The “Meine Kiezgeschichte” project aims to develop an audio walk in the Gesundbrunnen neighborhood. As site-specific “audio plays to walk along to”, audio walks can shed new light on a familiar location. In recent years, artistic collectives in particular have used this format and discovered its subversive and political potential – for example, when decolonial approaches confront striking points in public space.
“Meine Kiezgeschichte” (My Neighborhood Story) now understands the view of children from risky situations as a valuable and missing perspective on the neighborhood. Their experience is relevant for the urban history of tomorrow. The project works with their biographical material: they are encouraged to formulate their own anecdotes, which are put together to form a walk around Gesundbrunnen elementary school. As the majority of the participating children do not come from German-speaking families, it is both a challenge and an enrichment for their sense of language to get into storytelling and ultimately write a short text themselves.
Using various media that demonstrate storytelling in an elaborated or reduced form (classic text, graphic novel, newspaper article), the aim is to convey a feeling for narrative material and how everyday experiences can be conveyed to others in language.

There are also questions of dramaturgy when it comes to combining the selected stories into a whole. Another focus of the project will be on the media skills of the participating children, as the participants will set the written material (audio recordings) to music, record the texts and edit the audio material with the help of an audio editing program, supported by media educators.
The project also offers the participating children, who often come from families in at-risk situations, a self-awareness: even my everyday experience, what I experience in Wedding, is important when talking about this place.

The final presentations will take place
on Thursday, 21.12.2023 at 2 p.m.
on Friday, 22.12.2023 at 11:00 am

in the auditorium of Gesundbrunnen Primary School, Prinzenallee 8, 13357 Berlin

Please register at: assistenz.lunapark@gmail.com

Around 35 pupils from the 6th grade of Gesundbrunnen Primary School in Wedding took part in this project and will present their own stories about their favorite places in the neighborhood as a digital “audio walk”. The places selected by the children are presented in their own words and photos. The author Nadire Biskin will read live from her book “Ein Spiegel für mein Gegenüber” (A mirror for my counterpart) with a reference to Wedding.

MEINE KIEZGESCHICHTE is realized by the LUNA PARK initiative, in cooperation with the Gesundbrunnen elementary school, the MiK youth art school and the Badstraße youth club, and is funded as part of the “gemeinsam digital” measure of the German Library Association as part of the “Kultur macht stark – Bündnisse für Bildung” funding program of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research.