Imaginary Berlin was made with a pair of binoculars focusing on a point 3,000 miles away.

In 2004, a group of people in New York started playing with a string of questions. Can a friend describe his walk from the subway so clearly that you could walk it without having been there and know it as well as he does? Is it possible to read everything ever written about a city? What would it be like to consciously avoid knowing things about a place? What would happen, then, if you landed there? Can we collect every feeling a city inspires and match each one to another block, another shop window, a different street sign? A negative city was outlined. To materialize it, Berlin was chosen as a control, and the group launched a constellation of projects meant to generate real answers. These were presented, challenged, refined, processed, re-processed, re-presented and finally collected together into a single Imaginary Berlin.

Imaginary Berlin was presented at the Humboldt University as part of the arts festival Loving Berlin, with support from the University’s Institute for European Ethnology. It was created in collaboration with Shana Negin, Hilke Schellmann, Jesse Shapins and Jonah Spear.