The car as an illusion of mobility and movement. Given the case of Berlin, a private car is standing still for on average of twenty-three hours a day and is blocking a space of almost twelve square meter. This space equals a room in a shared flat which is leased for 400€ per month. On a daily base, oodles of mostly public spaces are being closed off by turning them into parking lots. Those unusable spaces are drowning in glossy varnish, stale plate and plastic. As part of the exhibition SPLIT LEVEL, a group show of 80 students from the Berlin University of the Arts, the project - advocating for a redistribution of common spaces - was displayed in an unused multi-storey car park.
The urban wanderer has been subordinated to the 'dictatorship of the automobile as a new landscape emerges, a non-place dominated by technology and advertising whose endless reflective surfaces are devoid of individuality.*
*Merlin Coverley: 'Psychogeography',
Harpenden, Pocket Essentials, 2006, p. 103
Harpenden, Pocket Essentials, 2006, p. 103
