Unseen


2017



Berlin. A city that still carries on its body the scars of its recent past, trying to recover from the trauma of the spatial and social segregation between the east and the west, a city in a state of apparent economic and cultural growth. Yet, a city where new socially homogenized spaces emerge in the old neighborhoods of the center and tend to remove each previous memory. The urban policy of gentrification, gated communities and semi-privatization of the public sphere, lead to invisible movements inside the urban fabric. Extraction and displacement appear with a new mask, producing new spatial inequalities and reproducing social discrimination in a place that gradually renounces the vital characteristics of heterogeneity. The city's inhabitants become strangers in their own place, attempting to reintegrate into the society, and redefine their own identity. The apparent prosperity of the center hides the unseen of the city, the old inhabitants or even the younger immigrants, who cannot cope with the requirements of the newly favored areas. Thus, they are slowly being led to a state of exception, being repelled to other, not visible to the visitor, places.


This project was realized during a week-seminar in Berlin, in March 2017, in the context of the postgraduate program INSTEAD:parapoesis. It was self-published in six copies in Thessaloniki, in June 2017.


EDITIONS

Orama Minimal Frames 10 Years, GR, December 2023
Exantas Issue 30, DE, December 2019


Unseen at Exantas magazine



Unseen at Orama Minimal Frames book

STEFANIA ORFANIDOU
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