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2025年6月24日
Anthro-film Laboratory 58
Special Talk and Discussion with Ralf Marsault
“A space for the self: living on Berlin's Wagenburgen”
Date & Time: July 29th 2025, 16:00 -
Venue: National Museum of Ethnology, 2nd Floor, Seminar room 7
Senri Expo-Park 10-1, Suita, Osaka 565-8511 Japan
https://www.minpaku.ac.jp/en
※reservation is not required.
日時：2025年7月29日(火) 16:00 -
会場：国立民族学博物館2階 第7セミナー室
〒565-8511 大阪市吹田市千里万博公園10-1
https://www.minpaku.ac.jp/information/access
※発表と議論の言語は英語です
※予約等必要なし
Speaker: Ralf Marsault
(Professor, Université Catholique de l'Ouest, Angers/Nantes)
Abstract
For the past fifty years, Berlin remains home to a few urban wastelands, where trailers, trucks and caravans are gathering. Known as Wagenburgen, these occupations of land claim a necessity if not a right for inhabiting the city in a different way. Each of them has its proper organization and modes of decision, and experiment, either with a neo-hippie flair or a claimed anarchistic punk culture, a desire for sensory immanence with the environment, as much as the invention of a specific community with its solidarities. They defend a reappropriation of aesthetic and redefinition of the self, be it with the production of signs, some of them incorporated (tattoos, piercings, traces of fights…), a sophisticated construction or mending of an ornamental dress, and building of vernacular architectures of spaces designed as retreat for meditation.
Approaching the experience of such a phenomenon, mostly with photography, to produce a visual anthropology, can somewhat be difficult. One discovers the obvious conditions of a “sensitive” field, where some of the actors are experimenting with the “limits” too.
Acknowledging those difficulties, a methodology of approach, and the co-construction of forms that are as objective and explicit as possible, remains to be searched for.
The conference will give an account of what has been possible to produce without a desire to extract or essentialize the phenomenon. How is it possible to produce tools that the people of the Wagenburgen themselves may use in their project, if they even have the desire to do so?
Biography
Ralf Marsault is professor of visual anthropology at the Université Catholique de l'Ouest (UCO) Angers/Nantes and a visual artist. In 1986, with the photographer Heino Muller, he produced the Fin de siècle series of images on the phenomenology of the punk movement in Paris, London and Berlin. He went on to develop this theme on his own, working on a field specific to Berlin culture, the Wagenburgen. He is the author of Faintly falling, Distanz Verlag, Berlin (2020), Résistance à l'effacement, Les Presses du réel, Dijon (2010). Fin de siècle [1990] will be reissued in 2026 by Éditions des Beaux-Arts, Paris. Recent exhibitions of his work are: February 2025, ‘Punk for ever’ at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris. November 2024: ‘Vivre, libres ...’ (To live, free ...), performed reading, Maison Heinrich Heine & Sorbonne Nouvelle Université. October. 2021, a retrospective exhibition ‘Soi, comme un autre’ The self, as another), at Musée Hèbre; Rochefort. Until September 2025, a photographic portrait of the Fin de siècle series is shown in one of the windows of the exhibition curated by Wolfgang Tillmans ‘Rien ne nous préparait, tout nous y préparait (Nothing would prepare us, everything would prepare us), at Centre Pompidou, Paris.