katamari goes berlin © Lilly Schwartz 2011
On the second day of my adventures into photography my fiance Ezequiel and me planned to go to the Berlin Zoo and Aquarium. And we failed! Let me start at the beginning though: We made the curious decision to go to the Taschen bookstore on Friedrichstraße before heading to the zoo. Apparently a delicious mistake.
Before we went to the bookstore we actually stopped by a strange little exhibition of media art with the title “What machines dream of” in the Automobil Forum Unter den Linden. I had seen the exhibition before together with my brother and it had only a few interesting exhibits that were already broken now that I was seeing it the second time round. Sadly this is the fate of media artworks that invite interaction: People tend to break them! The exhibition was a production of the Ars Electronica museum in Linz which has a wide range of interesting media art exhibits including a virtual environment CAVE which I visited a few years ago with my mother. It’s a fantastic museum! Although this specific exhibition in the Automobil Forum is not so special, it is worth a stroll since it is free of charge. Also take note of the speaking piano which is a speech synthesizer that only uses a piano to read out a text and is presented every half an hour. It’s a bit dissonant, but interesting nonetheless. However, today I completely forgot about it, what a shame!
After the exhibition we went to the Taschen store as planned. Bookstores are dangerous though and we ended up leaving the shop with 3 heavy books. The book I got shows the history of photography on 700 pages! Very fitting, very nice, but also very heavy. Not exactly the kind of book to take to the zoo! And Ezequiel’s books were even bigger and heavier. In the end we just decided to walk around Mitte a bit more and then to return home. We continued along Friedrichstraße and were then drawn along Leipziger Straße, because from afar we saw the interesting building of the Museum für Kommunikation. Again from there we then saw on the next square something that looked like a giant Katamari! Of course we went to investigate and this is where today’s picture was taken. The sculpture called Houseball by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen from 1996 was actually not meant to be a Katamari (well, obviously …), but was supposed to be a “symbol of displaced populations, the ordeal of refugees” (read more here). I however, just have the melody of We love Katamari in my head!