Over the last few years, debates about cultural politics have shown local policy makers to be completely focused on "competitive exhibitions," with which the city can bolster its image as an international cultural metropolis. Cultural politics in Berlin, it seems, have increasingly become a synonym for local marketing and an instrument of a neoliberal model of urban development. Politicians approvingly sell out urban space, putting up with the depletion of social and creative possibilities that goes along with this, in order to bring tourists and their money to Berlin, which the city needs in times of scarce public funds and paltry economic perspectives.
In this attempt to push Berlin far ahead in the competition between cities, it could only be a matter of time before politics would start pulling old plans out of the drawer, breathing new life into an event format with a dubious history. Why not simply put on a world's fair? Such is the concept behind The World is Not Fair–The Great World's Fair 2012, a new project by the architectural collective raumlaborberlin, in cooperation with Hebbel am Ufer, which seeks to create a counter proposal to the format of the "Expo," on the Tempelhof grounds from June 1-24, 2012.
This has been considered since the 19th century. It led, in 1897, at the highpoint of European colonialism, to the Great Industrial Exhibition of Berlin, which took place beyond the gateway to the city on the grounds of what is now called Treptower Park.
In the history of the world's fairs, which stretches over 160 years, degrading presentations of colonized cultures were a regular part of the agenda. Even the Brussels Industrial Fair in 1958 continued the tradition of these human zoos. The intrusions into the urban infrastructure of the host cities and their effects on the life of the people living there were hardly less destructive. We are reminded of the Vienna World's Fair of 1873. Then, at the time of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the course of the Danube was even altered in order to make place for the expansive exhibition architecture.
Often enough, this has given rise to some visionary architectural designs of unquestionable fascination. The Crystal Palace, conceived in Victorian style by Joseph Paxton, remains well-known to the present day. It was created for London's Great Exhibition in 1851, the first World's Fair ever. The technological breakthroughs of the industrial revolution made it possible, for the first time, to erect a monument out of steel supports and glass, completely doing without any structural masonry.
Before Berlin becomes the locale for such urban planning excesses and the collateral damage wreaked by them, The World is Not Fair–The Great World's Fair 2012, would like to create a counter proposal to the format of the Expo
Not even a hundred years later, at the Expo 67 in Montreal, the idea of transparent architecture that had been inaugurated by the Crystal Palace was brought to perfection when Buckminster Fuller designed the American Pavilion. An imposing steel structure was made out of pre-fabricated pieces. This was provided with a honeycomb of acrylic material and reached a diameter of 76 meters and a height of 62 meters. A 36-meter-long escalator in the middle of a theatrical exposition tour created an efficient transport system that provided access to the four great thematic worlds at seven levels.
These pavilions are not to be understood as state agents for national branding, but instead as places of highly subjective artistic and political reflection. Beyond the boundaries of cultural disciplines, architects, theater artists, performers, and visual artists will seek to examine ideas, systems, and phenomena by which even the most outlying cultures are now globally connected with each other. What will be exhibited is not the world as it is or should be, but how we perceive, understand, and interpret it. Can it still be represented and negotiated as a totality at all?
Five projects that will be seen in the framework of The World is Not Fair – The Great World's Fair 2012 should be named here:
Hans-Werner Krösinger, one of the earliest representatives of contemporary documentary theater, is conceiving a living sound installation in an antenna building, focused on the military use and history of forced labor at the former Tempelhof Airport.
Berlin-based filmmaker Harun Farocki will show the first part of a long research project with the title Vorbild/Nachbild, which examines the role of computer animation for simulation systems and prognostic services. It concerns the global circulation of air, fire, and water — and the demand to control a world that is marked by a growing instability in relation to the predictability of systematically defined events.
The architecture of the 15 pavilions can be understood as a contribution to a discussion about sensibly managing resources. A third of the exhibition spaces involve reformations of structures that already belong to the existing facilities of the former airport field. Other structures will be erected from modules that were used in the summer of 2011 at the festival Über Lebenskunst at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt. Only three pavilions are new structures, and these only to a limited degree.
The size of the grounds at Tempelhof Field matches the extent of Prague's old city. This extent shoots down any efforts that might be made to enter into a competition at the level of designing with monumental stagings, which we are familiar with from the world's fairs and "expos."
This need not be any disadvantage. Since these grounds cause any architectural gesture that would aim at overwhelming through supersizing to appear as merely marginal, they open up unfamiliar perspectives on our perception of near and far–forcing us to reflect on the proportions of cultural plans in relation to the normative and topographic frameworks that they are designed for. We therefore get the chance for a project to apply a poetry of failure into the work against this claim, to make the contradictions that arise because of it productive.