MARIENWALDEN – Notes, Diaries, Sketches”

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"For me, Walden exists in the whole city. You can reduce the city to your own little world that others may never see.(...) Walden consists of memories of what I wanted to see. I got rid of what I didn't want to see." (Jonas Mekas)

This is how the American-Lithuanian filmmaker Jonas Mekas describes his film work "Walden - Diaries, Notes and Sketches" (1968), in which he poetically captures his life in New York in the 1960s.

The idea of "Walden", as Jonas Mekas takes it up very freely from David Henry Thoreau, guided us through the Marienwalden project: Notes, Sketches Diaries.

As part of a cooperation between rampe:aktion and the IB transitional home for refugee families in Marienfelde, a film club for young people was set up at the facility in 2023/24.

In collaborative film exercises, the young people developed their own views and descriptions of Berlin and the transitional home as their personal living environment. The result was an audiovisual and collective film diary.

Jonas Mekas' biography and the history of the Marienfelde emergency reception camp, which was already a reception camp for GDR emigrants before it was used as a home for refugee families, were used as reference spaces in the production of a short film.

Mekas himself fled Lithuania, was a forced laborer and was housed in several so-called "displaced person camps" in Germany after the Second World War until he finally began a life as a filmmaker in New York.
The filmmaker's biography and way of working inspired us to discuss the topic of housing, which is not without its problems for young people, in a dreamy, poetic and playful way and to deal with it on film.

We watched excerpts from Mekas' film diary and developed our own notes, drawings and videos.
In relation to the diversity of overlapping stories of migration, we took a journey with the young people into the history of the Marienfelde emergency reception camp. We looked at images of the memorial site, which is directly adjacent to the transitional home and negotiates and presents its history.
In a scenic and performative way, we asked what the history of the people in the archive images has to do with us. During joint filming, we staged ourselves with them and opened up new visual worlds full of mystery, uncertainty and beauty.

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The project was realized with:

Marwa Fazili, Sana Fazili, Şeymanur Demez, Dilan Demez, Kayenat Joja, Mohammad Al-Asaad, Reham Mohammed, Silin Abdula, Muska Agtash, Wafi Almshal, Maria Almshal and other people who wish to remain unidentified at this point.

Thank you for the inspiring collaboration!

A project by rampe:aktion 2023
Concept and realization: Lara Dade, Christian Diaz Orejarena, Christian Limber and Miriam Trostorf

In cooperation with the IB Marienfelde, the Kommunale Galerie Adlershof Berlin and with the support of the Berlin Wall Foundation.

Images from "Walden - Diaries, Notes and Sketches" by Jonas Mekas are used with the kind permission of "Jonas-Mekas-Films".

The project was funded by the Project Fund for Cultural Education "Kulturformen" Berlin.