Metaxy : Between Destruction and Reconstruction | Guided Tour in German Sign Language

Wars, conflicts and the consequences of the climate crisis are destroying homes, cities and landscapes worldwide. Millions of people are losing their homes. Rebuilding these living spaces is therefore an urgent task. However, if it is reduced to a technical project – as a return to order, as a supposed ‘zero hour’ or as an opportunity for capital-driven investment – we lose sight of the fact that it is not only buildings and cities that are destroyed, but also social relationships, ecological structures, communal living environments and historical contexts. The crucial questions of reconstruction therefore arise before any building work even begins.

This is where the project ‘Metaxy: Between Destruction and Reconstruction’ comes in, with an exhibition and a four-part programme of events. Metaxy, an ancient Greek term meaning ‘between’, denotes a space in which past and future, memory and new beginnings, as well as loss and hope, are all at work simultaneously. Reconstruction does not mean a return to a previous state, but rather the uncovering of the destroyed interconnections.

Taking the Academy building on Hanseatenweg – an exemplary site of post-1945 reconstruction – as its starting point, the exhibition traces the colonial and Nazi history of Berlin’s Hansaviertel and presents perspectives from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Germany, Israel, Yemen, Palestine, Poland, Sudan, Syria, Ukraine and the USA.

The largest exhibit is the exhibition architecture itself: it traces the floor plan of the site’s former development. This 1:1-scale palimpsest makes the history of the site spatially tangible through the ‘in-between’.

An event space forming part of the exhibition provides a venue for discussions, lectures, and artistic and musical performances.

An educational programme featuring guided tours and lecture-performance walks, as well as an issue of the journal ARCH+, explores the exhibition’s themes in greater depth.

Participating artists and spatial practitioners:

Hala Alnaji, Archigrest, Marina Tabassum Architects, Maja Bajević, Karim Bingöl, Centre for Documentary Architecture, Kees Christiaanse, Tiffany Chung, CO-HATY, Salma Samar Damluji, Nir Evron, Ola Hassanain, Paul Hübner, Käthe Kollwitz, Anton Kolomyeytsev, Omer Krieger, Else Lasker-Schüler, V. Mitch McEwen, megouem, Kioomars Musayyebi, Marina Naprushkina/Neue Nachbarschaft Moabit, Open Group, Ute Richter, Nelly Sachs, Sasha Marianna Salzmann, Immanuel Schumacher, Arinjoy Sen, Nurit Stark, Syrbanism, Ernst Toller, topoScape, Kurt Tucholsky, Feda Wardak, Eyal Weizman, Ines Weizman, Julita Wójcik, Lebbeus Woods, Ina Wudtke

• Curatorial team: Anh-Linh Ngo, Johanna M. Keller, Christian Hiller, Felix Hofmann, Markus Krieger, Daniel Kuhnert, Melissa Makele
• Project Manager, Academy of Arts, Architecture Section: Annette Maechtel
• Exhibition design: ARCH+
• Design: Zita Leutgeb, Olivier Therrien
• Research assistant: Nicole Müller
• Artistic and Technical Director: Roswitha Kötz
• Planning and Design Assistant: Matthias Appelfelder
• Coordination Assistant: Carmen Abele