“This is a place where I never was before: here breathing is different, and more dazzling than the sun is the radiance of a star beside it.” — Franz Kafka
“What do we drink? Everything. […] – and in happy coexistence Moskva and Manhattan.”— Brigitte Reimann: Franziska Linkerhand
The project investigates architectures, places and landscapes that open up an in-between – between political ideologies, between politics/work and recreation, between past and future. In various case studies at the interface of architecture, memory and society, the study attempts to (re-)imagine political landscapes of recreation, to trace concrete spatial practice and to ask which visual or material traces of political ideologies have been inscribed in architecture. In a way, the project transcends Henri Lefebvre’s reflection – “has socialism produced its own spatiality” – and traces the connections, relations and internationalisms of post-socialist spaces in order to attempt nothing less than to open up established knowledge towards the unknown, the not- or more-than-familiar.