Über Brücken Bridging is published on the occasion of the performance and exhibition project of the same name in public space, curated by Lisa Klosterkötter and Elena Malzew, which took place between September 2022 and September 2024. The project spanned three long summers, presenting artistic interventions, performances, readings, sound pieces, temporary exhibitions, and installations on and around the seven Rhine bridges in Cologne. Cologne’s bridges are historical symbols of urban transformation and key structural elements of the city. They link districts undergoing different forms of social change and connect the inner-city west with the east at seven points across the Rhine. Around them condense social, cultural-historical, and socioeconomic narratives that relate to migration and labor, to urban history and its gaps, to environmental issues, and to public space and its ongoing privatization. Bridges are not only architectural passages but also material expressions of social orders. The majority of the artistic works presented during Über Brücken – Bridging were site-specific productions that, to varying degrees, engaged with the individual bridges, their role in contemporary and historical urban life, or their architecture, materiality, and corporeality.
The publication Über Brücken Bridging is intended as a counterweight to the ephemeral nature of the performance and exhibition project. It also extends the exploration of questions that emerged during the work around bridges and opens up new chapters, such as the disappearance of the public sphere and artistic interventions that foster community (Martin Karcher); visibility and commemoration in public space (Son Lewandowski); ownership of memory and collective trauma that is made invisible (Ani Menua); colonial traces in Cologne’s public space (Marianne Bechhaus-Gers); public space as a publishing platform (Laura Martens); a gastro guide to the surroundings of the bridges (Julius Vapiano); a ballad voiced by the bridges themselves (Nora Hansen); and homelessness and architectural thresholds between exclusion and inclusion in public space (Alexander Hagner).