What If Berlin

While we traverse the built reality of the city, we are constantly surrounded by unrealised building plans, lost artistic designs and visions of a different way of living together. To mark the 75th anniversary of the Berliner Festspiele the Japanese artist Akira Takayama invites the public to take six guided tours on the Berlin Ringbahn that will enable them to encounter these ghosts of alternative futures. The ideas for these unrealised projects have come from the archives of the Berliner Festspiele, other Berlin cultural institutions and individual architects and artists. Takayama transposes them to the present and asks which visions we want to make reality in future. On four weekends the 27 stations of the Ringbahn will be turned into locations for forgotten plans for the future whose stories will be retold in new ways by experienced tour guides. The video offers a concise insight into the structure and flow of the What If Berlin tours and captures the unique atmosphere of the Ringbahn journeys.