Andreas Templin /Berlin

Where is Walter Gropius?
After wondering around in Gropiusstadt for a few days, I experienced a strong form of negative contemplation due to the isolated situation of being in a remote satellite-city with nearly no active public space. My thoughts were turning dark.

I had to think of Giorgio Agamben‘s theses in the book „Homo Sacer“ and his term of the „comfortable concentration camp“, strongly of Michel Foucault and, while sitting on the balcony, about the ridiculous fights between East- and West-Berlin often staged through architectural planning. So there was such a planning right in front of me. Strangely enough I never visited here whilst living in Berlin for 11 years.
In reading and researching on the Gropiusstadt, which was excellently supported by all the materials provided in the apartment, I became aware, that Walter Gropius is something like a fallen Bauhaus-angel to me. Nevertheless, he distanced himself of the project later in his life and, as you will never know where your own life is heading, to what false compromises and mistakes your life will summon up to, I would like you not to take this as serious as it sounds.
In conclusion to this residency stay I started developing a project which has to do with philosophers‘ names in relation to the signs and brandings in public space. Maybe I‘ll return some day to show it and flag the skyscrapers of Gropiusstadt and read Asterix „Die Trabantenstadt“.