Sprechstunde Amsterdam: Blitzbesuch Gängeviertel
Last Saturday, Partizan and friends (Chris Keulemans en Eva de Klerk) were guests at the Hamburger Gängeviertel, a squatted complex of houses, warehouses and an abandoned factory, smack in the middle of the übergentrified city centre of Hamburg. The Viertel is like a Gaellic village: a blot of subversiveness, surrounded by glass-and-steel office highrises, international hotel chains and the cities' court buildings.
The Viertel got squatted just over six months ago. Over 200 artists took to cleaning the place up, scaring the pidgeons off the attics, and kicked inn a wild cultural programming, with 5 parallel expositions, parties, debates and what have you. At the same time they started to take on the marode building structures of the area to make them winter proof and liveable again. Surprisingly, the city did not shut the squat down immediately.
Now, more than six months later, the Gängeviertel still is one of the driving forces behind the local, very energetic 'Recht auf Stadt' movement. Not In Our Name, Marke Hamburg! states the mission. The piece is a witty text against top down city engineering, exclusive gentrification and commercial branding. A text against a mono cultural Hamburg, against the mechanisms of the ever growing, entrepreneurial city, against social and functional dualism. A text in favor of a more social and liveable city, the do-it-yourself city, the city of the people.
As a protest against a recent decision of the Bauprüfamt to shut down all public activity of the squat due to safety concerns, the whole public programme of the Viertel has been moved into the public spaces of the city.
Thus it was, that we found ourselves under the arcades of Brahms Kontor, a nearby former theater/music hall now office complex, hosting and presenting a discussion on how artists and creatives can reclaim the city, in which they have found themselves instrumental to big city unreal estaste interests. Although the Staalvilla, the Tolhuistuin and the NDSM rent their spaces, and the Gängeviertel inhabitants have squatted their place, they shared a common passion to take control and ownership over these places.
(Sprechstunde Amsterdam)
(Chris Keulemans)
(Edwin Gardner)
(Eva de Klerk)
(police visit)
The Blitz visit to Hamburg ended on the steps of the Südkurve of the Millerntor in St. Pauli. Under the waving black skull-and-bone club flags, FC St. Pauli, the Zweite Bundesliga club that holds between a soccerclub, a anti-fascist bastion and a neighborhood block party, beat Rot Weiss Oberhausen with 5:3.
A special shout goes out to Marion and Nora, our hosts for the weekend!
Text and pics by Joost Janmaat, Edwin Gardner and Björn König.
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