Publications

Reclaiming the City

Director: Stefan Rusu
Publisher: KSA:K – Center for Contemporary Art, Chișinău
Content: 1 DVD
Year: 2012

Through a complex interweaving of field trips and interviews, archival and found footage, personal narratives, interventions in public spaces, images, and other sources, the film reveals a number of sites of the New Berlin that uniquely exemplify the contradictions and tensions of social memory and national identity in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Conceived as an investigative documentary that examines urban changes critically, the film is a quest through dramatic socio-economic restructuring processes and the physical transformation of Berlin following the fall of the Wall. At the same time, it involves sociologists, architects, urban activists, curators and visual artists, who analyze the impact of gentrification processes on public space and question the role of the artist community in shaping the city. With the help of local experts, the film looks into the Kreuzberg, Neukölln, and Prenzlauer Berg districts, among others – areas that are trapped in a continuing cycle of gentrification.

Stefan Rusu is a visual artist, curator, editor, and filmmaker based in Chisinau and Bucharest. His artistic/curatorial agenda is geared towards the processes of transformation and changes in post-socialist societies after 1989.

Commissioned by the 7th Berlin Biennale, and co-produced by KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin and KSAK Center for Contemporary Art, Chisinau. Supported by Goethe Institute, Bucharest; ERSTE Foundation, Vienna; and the Romanian Cultural Institute, Berlin.

This publication is available at ERSTE Foundation Library.

Florian Bauer

Director Social Finance, Sustainability and Innovation
Since 2023, Florian Bauer has been responsible for social finance, sustainability and social innovation at ERSTE Foundation. Prior to this role, Florian worked in the NGO & Social Entrepreneurship sector for more than 13 years. He led the Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Partnership (REEEP), an international multilateral NGO that works to accelerate market-based deployment of renewable energy and energy efficient systems in developing countries, and was Managing Director & COO of the Impact Hub Vienna. From 2020-2023, Florian established strategic alliances with key partners and helped to create innovative semantic technology solutions at Semantic Web Company (SWC), a leading IT company in semantic AI solutions.