BRIDGING SOCIAL DISTANCES

The research project Bridging Social Distances explores artistic strategies to rehearse a future of greater social connectedness. Aiming to counteract everyday alienations at the micro-level of urban life, the work initiates relational interventions within the Berlin subway system. These encounters spark situational connections — fleeting yet resonant moments of human warmth — and give aesthetic form to social bridges that often span lines of societal division. The interventions constitute relational spaces that follow either a playfully invitational, or a more agonistic, provocative blueprint: In some instances the rear of a subway car is transformed into a makeshift-café or an otherwise cozy space consisting of a café-table, candle-light, free food, a carpet and signs. In others, a fake conversation ban is imposed to provoke people to subvert it together and through their own initiative. In every iteration, the project remains tethered to a broader inquiry into social alienation — and in each case, it leaves behind a trace of warmth, a shared moment of connection, and the possibility of imagining a more socially attuned public realm.