Katya Sander: Die kleine Berlin Statistik.

In English and German.

For the third night of the series „Specific Object. Show and Tell“, the Danish, Berlin based artist Katya Sander will present „Die Kleine Berlin Statistik 2010“. With the English edition of the Statistical Office of Berlin-Brandenburg as their starting point, Sander and her guest Jochen Becker are interested in how Berlin is currently developing and what this means for their own living (survival) and working situation, how their and our relation towards gentrification could be described, what position we take in the different local economies, how our future might look like in the city.

In the past, cities like London, Paris and New York have had similar situations as we are now experiencing in Berlin. What can we learn from these cities? Are there strategies that we could adopt and not necessarily destroy all that we love here.

We in the creative professions do not come here for a real economy, but perhaps because of a symbolic economy and a space for action, because of the possible life-forms, work cultures, etc. Because it is very difficult to make money, most of us bring their money from somewhere else: saved money, earnings from teaching jobs in Europe, money from grants or business with clients outside. We travel a lot, we are also called „Easyjet-Set”, and to have one’s roots in Berlin today looks very different than in other cities – and perhaps different than in New York and London when the big „Creative Boom“ and the subsequent gentrification happened there, too.

What does it mean for a city / for Berlin that so many of us have to travel back and forth? What does this mean for the politics we can perform, and what does this mean for the people who live here – and for those who have to move away or those who want to move here?

Katya Sander’s goal is to use the „Berlin Statistics“ as a starting point to formulate a couple of further questions together with the audience – as an attempt to express and to learn something about our lives in Berlin and to find questions that refer not to the answers we all know anyway. She is looking for questions that can lead us further and perhaps refer to a future that looks different than what we have watched happen in Paris, London and New York.