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Guggenheim ‘Lab’ set to swing through Berlin

New York’s Guggenheim Museum is creating travelling “laboratories” that will look at the design of cities. Berlin is believed to be one host city, but a redevelopment dispute is complicating matters.

Published: 29 April 2011 07:54 CEST
Guggenheim 'Lab' set to swing through Berlin
Photo: DPA

The project is basically a travelling think tank on what cities ought to be now and in the future. The BMW Guggenheim Lab – a collaboration between the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and German carmaker BMW – will travel the world drumming up ideas.

The host cities are still a secret. But various media reports have said Berlin has been chosen as the European host and that a parking lot at the northern end of Kastanienallee in the Prenzlauer Berg district is the planned site – which insiders have confirmed to The Local.

The temporary project is set to begin in the German capital in the spring of 2012.

There will be three BMW Guggenheim Labs, each of which will travel to three major cities. The first Lab will start in North America then move to Europe and finally to Asia. The architect will be Japanese firm Atelier Bow-Wow and the graphic designers will be South Korean duo Sulki & Min.

According to the Guggenheim in New York, each Lab will be an “innovative movable structure that will travel from city to city” and bring together artists, architects and scientists for “research, experimentation, and the sharing of ideas about major issues affecting urban life.”

The still somewhat scruffy Kastanienallee is the favoured site in Berlin. But others are supposedly being considered, including Pfefferberg, a nearby cultural venue at a former brewery, a source said.

The catch with Kastanienallee is that the Guggenheim project has run into a local dispute over plans to dramatically revamp of the popular shopping and café boulevard. While officials hope to improve tram and bike traffic, many residents and business are vehemently opposed to narrowing the street’s trademark wide sidewalks.

According to Severin Höhmann, who is running for a seat in the Berlin parliament for the centre-left Social Democratic Party in the city’s September election, redevelopment work on the street was being rushed to fit the timetable of the Guggenheim project, to the detriment and against the wishes of local business owners.

“In my view there is a misunderstanding. It’s about the future of a city … but Berlin is trying to make itself clean and new,” he said. “Even though (local traders) want the Guggenheim, they don’t want it done this way, with this street renewal. They’re changing the time-frame of the project just for the Guggenheim, which isn’t going to be good for the shops and cafés.”

He said the redevelopment should be done over two or three years with close consultation with residents and business owners.

“It should be done more slowly and they should be talking more to people … Now it’s like (controversial rail project) Stuttgart 21. That’s the way of politics today: ‘We decide to do it and we don’t have time to talk to people.’”

Höhmann stressed the BMW Guggenheim Lab would be a great thing for the city but said a rushed overhaul of Kastanienallee without sufficient consultation went against the entire spirit of the project.

“It would be a terrific thing for Berlin. I absolutely want to welcome Guggenheim here. It’s just that it’s not necessary to clean up the neighbourhood to have it. If I have understood it correctly, one of the points of the Guggenheim project is to talk about how cities change, but you can’t do that if it’s not about the city and its people but about the city and politics. It would be a good chance to talk about Kastanienallee.”

One insider, who did not want to be named, said Kastanienallee might have to dropped in favour of another Berlin site.

For now, officials are tight-lipped about the plans. Jens-Holger Kirchner, a Greens member of the Pankow district council who is responsible for public policy, did not respond to request for comments.

However, he told the daily Tagesspiegel earlier this month that having the Lab would be “a great honour and a greater asset” for the city and that the project would enrich the current debate about the future of Kastanienallee.

Guggenheim director of public relations in New York, Betsy Ennis, declined to comment on the Berlin situation and simply told The Local the museum would hold a press conference on Friday, May 6.

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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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