Enter the Promised City...

Why did Sven move from Bavaria in the South of Germany to a rapidly gentrifying Prenzlauer Berg in Berlin where his type is secretly resented? He is, to elaborate, one of the typically rich southerners who is pushing up the rents here, elbowing out artists who once made this neighbourhood vibrant.

Sven already calls it home, this fast homogenising part of the city. And what made him so eager to belong to this ‘Poor but Sexy’ Berlin this soon? Or why did Martin move from the Czech Republic to make a living working in a Currywurst shop in the gay quarter of Schöneberg?

Any migrant would know, even if vaguely. And a majority of us will be in that position in a globalising world where cities have become strategic points of contact with the rest of the world; we are all migrants making our way between this city and that.

Realising this, the Goethe-Institut’s ambitious Promised City project set to articulate the pushes and pulls of a city, taking the individual contexts of Berlin, Warsaw and Mumbai as laboratories. This it did through collaborations between artists, filmmakers, writers, and journalists whose output will be shared with Mumbai in a series of events starting October 8. 

Creative destruction
In this triangle, the choice of Mumbai may seem odd, given that Berlin and Warsaw have similar histories of having been destroyed in WW II and rebuilt thereafter. Mumbai was a deliberate choice, as “Europeans often focus too much on themselves,” says Tomasz Dabrowski, director, Polish Institute Berlin. “We need the external perspective, in this case the Indian one, if we are to cope better with our complex situation and its problems,” says Martin Wälde, director of the Goethe-Institut in Warsaw, who also conceptualised the project for over two years.

The photographs, poems, lectures, and art installations produced as a result of the two-and-a-half year long project are selective narratives that treat the city as a crucible for ‘creative destruction’ and reinvention, for stories held together by the ‘pursuit of happiness’ and capitalistic logic.

In their 50-minute two-screen video installation titled ‘The Capital of Accumulation’, Delhi-based artists of the Raqs Media Collective trawl “oblique narratives” of the relationship between the three cities, contrasting it with German Marxist theorist Rosa Luxemberg’s  seminal work ‘The Accumulation of  Capital’.

“Capitalism knits the world in its own image. But the key thing is to not be dazzled by the image, but to search for the details in its shadows… The memory of the long textile strike is a door that opens in Mumbai, and takes us into the history of working people’s struggles in Poland in the 1980s, and the interconnected histories of silent cinema in Berlin and Bombay in the early part of the twentieth century segue into narratives of hope and exile,” says Monica Narula of the Raqs Media Collective. 

Most of the work has come out of Warsaw, the city that emerged from the Soviet umbrella and embraced capitalism in 1989, revved up, and never looked back. Yet it remains a city without a master plan, a city that “existed in a space more virtual than real; in the drawings of town planners sketching their visions of the future… in the speeches of politicians; in the ideals of artists and social activists.”

Wälde hopes that this international project will motivate people to take action here.

Living among strangers
In the photograph series ‘Fortune Seekers’, Berlin-based photographer Katja Schmitt explores this Warsaw through the lives of Polish women who had moved to Warsaw as students, artists or mothers. She reveals these women alone and soulless in their rooms, clad in flashy fakes from the discount markets. Schmitt wants to know, “whether with the help of clothing, one can manage to depict what capitalism promises and what, at the same time, it produces.”

Elsewhere Frankfurt-based photographer Tufi Rami manages to get past the steel into the gated communes of Warsaw, the expansive, sanitised spaces that most can only see from outside.

Through facades and empty spaces, as opposed to characters in other photo essays, Rami explores how people make a living in the city and how they shape its architecture. Gated communities to him are stark symbols of aspiration in a city dotted with derelict Soviet Era buildings and obsessed with catching up with the rest of the world.

“The language of my photo essay might be another but it’s a metaphor to see how different groups construct their views of fortune,” says Tufi.

That most of the narratives from Mumbai dwelt on Bollywood, locals and slums, only shows how little Europe sees of this side of the world.

Mumbai-based freelance photographer Dhiraj Singh was interested in documenting another dimension — the walls of Mumbai that support migrant dreams, horizontal spaces having been claimed by encroachers, hawkers or the BMC.

“There is another space, which is supportive, which is vertical. Even the BMC has no rules against it. So it is really the unclaimed space that people find comfort in,” says Singh, about pictures of Kolhapuris and baskets and bags resting on roadside walls. 

These artistic interventions reflect the conclusions, imagined universes and myths, flashes of truths and half-truths that emerged from “living among strangers”. And that’s all they can be, though they might be pointers to the future.

Ranjit Hoskote, the Mumbai-based writer and poet who spent a month in Berlin as part of the project writes, “The ‘Promised City’ is in the mode of the ‘not-yet’, a permanent work in progress, a stimulating challenge to our ways of thinking about how people come together and live together in societies. Anthropology is no longer confined to a special discipline; rather, it is our standard operating procedure.”

The Promised City project opens in Mumbai on October 8. For more information, visit www.promised-city.org