My stay during the residency at Lichtenburg studio was a self-exploratory research lab and became a place and time for me to reflect on my practice. The lab for me was distributed with a dedicated workshop studio space, local bicycle rides, conversations with local creative practitioners, traveling around the city on the local trains, and a couple of chances to meet with scholars and academics.
© Srinivas Harivanam
The time at residency allowed me to involve in various discussions related to the politics of space, language, and identities. And a chance to investigate multiple happenings in contemporary art within Berlin and Germany. Having spent some days cycling around the Lichtenburg district and the surrounding areas, the foregrounding feature that was attractive to me most was the city's voices and histories narrated on its skin and architectural settings.
© Srinivas Harivanam
My curiosity about the river spree and Rummesldburg bay landscape led me to delve into stories around it from the GDR times to today. Particularly interested in the recent developments in politics around the bay region due to construction activities. The bay has also been under a lot of focus for the last few years because of intense, rapid development and the consequence of these changes in the landscape.
The research unfolded with an urban site-specific installation in a move to erase the fences and walls around Rummesldburg bay, Berlin. The interventions were an attempt to dispel the fence, which acts as a medium, to justify the bifurcation by building costly condominiums and corporate buildings, flagging the possibilities of cultural space and social housing, and allowing the real estate price to rise. Intervention intends to comment on and antithesis to the larger border systems, boundaries, exclusions, and discriminations worldwide, which manifest in human gaze to allow human suffering possible.