Future City show Berlin

12.06.2009 · by Nika Dubrovsky · in Other

We had a black sheet of paper. At the edges we placed boxes for buildings, which the children started to decorate. Each child decorated his own house, according to the nature of the character that the child created and that is going to live in it.

The characters, in most cases, we had already invented during the preparations for the exhibition. We had a special class called “Citizens of the Future City.”

For children who had not made their characters, we had a lot of small plastic toys. In our City of the Future, trash, mass culture and ready-mades are aesthetically and ideologically organic.

Therefore, plastic cartoon characters, or heroes of the mass media, seemed to us welcome guests.

Benjamin built a castle, connected by a special gallery.
At the gallery sat a watch-guard. Despite a pretty cute outfit, his task was to guard the treasures, while the owner of the castle roamed the town square.

In addition to the guard, the dragon had a servant.
Meanwhile, the owner of the castle was none other than the terrible and powerful monster.

Sasha and Ira were building a pirate ship and other equipment for the life of dangerous seafarers.

Danja has long planned his character named Buka.
Buka lives alone and has a very special personality. She always laughs, jumps up and down and speaks in mainly interjections.

In my opinion, Danja dearly loved his creature. He asked me to return it to him after the show is over.Buka also loves to jump around schools, where the kids are diligently doing boring homework, and scoff at them.

Two heroes created by Polina were a snake and a tripod dog. They look harmless, but in fact, they are the city police, and the house in which they live is a jail.

The good alien of Fillip is living in a mysterious house. He rarely goes into the street, stays quiet and even declined at the end of the show to participate in video interviews — the only one from all the residents of our city!

Dana’s characer was a gothic punk with red hair, green eyes and chicken legs who lived in a house which certainly would have been liked by the Addams family.

Sisters Marusya and Rosa worked very hard changing various toy characters, adding and mixing them. It seems that there Japanese-mutant dragon are sick.

Timur continued to build energy panels, as in his plan, where the whole city lined up around energy networks.

When we built our city, Timur linked the central energy generator (the blue piece with the tentacles) with all town houses, literally providing electricity to every house. The colored tubes are the power lines.

Martin was building his characters and the house together with his mom Veronica.

The participation of adults in our projects is very important. Such projects are not only opportunities to talk with the children, but also offer the possibility to form common understanding on important issues.

How did we construct our City?
Being busy with the constructions of our personal buildings, trying to choose the right character from available toys or quickly molding our own, we just forgot about the town square.
Meanwhile, our city was built based on the medieval understanding of the city structure – all the private houses surrounded the central square, that played the role of the Public Space.
What are we going to build in our Pubic Space?

It was impossible to abandon the idea of a central power unit. It was too popular
at the preparation stage of the project.

On the other hand, nothing is more lovely to the heart of a child than a playground. Therefore, we decided to combine both ideas, and suggested that all residents receive energy from a central generator, that would stand in the middle of the giant playground.