Western Cold War Architecture encounters four of Berlin’s Cold War architectures that speak to the institutionalization of US-American power and knowledge dissemination. In October 2024, Tracing Influence takes place in four stations, the Amerika-Gedenkbibliothek, the Amerika Haus, the Haus der Kulturen der Welt and the Henry-Ford-Bau, four buildings that were constructed in Berlin in the 1950s with the help of American donations and were intended to expand the educational landscape of the divided city. Four artists and a group of researchers, together with different publics engage with these architectures to ask for their pedagogic mandate, their democratic vision and also for their problematic modernist legacy.

Tracing Influence

© Lena Pozdnyakova

Performance artists will engage with these architectural spaces and their site-specific histories to reimagine ways of coming together that confront the power-over framework that their past constructs. Isabel Lewis, Nadja Buttendorf, Sophie Yukiko, and Rike Flämig will create alternative choreographies and new forms of coming together in these spaces, intervening in the movements and paths shaped and directed by the architecture and thus proposing alternative ways of coming together, of assembling in space.

How can choreographies be conceived as counter-movements to gather differently in these spaces? How can bodies and movements intervene on a micro scale? How can forms of assembling inscribe alternative social relations and trace hidden histories?

Tracing Influence was conceived by Kirsten Maar, Sophie Schultze-Allen, Hannah Strothmann, and Luise Willer with the support of Mariama Diagne, Friederike Hartge, Martina Kutsch, and Giulia Weis as part of the Collaborative Research Center Intervening Arts at the Freie Universität Berlin, in cooperation with the Berlin Central and Regional Library and Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) Berlin.

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