with Hannah Darabi, artist
Benoît Grimbert, artist
and Jochen Becker, author, curator and lecturer

In English

Shortly before his death, David Bowie himself reviewed his time in Berlin with the song Where are we now? The conversation at the start of the EMOP Opening Days takes Bowie's Berlin perspectives and the small-edition artist book Neuköln, ‘Heroes’ by Hannah Darabi and Benoît Grimbert as the occasion for a double review of the Berlin district of Neukölln: “Bowie revisiting his Berlin album, us revisiting our project.”  

Where are we today?   

For the publication Neuköln, ‘Heroes’, Hannah Darabi and Benoît Grimbert roamed through Neukölln in 2013 and captured a special Berlin document in photocopied black and white and everyday colour photographs. The artist's book, produced in dialogue by the Paris-based artists, is a travel narrative with David Bowie as its leading figure, supplemented by text material by Franz Hessel, Christopher Isherwood, Siegfried Kracauer, Edgar Ulmer, Billy Wilder, photographs by Robert Siodmak and an integrated brochure from Aldi-Nord.

Bowie experienced Neukölln, then inhabited by so-called guest workers from Turkey, as a sad and impoverished neighbourhood. “There's a track on the album called ‘Neuköln’, and that's the neighbourhood in Berlin where the Turks are confined in poor conditions. They are a very isolated community. It's very sad. Very very sad (...) I mean, when you've experienced something like that, it's hard to sing ‘Let's all think of peace and love...’ because that's exactly the point you should arrive at after seeing something like that. You arrive at a feeling of compassion”, David Bowie said in October 1977 in Melody Maker.  

Where are we now?