Unscene Berlin

Last weekend does seem far away already, doesn't it? So much has happened, since then: Minneapolis disbanding its police force, owing to its highly visible brutality and social toxicity. A Temporary Autonomous Zone was set up in Seattle, with the mayor's blessing. And in other news, racist monuments were being toppled all over the place, by cheering crowds playing Enya. I've gotta be honest: I was off of social media for the last couple of days because I was hammering away frantically to finish an article about how the news media force feeds us depressing myths about humanity. Logging back on, though, I've found a 180 degree turn on that policy. There is now such a critical mass of humanity-validating events happening at once that I wonder if my article won't be redundant soon... Ah, well, it'd be worth it. But getting back to last weekend. The Black Lives Matter solidarity demo in Berlin on 06.06.2020 happened under favourable weather conditions, w...

A combination of the pandemic and policing efforts have left Alexanderplatz looking like a still from the 1960's: empty, windswept. Aimless people, seemingly fresh-awakened to the endless possibilities of city life, are moving with uncertain freedom to the Reclaim Club Culture sound system. I had to bypass what looked to be a " hygiene demo " to get to this antiracist action by RCC, in support of freedom of movement. The hygiene demo was a messy scene, full of aggressive, drunk people trying way  too hard to look like they were having fun.  One can see the different intentions behind the two actions in the way that each group uses its allocated demo space. The hygiene crew use it to scream at passers by to take off their masks and invade their personal space, walking or dancing uncomfortably close. As if they blame you for whatever is going wrong with society. Under the auspices of freedom, they move into the power vacuum of an empty city street, and attempt ...

I'm playing infinite-scroll roulette on my Twitter feed. I swipe, and watch the posts flip past at warp speed, blurring like the stars outside the windows of the SS Enterprise. Where will it come to a stop? * An ad for a food show * Coronavirus politics * Clever German psychobabble * People openly advocating drug use * Earth Day * Pets wearing clothes? It occurs to me that everything's changed but many people don't even realise it, because nothing's changed on Twitter. Or Facebook. Or Instagram. Or CNN, BBC, Reuters, etc.  All of the mass media templates are holding patterns for a mentality that's optimised for panic. Outrage. Fear. They hang on to those emotions rabidly, regardless of what actually happens in the real world. Caging our adaptability. "Nonapocalyptic reality is simply not hospitable to [disaster capitalism's] ambitions,” writes Naomi Klein in her book The Shock Doctrine. Our disaster-fuelled me...

March 29, 2020 Via  Reddit Colder weather today has me housebound, so I let my fingers do the walking. They moseyed on over to a conspiracy forum that I sometimes look at when I'm short of whack new ideas. I was thinking someone there might be bouncing around some totally overblown theory that the coronavirus is actually a DARPA-engineered, organic malware that we caught from using Instagram or something, I dunno... bizarre, you know what I mean? Something to make the whole pandemic thing seem so OTT as to be ridiculous again. To my surprise, everyone on the site seemed to have a more pragmatic take on The Plague than the mainstream of the Internet does, right now. Like, wow. How often does that happen? Consensus there seemed to be that the virus was being blown out of proportion and we should be more (or even just equally) concerned about the government's intervention in our lives. So for once, the conspiracy theorists were not on board with a wave of pa...

As the co-inventor of the gentrification model currently reshaping Berlin, Bloomberg.com's views on the subject of rent control activism are inherently biased. Yet neither the site nor its writers seem willing to admit it. I've just read No City Hates Its Landlords Like Berlin  on Bloomberg website. A few things grabbed my attention as being, um, less than impartial about it. Who you wouldn't have guessed from the title, right? For one thing, it overuses the word "expropriation". The piece repeatedly uses "expropriation" as a shorthand to describe Berlin's plans to buy back certain properties from its biggest private landlords. "Expropriation" is an archaic word that apparently reached its peak usage around the 1950's. And it definitely seems like Bloomberg has dredged it up to try and revive the frenzied McCarthyist mood of that era, for this piece.  I'm familiar with a lot of big words but I decided to look up...

This past Friday, I went to a demo and then a party . At the demo, there were 50,000 people wearing different clothes, waving different signs, playing different kinds of music, making different statements and taking different actions. All of them were sharing the same space, the same venue, because they shared a common cause: saving the environment before it's too late. At the party I went to later, I saw hundreds of people wearing different clothes, playing different music, making different statements, performing different sets and dancing different ways.  Everyone I talked to there agreed the party was largely excellent, even if it wasn't 100% tailored to their personal preferences at all times. But when I turned the conversation the demo, their responses were roughly the same. "Oh, I would have gone except I didn't like the name,  catch phrase or the symbolism," "Oh, I don't think I'd like it, don't agree with a statement that a pers...

Another day, and another several thousand party nutters are dancing to techno in the streets and fighting the system in Berlin, Germany. Except today, they are joined by over 270,000 people taking part in various actions and demos organised by Fridays For Future, Extinction Rebellion and Reclaim Culture - amongst countless other organisations - as a part of the Global Climate Strike .   Waving up-cycled signs and throbbing with techno and other sounds of the underground, five trucks (one decked out with reused plastic), blew through the Mitte in a kilometre long procession, passing straight through Potsdamer Platz, Checkpoint Charlie and finally, Alexanderplatz. The music pulled everything together, weaving a coherent entity out of all the frustrated, angry, yet hopeful and ecstatic strands of emotion. Check out the two-minute video below to get a sense of what it was like... The anarchic dancing mass parked up, chattering and laughing to a boom-tss-boom-tss-boom-...

Photos taken by A. E. Elliott at At.Tension festival 2019 If there's something that holds people together, it's their creations: story-telling, painting, drawing, playing music and making clothing and food are what people have always done together.  And Berlin has a surfeit of visionary people, but how many of them are taking steps towards making their visions real?  As many as have the chance I'd guess. Yet that creativity could be the key to the largest problem we're facing - climate change. So maybe it's time to stop leaving things to chance.  Between September 20 th -  27 th , Reclaim Club Culture ,  UKlima2019  and Fridays For Future aim to bring all of Berlin's creative tangents together to see what solutions can be collectively dreamed, and then realised, in this city. Their weeklong lineup of action against climate change will kick off on Friday September 20th with a street party / demo called " No Future, No Dancefloor ". But...

  Rolling around Schoeneweide, again, I notice a gate open at the old brewery. It looks like a host extending a personal invitation to come in and look around.  Much obliged if I do... Eyes gazing upward of piles of rubble, grazing lofty, grandiose walls, all faded formidability that waits but never gives up its stature .  What is it about this delirious, valueless space , that keeps my mind straying off track, returning to center, re- balanced? Drawn into halls and bays that are   grandiose, soaring, extravagant as they are abandoned and unkempt. Like a pebble strewn beach or an overgrown field, this building needs nothing but the elements and awareness to sustain it.   The structure itself is actually formed of art. It's a very Berlin approach, the accidental breach of order spilling colour from every molecule of the city. No new beginnings or means to an end, just an ...