2020/2021 Fellow | Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik | Berlin, Berlin
My fellowship launched my career as an international public artist.
When I moved to Berlin in 2020 I could not yet call myself an artist. When I arrived, I started researching the history of Haus der Statistik and ways that creative practices engage with the past, present, and future of local contexts.
As it turns out, Haus der Statistik stands today exactly where Gerlachstraße Jüdisches Altenheim was located at Gerlachstraße (Lietzmannstraße until 1938) 18-21, a street which no longer exists. During WWII, the home was seized and used as a Nazi collection camp, “Sammellager,” for elderly Jews being transported to concentration camps. First, the home’s more than 250 residents were deported from their home to Theresienstadt. Then, over the course of the 1942-1943 winter, more than 2,000 elderly jewish people were held at this site and then transferred to concentration and extermination camps.
In the late 1960s, structures on the site that were not destroyed by Allied bombing as well as the former street grid were razed to make way for the DDR’s Haus der Statistik and Karl-Marx Allee residential complex. While the Altenheim had been requested to be listed under historic preservation in 1955, since its demolition it has since been erased from public memory.
What followed from my discovery of this history was not only numerous public art installations, collaborations with neighborhood groups, developers, activists, and other artists but also subsequent funding from neighborhood associations and the Berlin Senate for Culture and Social Cohesion.
In fact, these partnerships continue to flourish to this very day and the project is only growing from here. Recently, a resolution was passed at the District of Mitte level to support a permanent memorial at Haus der Statistik. With this experience as the foundation of my public art practice, I have since developed projects in Krakow, Poland; Raleigh and Durham, North Carolina USA; and Chisinau, Moldova.
Without the German Chancellor’s Fellowship, I would not have had the freedom, support, and social network to achieve what I have today.
