Contextures : inscriptions of urban space in inner-city Berlin

Abstract

This article sets up a dialogue between photographs of urban art, artifacts, and architecture in the Prenzlauer Berg district of former East Berlin with a meditation on the ways in which urban subjects interact with their environment so as to transform both themselves and their city. The article works with notions of fluid “folded” relationships between city space and denizens, suggesting that these are not discrete entities interacting with each other according to the Euclidean paradigm of container and inhabitants, respectively. Rather, urban subjects are manifestations and products of the space that brings them forth. Any aesthetic practices on the part of urban subjects are recursive actions that modify the urban fabric continuum of which those subjects are a part, thus initiating complex environmental, political, and subjective changes, which can be understood under the rubrics of Lefebvre’s “right to the city” as well as the work of more recent theorists.