“Fallingwild”, film & art project dealing
with human-animal cohabitation
Brian Karp
(Visual Anthropology/ 1. Camera and Editing) Leonard Leesch (2. Camera, Sectional Images) Peter Spillmann & Marion von Osten
(Idea and Execution) Kolja Vennewald (Artistic Realization)Franziska Zahl (PR/ Transcription).
SYNOPSIS
The project fallingwild revisits the relationship between architecture and nature by asking what design processes can look like if we take into account habitats of other species and understand non-human animals as space producers and urban actors.
LONG SYNOPSYS
We understand fallingwild as a plea for a diverse co-existence against the un/intentional displacement of animals and humans from urban space. For us, thinking of the city as an interspecies relation means throwing the separation of nature and culture onto the garbage dump of history and instead understanding wasteland and ruin, foxhole and high-rise as entangled urban spaces. “To think and act presently”, as Donna Haraway urges, is to turn differently the social, economic, and political contradictions that the modern city has created: As a space of multiple and diverse species, created precisely to test new modes of subjectivation and solidarities, precisely because we already live together.
fallingwild is a project by the Berlin collective Labor k3000. Modernist architecture set itself in radical opposition to nature as an anthropocentric dwelling, as the culture of man. The project fallingwild revisits the relationship between architecture and nature by asking what design processes can look like if we take into account habitats of other species and understand non-human animals as space producers and urban actors. The starting point of the project is the Haus der Statistik at Alexanderplatz. The focus is on the facade, which has been used as a nesting site by over 200 pairs of swifts for several years. Many animals lose their habitat in the monocultures of industrialized agriculture and are not hunted in the city. The food and habitat supply in a city like Berlin is also particularly diverse. Due to its differentiated spatial diversity and the wide variety of historical architectural phases and building types, the city has become an ideal place for animal co-inhabitants as well. New forms of cohabitation and interspecies relationships are already a reality.
With fallingwild and the model facade in front of the Haus der Statistik we propose to design the urban interspecies space together with non-human animals. (Text: Marion von Osten)
On the question of animals as space producers and urban actors, we conducted discussions with actors from the fields of conservation, biology, architecture, construction industry and urban development, which were presented for the first time in the context of Artweek in autumn 2019.
