| Title | Hedera |
| Year | 2002 |
| Location | Kreuzberg, Berlin |
| Brief | Conflict and negotiation as spatial practice |
| Notes | See “Hedera Experiment” installation |
Operating with new techniques and methods of urban intervention, conflict and negotiation are used as spatial practices. “In a new arms race [economic and social] fueled by the electronic media, between material life, markets and anti-marketeers, the city has been rediscovered (again!) as the arena where political change is being fought for. Conflicts and negotiations whether played out in the political, military or financial realms, have a physical and spatial dimension. The space of conflict has its own particular characteristics, morphology, topography, organization and geometry.”
¶ Hedera is a cultural and commercial intervention on an urban scale in the Kreuzberg borough of Berlin, often called the largest Turkish city outside of Turkey. The project is based upon photographic research of viral markets and other trade elements in Istanbul as well as research and direct urban intervention on decaying markets in London (Swiss Cottage).
¶ Hedera applies the properties of ivy plants – rapid growth, appropriation, symbiotic or parasitical survival – to architectural elements in modern multi-cultural cities. It uses Berlin’s building regulations that impose a 25cm limit to any structure projecting from a façade as a basis for a viral urban construction, growing in time to overpower an entire neighbourhood. It is a 25cm thick structure, infinitely long, that defines spaces, economies and social attitudes. The structure grows from the neighbourhood’s ground floor shops as a storage and display device but quickly continues growing upwards and indoors, wrapping around and transforming the existing built fabric.
¶ Through this process spaces and possibilities are created. A new machine inhabitant is consequently born in the city: one which grows, dies, creates or steals spaces, interacts and interconnects on an urban and cultural scale. An animate form to grow and learn with the Turkish community in Berlin.