These maps will engage with the continuities and changes shaping German coloniality, and movements of resistance to it, thereby opening up alternative perspectives on the city’s established cartography, which is marked by the official memorialisation of Empire, Nazism and the Cold War. While a strong focus will be placed on German colonial history ‘proper’, a history that has been systematically denigrated for decades, the maps will not rely on a linear chronology that contains different historic eras in impermeable boxes, and on a linear timeline suggesting a steady progression towards liberal ideals, thereby maintaining the idea of Berlin’s centrality to ‘world history’. Instead, the maps will emphasise how different layers of time are intricately interwoven through personalities, texts, ideas, organisations, or movements. Rendering these different aspects visible as relators (some of them are already officially recognised through street names, monuments etc, others are haunting the city as spectres), will weave this place into a transversal, horizontal rhizomatic global network. In the process, Berlin’s centrality to the history of modernity, through imperial violence or scientific innovation, will be complemented by its peripheral role in the lives of people and movements whose centres have been and still are elsewhere. Berlin’s cityscape will thus become visible as an island in a global archipelago and as a palimpsest of different and simultaneously existing temporal, spatial and political imaginations.
- Kursleiter*in: Dr. Moses März