Bricolage: What makes a place a space?

(With the kind support of  WOGE Saar.)

Opposite my grandparents' house in St. Arnual (Saarbrücken), there was a building in Stockenbruch that fascinated and inspired me at the time, but also confused me. It was a high-rise, semicircular building that towered far above the other buildings. I often wondered what it would look like inside the apartments: What kind of people live in the building called Habitat  Stockenbruch? How does it feel to live in a building like this? And is a building's identity influenced by the people or the building and its architecture influence the people who live there? As a child, I felt safe and secure in this neighborhood around Habitat, although in the 1980s, during the Cold War, the world in general did not convey that feeling. Would I experience the same feeling four decades later? For my photographic walk through the building, I gave myself instructions on how I wanted to proceed: What do I feel when I walk through the building? What insights can I gain about the building by generating memories in a kind of embodied knowledge through photography?

My main question for the building was: What makes a place like the Habitat a space and what does it take to create a social space from today's perspective? What stories would the building tell me about this? The Habitat was created in 1953 in the context of the vision of a peaceful Europe.  For the people of Saarland, the vision of becoming the headquarters of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) was probably too futuristic. In a pragmatic decision, they voted against the Saar Statute in 1955 and thus became part of the Federal Republic of Germany. Today, we are still asking ourselves how the future of a peaceful Europe can be shaped. However, the needs of today have developed considerably compared to 1953. Topics such as sustainability, inclusion and diversity through participation, and accessibility are much more in line with the context of the present in the design of urban space and are the prerequisites for what makes a place a social space. Like a bricolage, social space consists of experimentation, a do-it-yourself in the participation of all, not in exclusion, but in the inclusion of different opinions, points of view, changes of perspective and the courage to experiment. For me, the Habitat  Stockenbruch stands for this idea. Because ça marche encore.

In my understanding, the bricolage consists of a bottom-up process of preserving traditions, while at the same time rethinking them and creating something new and suitable for the needs of everyone in the context of the present. It is to be able to throw it over at the same time to build something new from the components. The aim of my photographic walk through the Habitat was to visualize precisely this idea photographically in the image.

The following two elaborations served as a theoretical basis for me:

Book 1: Saarbrücken zu Fuß. 17 Stadtteilrundgänge durch Geschichte und Gegenwart.

Hrsg. Jürgen Albers, Ursula Blaß, Dirk Bubel, Harald Glaser, Erschienen im VSA-Verlag, 1989.

Book 2: Die Geburt des Saarlandes. Zur Dramaturgie eines Sonderweges.

Hrsg. Ludwig Linsmayer. In der Reihe ECHOLOT. Landesarchiv Saarbrücken, Saarbrücken 2007.

Created during the international research studio on architectural photography “You only know what you see” - buildings and their representations as a source of knowledge about Franco-German relations in Saarland after 1945 in September.

ENSA Strasbourg, BTU Cottbus, Franco-German University (DFH)

Exhibition of photographs at the annual conference of the German Werkbund

(Saarbrücken, October 3-6, 2024)

With the kind support of WOGE Saar.