The interdisciplinary project "The Migration of Spaces" explores the spaces Berlin’s migrants have imported and created—the spaces between their place of origin and their place of arrival. Berlin’s refashioning into a new city and the tendency toward preservation in the migration of spaces have generated conflicts of placemaking. Using the case of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the project will examine these conflicts more closely from a migrant perspective.   

Migration encompasses more than the movement of people; it is also the movement of spaces. The spaces of home (both rural and urban) that the migrants bring with them form the basis for new spaces, enhanced by mutual strategies of delineation. Berlin in particular contains many of these “migrated” spaces. What is more, the city itself, far from being static, is composed of a multitude of changing spaces. How did the city’s migrant groups view the dual territorial borders (residential quarter /Berlin Wall)? How do these migrant groups move in the politically unified, but spatially divided, Berlin of today?

In "THE MIGRATION OF SPACES: ON  PLACEMAKING IN MIGRATION AND THE FALL OF THE WALL" Stefanie Bürkle has gathered an interdisciplinary team of artists and social scientists to work on the subject of space and its movement among Berlin’s migrants. Throughout 2008, team members will collect and produce interviews, photographs, videos, and texts, which they will then add to the project’s Website, creating a public sketchbook of the project as a work in progress. A project exhibition is planned for 2009, the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. 

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