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X Properties: The film series

with films by Μarta Dauliūtė & Viktorija Šiaulytė, Yvonne Wilhelm/knowbotiq, Black Audio Film Collective and Natascha Sadr Haghighian & Marina Christodoulidou & Peter Eramian

organized by Joerg Franzbecker, Naomi Hennig, Janine Sack and Florian Wüst

How do the forces of financial capital impact on a city’s social and cultural production? How can the goal of urban development for the common good be promoted in the face of gentrification and displacement driven by the booming real estate market? In the fall of 2022, these questions were addressed by X Properties, a nGbK project that dealt with the nGbK’s own situation of its premises at Oranienstraße 25 in Berlin-Kreuzberg being sold to a Luxemburg-based real-estate investment fund. Produced as part of this project, the eleventh issue of Berliner Hefte zu Geschichte und Gegenwart der Stadt combines Berlin case studies with global perspectives on the de-/financialization of the city.

On the occasion of the publication of the English e-book version of X Properties by EECLECTIC, the nGbK is hosting a series of three film screenings that return to this debate about the economization of urban life. The four artistic/activist films explore models for coworking and cohabitation that intrude far into private spheres; reflect on the scope for individual action within the banking system; and look at migration, belonging, and memory as conditions of space-related power relations in techno-capitalism.

Good Life (2022) by Μarta Dauliūtė and Viktorija Šiaulytė documents the everyday life of a group of young people who rent “sleeping pods” measuring just a few square meters in a shared house in central Stockholm; Tech Farm, the start-up operating the facility, inspires them to lead their entire social life as a business operation:entrepreneurship becomes part of theinnermost self and community becomes a commodity. In DREXCIYA or becoming transparent, translucent, transmaterial (2017), Yvonne Wilhelm interweaves biographical storytelling and acoustic historiography in a new interpretation of the migratory movement of the trans-oceanic slave trade. In Twilight City (1989) by the Black Audio Film Collective, the journalist Olivia wanders around London in the early days of neoliberalism; in a letter to her mother, who returned to the Dominican Republic many year previously, she tells of her search for evidence of the ways wealth inequality becomes inscribed into the city, what home means, and what it may once have meant to her mother. The Broken Pitcher (2022) centers on a family’s negotiations with their lending bank about the looming repossession of their home in Larnaka; Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Marina Christodoulidou, and Peter Eramian present this real event that took place in 2019 using reconstructions from memory, followed by commentaries by various individuals answering the question: What do you think the bank officials should have done?