situation report from the nordkiez 

ernest ah

luisa dear, in the last year we often talked about your work, what it is that engages you and what it is that you are dealing with. you have now invited me to add further thoughts and observations to our exchange. i do not want to interpret your work, but rather contemplate it and share my perception of some events whose connection to your questions may not be obvious at first glance, but are  undoubtedly there.

i remember you telling me about the man who lost his house in the earthquake and then spent years living in a hotel next to an ever-changing group of tourists. what is it like to live every day in a backdrop, in a state of limbo, without a home? you say you are moved by the question of how people (re(inhabit)...continue to) inhabit their bodies after traumatic experiences. i recognize these feelings of alienation and uncertainty later in your installation, but also the desire of the bodies to connect, to be with the landscape, with each other, with themselves. the desire for touch and understanding, that elude each other again and again.

these are major, existential questions which you insert in a very specific landscape. in the following, i would like to consider them for a moment from another specific situation, from the berlin winter. more precisely, envision a wintry morning in the friedrichshain nordkiez in the middle of a pandemic that has spiraled out of control. this leads me to speculate about that more abstract winter of the world of the north, the destruction of spaces, of connections, of filigree relationships that have existed for centuries on all kinds of levels, in the nordkiez, in the villages of umbria, in the so-called primeval forests, woods and wilds of this world. 

please understand the following as a subjective situation report, whose biggest question remains how, against all cuts and alienation, the solidarity that momentarily appears in emergency situations becomes a permanent solidary practice; how seemingly completely unrelated incidents resonate and reinforce each other.

a house in east berlin that had been occupied for decades was evicted on october 9, 2020. the eviction was not an earthquake, it was announced, default judgment, bailiff. if you know it's coming, is it still trauma? grief, yes. trauma, lingering: loss of spaces, destruction of a collective way of life, standardization and humiliation of others. everything that resists exploitation, isolation, is different. the stone that unsettles the combine, the tree that is ensouled, those who defend it. children who do not sit still, women who do not give birth. not to mention the lazy, the free-spirited, the rivers that wrestle with dams, the bats that harbor viruses. the clearing: terminated tremor. one could also say, living in a squat is living on a fault line. 

cops. the village square is completely fenced off, water cannon trucks and other heavy vehicles behind the barriers. there are still people in the house. those of us who are outside are making noise for the vigil. a few fags are flirting with the henchmen of the state power with flaming speeches. life and fences don't get along. from the balcony opposite, a tireless sound of pots and pans. it's cold. on the roof, special forces are standing around and taking selfies. helmeted beetle lookalikes. smoke rises, there's a fire somewhere. several small groups hand out wraps and tea. the comrades are masked, we protect each other in the time of the virus. there is a sticker on each wrap: “smash patriarchy! fight gentrification” and the drawing of a garbage can from which something rises. hard to tell if it's flames or plants. you cry. endless hours of cold, powerlessness, tension. a small glow that someone cares.

only the possessors are regarded as subjects, those who obey as the property to be protected. we, on the other hand, masked, sneak up on them, aimé césaire on our lips: “beat it, i said to him, you cop, you lousy pig, beat it, i detest the flunkies of order ...” on the way, we treat my bourgeois fear of fireworks and set off a few rockets.

when entering the undergrowth, logistics break down. this is where those who have no place on the golden roads find themselves. fluid processes give way to knowing when the berries are ripe and where the mushrooms grow and which ones they can eat and when they better not cross the river and when the mosquitoes come and where the burrows are and how not to be followed on the way there. and when the water gets polluted from the industrial fertilizer on the plantations upstream and the fish decrease and the plants undergo strange changes and the insects die and they can't find anything to eat anymore, they move deeper into the undergrowth where they meet wanderers and poachers who can't find anything to eat in the gray places.

liebig34's describes itself as anarcha-queer-feminist. right-wing groups call it gender-gaga, and after the eviction: #drecksloch. the hashtag circulates for days, with scorn and disgust, dehumanizing residents as “vermin” and playing out corresponding destruction fantasies. in livestream, hand-picked right-wing press, led by father state, is allowed to ghost through the freshly destroyed living space and immediately stages pornographic close-ups of dirty dishes and barricades made of rubble. decent people hand over cleanly swept squats when evicted. not so the “work-shy riffraff”, “in a socialist state you would have been shot.”

