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.
