Tonderai Koschke
Small Place, Big Space
Seminar, English/Deutsch, 2 SWS, 2 ECTS
Tuesdays, 16-20 h, bi-weekly: ATTENTION - starts 7.11., 21.11., 5.12., 19.12.2023, 9.1., 23.1., 6.2.2024 (plus extra date tba), Hardenbergstr. 33, room 102
ATTENTION: Meeting 23.1.2024: 14:30 at the Karpfenteich in Treptower Park. We will then continue on to the Museum Treptow at Sterndamm 102 at 12487 Berlin, where we will have a tour in German.

Registration on Moodle starts 16.10.2023 / Anmeldung auf Moodle beginnt am 16.10.2023: https://moodle.udk-berlin.de/moodle/course/view.php?id=2018
Moodle Enrollment Key / Einschreibeschlüssel: place

“To the people in a small place, the division of Time into the Past, the Present, and the Future does not exist. An event that occurred one hundred years ago might be as vivid to them as if it were happening at this very moment.” (Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place)

Small places are so easily forgotten. This seminar harnesses different means available to us, including works of literature, architecture, and urban studies, to take participants from the interior of an institution in Berlin, through the streets of our city, via memories held by local minorities, ever approaching the realities of global majorities. The course combines reading, watching, listening and discussion (seminar-based learning) with walks in the city and writing/practice exercises. It aims to help students develop a better understanding of, and personal response to, Berlin as a postcolonial city, situated in the here and now, yet governed by racialized and other associated hierarchies endemic to global capitalist systems that span various time- and geographic zones.

The postcolonial city is also rich with repertoires of refusal, resistance, remembering and re-making within and around urban infrastructures. An engagement with different strategies for space-making and memory-making allows for time spent participating in the imagining of alternative futures. Outputs from the seminar may therefore be either critical, speculative, or both.

Requirements for the ungraded Studium Generale credit points: Seminar attendance and monthly short reading assignments.

Tonderai Koschke is an architectural researcher and educator currently living in Berlin. She holds the position of guest lecturer at Weissensee School of Art. Having completed architectural studies at the Technical University of Munich, the EPFL Lausanne, and at the Harvard GSAS and GSD, she holds an M.A in architecture. She has worked in project management at Architangle publishers in Berlin (2020-2022), practiced at Boltshauser Architekten in Zürich (2018-2019) and worked as curatorial assistant at the Architecture Museum of the Technical University of Munich (2018). She is also a co-creator of the pan-African collective Isusu Ffena, which hosts discussions, events, and festivals in Berlin. Her research interest, within the interdisciplinary fields she engages in, is in post-colonial identities and power dynamics.