Friday 1 August 2014
Christoph Uhles - "The wreck of hope - A very short introduction to the German Green party and its functioning in the ideological superstructure of today's capitalism"
20h00 - welcome & drinks /
21h00 - lecture /
22h00 - discussion & drinks
Instead of telling you in this introduction my impressions about what I have witnessed in a devolving story in Berlin, I quote (translate) a Kreuzberg local resident who wrote in the Berlin Newspaper Der Tagespiegel (29.06.2014): "If someone would have told me 10 years ago that a green mayoress of the city district government Kreuzberg-Friedrichshain would shut off half of the Kreuzberg district together with 900 police men to block a building that is squattered by refugees I would not have believed it. If there is a reason why police forces are carrying machine guns in the streets, then we as local residents would like to know it" (Hätte mir jemand vor zehn Jahren erzählt, dass eine grüne Bezirksbürgermeisterin mit 900 Polizisten einen halben Kiez in Kreuzberg lahmlegt, um ein von Flüchtlingen besetztes Gebäude abzusperren, ich hätte es nicht geglaubt. Falls die Polizei tatsächlich einen Grund hat, hier auf offener Straße mit Maschinenpistolen aufzutreten, sollte sie den uns Anwohnern bitte schön erklären. source).
This quote may show that a debate on the Green party is topical and that the title "the wreck of hope" is consistent. In my lecture I would like to show that there is not only a gap between green politics and its ideology (what they say and what they do), but also that this gap might be the aftereffect of a concept that has been dubious from its very beginning.
As a visual artist I am also interested in questions of Urban Planning. Since 2010 I travelled many of the so called megacities in Asia. According to my believe as visual artist, I would say: show me, don't tell me...
