• Wed 26 06 2019 •
M.S. KALK Arrival City Kalk - Of (Life)Designs and (Residential)Biographies

With MERYEM ERKUS, BORIS SIEVERTS and local nonprofit initiatives

The residents of Kalk aren’t the sort to give way — and indeed, there’s little space give. Their district is constricted by a wide railway line, and no matter the direction, it is only reachable by extensive underpasses. The steel chimneys and chemical factories once puffed smoke into this urban basin, and when the industry vanished in the 1980s and ’90s, a unique sociotope remained that was soon considered to be a ‘problem area’. But those who took a closer look discovered that in addition to tensions, there was also a striking curiosity towards others.
With its unique mix, Kalk is an extreme environment, perhaps the most metropolitan and political district in Cologne, and a stage, ‘the epic of which is not yet told’, according to Meryem Erkus and Boris Sieverts, the two curators of this Memory Station. As an organiser and activist, Erkus is jointly responsible for many (sub-) cultural projects and hybrid (exhibition) forms in Cologne. Sieverts, who studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, takes locals and visitors on tours through urban grey zones and conurbations with his Büro für Städtereisen (Bureau for City Tours).
The M.S. KALK seeks not only to collect and archive stories and histories but to perform, exhibit, and duplicate them at the same time. Sieverts calls this ‘living historiography’, and the formats range from a cartography workshop to a wandering ceramic model of Kalk. In addition, with his mobile Memory Station, artist Malte Fröhlich seeks out Kalk residents going about their everyday lives. The main starting point and meeting place for the project is Lichtspiele Kalk.

Start: 18:00
Venue: Alter Friedhof Kalk (Kapellenstrasse 55)
In various languages
Free admission

M.S. Kalk is funded by Landesinitiative StadtBauKultur NRW and Fritz-Bilz-Stiftung.