Berlin: The Fragments

“The European city is a hallucination made flesh and concrete, criss-crossed by marks of negation: graffiti, bullet-holes, neon. The city is an immense arena of eroded and exploded signs – signs that mediate the city to the individual, and that individual to the city. For all their pockets of stasis and stagnation, the European cities have taken on a momentum of transformation in the final decade of the twentieth century, and that transformation demands constant, obsessional exploration. The eyes of the cities’ inhabitants are in a process of visual suffusion, compacting a multiplicity of gestures and movements into the act of seeing the city. The process of experiencing the European city is one of corrosion, in which the screens of the city are torn away, revealing layers and nodes of history and memory that lie shattered by the trajectories of the twentieth century. Just as it moves forward, blindly but sensationally, the European city is moving backward in time, colliding abrasively with extreme moments of conflict: the collections of murder, annihilation, violence that make the twentieth century vivd and tangible in all its horror. From this mesh of space and time, which itself transmits the history and experience of the European city, the imageries of television and cinema are ejected into the city: television constantly, droning with the noise of the city, and cinema intermittently, performing its dense projection of vision into the eyes of its spectators. The inhabitant of the European city is a participant entangled utterly in the visible, susceptible to an infinity of aural and visual acts that encompass the tortuous, the exquisite and a vast array of the banal: the banal supports the city and gives it life. Assembling a city is a most gratuitously social act imaginable, conglomerating human lives into a mass of friction. To build a city is to subjugate the imagination to the obliterating power of the everyday. The cities trail limbs of suburbia that are the exposed and wounded sites of all the random residue generated by the glory of the European metropolis: racism, poverty, drug abuse, prostitution, desperation. The detritus addicted but the city and the strangeness exuded but the city are interacting elements of the same arrangement, of the same visual sensation. The city projects itself with a force which is exhausting, that in visual terms exacts surrender and acceptance of the city’s appearance. The cities have a self: cities exist to be travelled in, worked in, passed through by the colossal ephemera of human lives. The cities represent themselves, accumulating a mass of vital imageries from the fluid matter of memory, nostalgia, evocation, and suturing that index of scars into the projection of the contemporary moment, the present and the presence of the city in its immediacy and urgency. The survival of the figures that inhabit the European city hinges on a questioning of – a penetration of – the hallucination that is a city.”