UrbanEyez
Workshop, Installation
Dot Project Space, Berlin
- 2023
Who has a right to the city?
Are public spaces open to everybody? Can every body, therefore, safely travel through and exist in public spaces - streets, pavements, markets, open areas, green spaces, parks? If we assume that this isn’t the case, then which bodies are granted safe access and which are denied? For whom are cities intended?
UrbanEyez was a series of workshops developed to address the different ways in which people think about and access public spaces in Berlin. At its core, the project aims to challenge workshop participants to assess their ability to engage with the city, physically or otherwise, and to ask what is necessary to either enhance or diminish that engagement.
In each workshop session, objects constructed from found materials were designed and worn by participants in order to alter their experience of the urban environment. We predictably encountered our own individual limitations and freedoms during this process, and yet in doing so created a collective vision of what future cities might look like and offer us. The first workshop session addressed the body - which bodies are granted access to public spaces? In the second workshop, we focussed on anonymity - how are our rights to privacy changing in the ‘spy-capital’ of Europe? The third workshop was about survival - what challenges might the future metropolis present us, and how can we overcome them?
UrbanEyez was realised within the framework of Future-Proof - a duo exhibition with Julie Chovin that was presented at Dot Berlin in 2023. I wish to thank all the participants who attended, contributed and intervened: Benjamin Bouliere, Julie Chovin, Flavie Guerrand, Hannah Alongi, Clara Gross, Patricia Meier, Ann Francis Ang, Caesar van Daal, Marijana Vorkapic, Soazic Guezennec, Lainey Molloy, and Masha Wysocka.
