What is a home? And what is a city? Can a city be seen as a collection of temporary and permanent homes? Can we speak of a city as a home?
And what does it mean, according to Article 13 of the Basic Law, that the dwelling is "inviolable"? And what does it mean when just below it, in article 14, it says "property is obligatory". To what? Speaking about habitation means talking about our understanding of property, especially in Frankfurt, where the German squatter movement began.
The lab tries to revive these questions through interviews with activists of the "Eine Stadt für alle" (A City for All) movement.
Lisa Hahn is an activist in the initiative „Eine Stadt für alle – Wem gehört die AGB?” (A City for All - Who does the AGB (general terms and conditions) belong to?)
She studied Human Geography & Urban Research in Frankfurt. She focused more and more on the topic of housing and wrote her master's thesis on student housing. Since October last year Lisa Hahn has been working as a research assistant in local politics for the parliamentary group Die Linke (democratic left party) in the area of planning and housing policy and urban development.
The alliance "A City for All - Who does the AGB belong to?" is a forum for housing policy and neighbourhood initiatives from Frankfurt (and the surrounding area) and launches various actions and campaigns on a regular basis. In particular, the campaign "We are half the city" is about demanding high-quality and long-term affordable social housing in Frankfurt.
Images create cities. Whether official marketing or selfies in front of sights: cities and public spaces are often reduced to the visual. In doing so, they are particularly shaped by what cannot be seen, such as infrastructures and memories, norms and restrictions, plans and forgotten utopias. Beneath the surface of the images, the invisible city is hidden: firstly, with its different lifeforms, its history, its becoming and passing; secondly, with its borders, exclusions and marginalizations. Cities are spaces in which the future is permanently negotiated. They are reservoirs of the past, motors of the present and laboratories of the future - in the good and bad sense.
Since 2012 laPROF has been holding laboratories for performative research on a regular basis in order to make contemporary artistic methods openly accessible. In small laboratories, artists work together with participants on specific topics, making their methods of working and their aesthetic stance transparent. On the weekend of 8-10 September 2017 laPROF will organise a laboratory for performative urban research. The invited artists will research with the participants on concealed issues and stories in Frankfurt. Following artists will be there:
Ligna (Performance collective, Frankfurt/Hamburg): Construction and demolition
Friendly Fire (Performance collective/Leipzig): Places of protest
Diana Wesser (Visual artist and performer/Leipzig): Traces of Jewish history
Eleonora Herder (Performance artist/Frankfurt) with Lisa Hahn (Activist „A city for all"/Frankfurt): Coexistence
The event will be based in the student house in Bockenheim, the research will mainly cover the districts of Bockenheim and Westend. The laboratories will investigate concrete places, their history, how they function, what they show or hide. At the end of the weekend, the participants will create small audio or video tracks from their research, which will be implemented on a website and then, if possible, made openly accessible at the respective locations. This will create a pool of small artistic interventions. In addition to the open House of Cultures initiative, cooperation partners are the "Stadtlabor unterwegs" (City lab on the move) of the Historical Museum and the Jewish Museum.
At the beginning on Friday there will be an introduction by Jan Deck (independent theatre maker/laPROF) and Patrick Primavesi (Professor of Theatre Studies/Leipzig). Afterwards there will be a tour with Norbert Saßmannshausen, a district historian.
Qualitative interviews are used to generate data in the form of narrations and statements about a subject. However, the statements are not facts or views that are to be elicited from the interviewee as fixed units. Rather, they are communicatively generated data that arise in an interaction between the interviewee and the interviewer, including their verbal and non-verbal interactions.
Thus, the context of the data production is considered an immanent part of the data itself. The interview context should be integrated into the analysis.
An essential part of this happens through the self-reflection of the researchers. This also includes becoming aware of one's own position in relation to the interviewee and the object of research.
Qualitative interviews reveal what the spatial appropriation of one person does to the claims, rights and practices of another. In this sense, interviews can make a contribution to the pluralization of the city, they can be supportive in formulating and explaining the "right to the city". It has also become clear that the city actually takes placein the interview – and is not just being remembered and told of. If an interview is carried out on site, it is not only talked about the city, but the people involved in the interview create the city in their interaction.
