Dec 02–03, 2006
my construction site #2: my house
my construction site focuses in the second part of the series on the locating of the person.
my house is the title of the weekend that inquires into the function and meaning, transformation and design of the concrete site in a globalized and mediatized world: How do we want to live – and to shape our immediate living environment? In what way do we change ourselves thereby – and what does this postulate of self-shaping mean on the socio-political level? What meaning, in turn, does the site have as a center of life, when all around the world more than 200 million people seek refuge and work in foreign countries and many more are migrants within their own countries?
A series of presentations revolves around the interaction between biological and architectural, urban-planning bodies, between the self and a site. The focus is on geographical and ethnographical differences, on rules of the game and rituals that constitute sites. These themes are not only differently viewed by experts’ differing specialized perspectives, but also by the consciously subjectively formulated question: What does “my house” mean to me?
One of the currently most unusual performance-stagings will play in parallel to the presentations and also, on the next day, in various places on the HWC construction site. In „Avenir! Avenir!“ , Hamed Taheri starts out from Hannah Arendt’s hypothesis that we all live in camps and that everyone is a migrant. “Future” in life on the stairway, in the labyrinth of migration.
And the long-term film documentation “House” by Amos Gitai shows life stories – Palestinian and Israeli – as the history of a house in Jerusalem.