close-ups from the local bar: someone has fallen asleep in the corner. a radio plays softly from the kitchen. the beamer illuminates the room with the latest feeds and local news for those of us without smartphones, the untraceable ones. after a sleepless night, we warm ourselves with coffee and fresh cake and read along. the hate emanating from german living rooms is something like the underwear of the beetle legionaries. dazzlingly white, uptight, actually you'd rather not see it. 

the only thing that is really happening in front of the camera is the transformation of earth into property, from a place of retreat into square meter prices.  the quality of the house is changing under duress. what until now was the couch you could crash while passing through, what was the courtyard where you could find warmth and companionship by the fire, the infoshop where you could always get support if you had questions, now they are all one thing: potential for capital. primitive accumulation in livestream. here, monotonous luxury apartments are being built in a central city location. forget the announcement that the house will provide accommodation for refugees. instrumentalization of people in need of protection as a fig leaf for greed. money will be made until the rent cap is over, and then the cash flow will go up exponentially: fuck-the-people-who-live-here, next. the twitter mob, on the other hand, is suddenly very concerned about the well-being of those refugees for whom there should now be room after all, right there, and only there, where the so-called ladies used to live.

blue spotlights flood the night. the high complexity of relationships in the undergrowth breaks the totalizing spread of individual processes. if this is disturbed, the triumphant march of logistics, of equalization, can begin. a carpet of algae takes over the pond. a pack of harvesters rolls tracks into the bushes. a snake bites a pangolin, a wildcat scratches a monkey. the birds starve.

at the end it becomes clear: if the liebig was a shithole, twitter is a disney castle, the faz is the burg hohenzollern, and the b.z. is a luxury rehab with a beach view. then rather noise and joy through freedom for all those seeking protection and political prisoners and psychiatric internees and the collective takeover of the job centers and factories. fuck the castles and pompous real estate of the would-be monarchists. let them lock themselves up with stolen art and dream at night of those who will liberate them one day. they will come.

croissants and lentil soup, on the other hand, for those who stick together, for those who help each other, who are exhausted and shaken. the local bar is also a shithole. everyone pays what they can and get what they need. two young punks sit at the bar and philosophize:

- a piece of fabric consists of many threads and these threads are us. but when we are isolated, we are just a loose piece of thread that falls apart over time.

- deep. and what do you do with the fabric?

- everything! bags ... jackets ... banners ... blankets ... whatever ... a piece of fabric is a really cool thing. to wear, to keep warm, to collect things, to pass them on, you can actually make almost anything out of it that is important.

- wrap up cops.

- wrap up cops.

- wrap them up and put them in the closet for a while, give them some time to think.

- i doubt very much that anything much would come of it.

- hmm, me too. coffee?

- i'd love some. shit, i'm so, so sad.

- you're not alone. look how many people were there or are still out there. and in here, too, all comrades. we weave, my dear, we weave on, no matter how many more hundreds they send.

 the writing on toilet door says: “nothing is connected to everything. everything is connected to something.” shitholes of all land masses, create bonds! those of the waters, too! and the air, which is one single shithole. the logistics can be dealt with, with boycott, sabotage, waste and misalignment. the desire for optimization, speed, efficiency is constructed like the desire for a checking account. once it has taken hold, it is difficult to get rid of it. but there are always those who desire in a different way, more awkwardly and much more excitingly. the toilet door also says:  “i love my vagina” and “refuse to pay rent, throw your eviction notice in the toilet, occupy buildings in any case!”

at dusk, somewhere in this moment, lackeys of capital appear to destroy a few shitholes. clearing up, they say, cleaning up. everything that moves is fenced off. the polis does not look like a roman marketplace or the british house of commons or those other ugly auditoriums of bureaucracy. the polis of the earth is the meadow, the pit, the dam, the storm, the dried-up pond, the village square. no policies are negotiated there, there is arguing, sleeping, eating, laughing. it's not as if the earth doesn't know the logic of logistics, smooth expansion, totalization. better leave the forest alone. because if you get too close to the bat in its shithole, you lousy agent of displacement, it will cough at you. good riddance.