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OpenCity Berlin (West)
20 February 2019

Photo credit: Tarah Dean
This walk was a reprise of the walk three years before
OpenCity Berlin (West)
28 October 2016

Photo credit: Kate Brehme
I was commissioned to compose a soundwalk for UrbanTOPIAS. Discussing
the Challenges of Changing Cities. The 4th Annual
Conference of the International Graduate Research
Program Berlin-New York-Toronto “The World in the
City: Metropolitanism and Globalization from the
19th Century to the Present”.
I wanted to confront the busy ‘self-satisfied’ modern metropolis with its appalling levels of homelessness, with humans apparently in worse conditions worse than the adjacent animals in the Zoologischer Garten. I was thinking of China Mieville's 'The City and The City', in which a parallel city is deliberately un-seen.
Behind the everyday hum of the city an unidentifiable machine threat could be heard, generating a mounting sense of unease. Whilst walking through the modernist blocks of Hansaviertel as dusk was approaching I was reminded of Antonioni's ‘L’Eclisse’. Soundwalks really do have extraordinary cinematic potential.
The result can be listened to at https://soundcloud.com/beechbuchanan/oc-berlin-west
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