Aftercare

Aftercare
Materials: various
Dimensions: various
Aftercare is an ongoing project which I started recently when I arrived in Berlin. This came about from trying to answer the question how do I arrive in Berlin as an artist? How do I touch it lightly? What kind of footprint do I make on the city? how do I speak to it? How do I give rather than take from it and who or what needs to be acknowledged in this process? I started the project Aftercare and what I’ve been doing is looking for overlooked —often abstract—pieces of public sculpture around Berlin. These have fallen into disuse or disrepair and I’ve started to look after and maintain them, I trim the grass, repaint the signage, and so on. I also appropriate these spaces, these overlooked pieces of public sculpture to the project by marking each space with a sign carrying a brief description of the project. I’ve been mapping these “abandoned” public sculptures and wondering if some of them might equally speak to an abandoned hope for a different kind of Berlin, and for a different kind of world, now lost with the “vanquishing” of Socialism, the disappearance of the Berlin Wall and the years immediately after its disappearance where people dreamed of a different kind of city, a different way of organising themselves. As money now pours into Berlin and a consumer- driven economy takes hold of and reshapes the city in its image, I was wondering if some of these overlooked public sculptures might speak to or embody that kind of lost or abandoned hope.