Kiez Party

The festival “Berlin bleibt! #4” opens at Mehringplatz with a neighborhood party. Music will be heard, people will play and dance, perform and eat together. The city is us - bring your neighbor! The artist collective Gob Squad develops live portraits with “A Monu-Moment for Mehringplatz”; Medhat Aldaabal & Ali Hasan from the legendary Dabke Community Dancing invite beginners and well-advanced to dance. Kreuzberger Musikalische Aktion (KMA) present music projects, Şipşak Druck invites to screen printing actions at Mehringplatz, the motives can be created live. Bring t-shirts, cloth bags, etc.! The group Stadt Tatreez exchanges fine sew-on patches, inspired by Palestinian embroidery art, for photo poses. Author Duygu Ağal and musician Derya Yıldırım are working with young people on the project “KEYİF at Mehringplatz,” in which stories are created through music and lyrics. Yıldırım will have a solo concert at the end.

Stage programme:

14:00–15:30: Workshop “Dabke Community Dancing” by Medhat Aldaabal & Ali Hasan
16:30–18:00: Concerts by KMAntenne bands
19:00–20:00: Concert by Derya Yıldırım
 

13:00–20:00 (continuously)

Gob Squad
A Monu-moment for Mehringplatz
If you stand at the North end of the ring of Mehringplatz and face up Friedrichstraße you can just about make out the Monument of Checkpoint Charlie. Two images of young soldiers, a Russian and an American, are placed back to back to denote the once controlled border of the city. This monument is surrounded by the hullabaloo of tourism and experience culture: an attempt to grasp history and hold it in time, an attempt to remember what once was, to never forget. The world of Mehringplatz, so geographically close, feels very far away. Under “redevelopment” for what feels like forever, the people we have met from there often talk about feeling of being forgotten rather than remembered.
For “Berlin Bleibt #4” Gob Squad decided to be process led. Rather than having a complete idea of a piece of finished work they have used the opportunity to research the area and experiment with possible outcomes. Through this process they decided to make a dialogue with the monument which is less than one kilometer away. Instead of a monument we started to think about a “monu-moment”, something that reverses the idea of permanence and remembers something for a moment, something fleeting, it attempts to grasp at the gaps in history, what has been forgotten, what is not elevated by the state. Together with the residents, carers and passers-by of Mehringplatz we will construct a Monu-moment which talks directly to its touristic neighbour.

Supported by Fonds Darstellende Künste with funds from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media within the program NEUSTART KULTUR.

Şipşak Druck 
Almost at the push of a button, the mobile screen-printing collective Şipşak Druck initiates actions in public space, opening up chance encounters in which unexpected forms of dialogue and exchange emerge. For “Berlin bleibt! #4” the collective develops motifs spontaneously and on site together with the residents and passers-by of Mehringplatz, in addition to prepared screen-printing actions. Participants can immortalize themselves on T-shirts, cloth bags, and posters. Şipşak means “spontaneous/a snapshot/quick” in Turkish and the Şipşak Druck plays with collective experiments. Şipşak Druck was founded by artist Rüzgâr Buşki, Hannah Kirmes-Daly and Nagham Hammoush. It is a space for horizontal unlearning, political actions and art education.
 

Derya Yıldırım & Duygu Ağal
The musician Derya Yıldırım and the writer Duygu Ağal deal with songs and lyrics in their work. Both combine their artistic visions in different areas. Together with young people, they want to share and elaborate stories in the form of language, lyrics, music and sounds. This is to create their own space with simple means, in which all can meet artistically. The process is the goal, and the exchange should form its own added value for the young people. The THF-Rolling Radio, a mobile radio station, is to be the central access point of the meeting place. Within the framework of “Berlin bleibt #4: Treffpunkt Mehringplatz”, temporary places at Mehringplatz are to be occupied in order to enable musical exchange and to make speech- or text-oriented offers, in which artistic writing processes can emerge.

Guerilla Architects
mehringplatzen!
For ten years, the residents of Mehringplatz lived in a chaotic construction site without access to the central meeting place. Now the construction fence is gone: what do they do first? In a site-specific, participatory-performative process, the artists' collective Guerilla Architects explores the stories of Mehringplatz and uses the public space as a stage for the neighbourhood. Over a period of six weeks until the festival, they will use their mobile project space on site to seek dialogue with the numerous initiatives and residents of Mehringplatz in order to provide an impetus to reclaim the once lost public space after years of long-term construction.