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Repairing run-down buildings one Lego at a time

The colourful plastic toy bricks you may have noticed patching up buildings around Europe recently have nothing to do with municipal budget cuts. Shannon Smith examines a Berlin-based artist’s quirky open-air installations.

Published: 13 October 2009 17:54 CEST
Repairing run-down buildings one Lego at a time
Photo: Kathleen Waak

Jan Vormann hopes you remember your youthful fondness for Lego.

The Berlin-based artist’s “Dispatchwork” project appears simple enough at first glance: observant passersby in the German captial’s Mitte district this summer could spot chromatic constellations of Lego and other building blocks filling holes in the facades of buildings on the Humboldt University campus.

Still pockmarked from World War II and 40 years of communist neglect, the surfaces proved to be the perfect candidates for Vormann’s exercise in collaborative repair.

“We wanted to demonstrate the effect of filling a hole, but also how a repair can highlight it,” the 26-year-old artist told The Local recently.

On certain days, lucky passersby and visitors to the exhibit – sponsored by Berlin gallery Jarmuschek+Partner – could be seen altering the installation, removing, rearranging and reusing the toy bricks as they saw fit. Vormann described public participation as a fundamental aspect of the project.

Click here for photo gallery of the art project.

“I think one of the reasons people are so willing to join in is the excitement inspired by building blocks and creation,” Vormann said. “Almost everyone has some sort of emotional connection to Legos.”

Berlin was one of several stops including Bocchignano, Italy, Tel Aviv, Israel, Amsterdam, Belgrade, Serbia and most recently St. Petersburg, Russia. Vormann said the idea originated as part of a project called 20Eventi on an invitational trip through the Sambina region of Italy.

“I began noticing that the locals would make repairs to damaged walls and other structures with whatever they had lying around,” he explained. “They were repairs made out of necessity, and the special thing was that it worked. In fact, often times something more beautiful was born.”

The Amsterdam leg of the art project took place in cooperation with the Institute for Achitecture ARCAM and Platform 21, an organisation and self-described design platform, which touts repairing rundown objects as a valuable and endangered undertaking. It’s Repair Manifesto has already been downloaded more than a million times, according to the group.

“Whereas our Western society is trained to always want the newer, better and shinier version, dismissing chipped or superficially damaged items as broken, Jan Vormann is not afraid to make his repairs visible,” explained Dewi Pinatih of Platform 21.

Vormann’s work “shows what repair should be about: a hefty dose of improvisation, mixing old and new techniques and materials and above all, he’s having fun with it.”

Representatives of Platform 21 contacted Vormann and were quick to recruit him as a platform ambassador. Not long after, select parts of Amsterdam received their own “Dispatchwork” repair treatment.

“It was incredible to see a group of serious adults turn into people enthusiastically playing and digging through their bags of Lego looking for the right brick,” recalls Pinatih.

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ART

African-born director’s new vision for Berlin cultural magnet

One of the rare African-born figures to head a German cultural institution, Bonaventure Ndikung is aiming to highlight post-colonial multiculturalism at a Berlin arts centre with its roots in Western hegemony.

Published: 8 July 2023 10:13 CEST
African-born director's new vision for Berlin cultural magnet

The “Haus der Kulturen der Welt” (House of World Cultures), or HKW, was built by the Americans in 1956 during the Cold War for propaganda purposes, at a time when Germany was still divided.

New director Ndikung said it had been located “strategically” so that people on the other side of the Berlin Wall, in the then-communist East, could see it.

This was “representing freedom” but “from the Western perspective”, the 46-year-old told AFP.

Now Ndikung, born in Cameroon before coming to study in Germany 26 years ago, wants to transform it into a place filled with “different cultures of the world”.

The centre, by the river Spree, is known locally as the “pregnant oyster” due to its sweeping, curved roof. It does not have its own collections but is home to exhibition rooms and a 1,000-seat auditorium.

It reopened in June after renovations, and Ndikung’s first project “Quilombismo” fits in with his aims of expanding the centre’s offerings.

The exhibition takes its name from the Brazilian term “Quilombo”, referring to the communities formed in the 17th century by African slaves, who fled to remote parts of the South American country.

Throughout the summer, there will also be performances, concerts, films, discussions and an exhibition of contemporary art from post-colonial societies across Africa, the Americas, Asia and Oceania.

‘Rethink the space’

“We have been trying to… rethink the space. We invited artists to paint walls… even the floor,” Ndikung said.

And part of the “Quilombismo” exhibition can be found glued to the floor -African braids laced together, a symbol of liberation for black people, which was created by Zimbabwean artist Nontsikelelo Mutiti.

According to Ndikung, African slaves on plantations sometimes plaited their hair in certain ways as a kind of coded message to those seeking to escape, showing them which direction to head.

READ ALSO: Germany hands back looted artefacts to Nigeria

His quest for aestheticism is reflected in his appearance: with a colourful suit and headgear, as well as huge rings on his fingers, he rarely goes unnoticed.

During his interview with AFP, Ndikung was wearing a green scarf and cap, a blue-ish jacket and big, sky-blue shoes.

With a doctorate in medical biology, he used to work as an engineer before devoting himself to art.

In 2010, he founded the Savvy Gallery in Berlin, bringing together art from the West and elsewhere, and in 2017 was one of the curators of Documenta, a prestigious contemporary art event in the German city of Kassel.

Convinced of the belief that history “has been written by a particular type of people, mostly white and men,” Ndikung has had all the rooms in the HKW renamed after women.

These are figures who have “done something important in the advancement of the world” but were “erased” from history, he added. Among them is Frenchwoman Paulette Nardal, born in Martinique in 1896.

She helped inspire the creation of the “negritude” movement, which aimed to develop black literary consciousness, and was the first black woman to study at the Sorbonne in Paris.

Reassessing history

Ndikung’s appointment at the HKW comes as awareness grows in Germany about its colonial past, which has long been overshadowed by the atrocities committed during the era of Adolf Hitler’s Nazis.

Berlin has in recent years started returning looted objects to African countries which it occupied in the early 20th century — Burundi, Rwanda, Tanzania, Namibia and Cameroon.

“It’s long overdue,” said Ndikung.

He was born in Cameroon’s capital, Yaounde, into an anglophone family.

The country is majority francophone but also home to an anglophone minority and has faced deadly unrest in English-speaking areas, where armed insurgents are fighting to establish an independent homeland.

One of his dreams is to open a museum in Cameroon “bringing together historical and contemporary objects” from different countries, he said.

He would love to locate it in Bamenda, the capital of Cameroon’s restive Northwest region.

“But there is a war in Bamenda, so I can’t,” he says.

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