When we visited the “Berlin Global” Exhibition at the Humboldt Forum in September 2024, it ended on an interesting note. Throughout, the exhibition elaborates on its opening statement that “much of what happens in Berlin changes the world. And much of what happens in the world affects Berlin.” Early on in the exhibition, this includes a focus on European imperialism and the late nineteenth century “scramble” for unclaimed territory. Later, Berlin’s global connectedness is identified in the city’s history of entertainment or in how the student and worker movements of the late 1960s fostered cross-border ties. The final room of the exhibition is titled “Interconnection” and nods to how the migratory movements of the post-war era have shaped the city’s social fabric. Audio-files transmit the voices of different Berliners, and one wall features objects that are meant to encapsulate their relationships to the places, cultures, and identities that they have brought with them to Berlin. Visitors familiar with the recent musealization of migration will note this familiar trend from other migration museums, like the Museé de l’histoire de l’immigration in Paris.

From March 2023 to October 2024, squeezed in against one side of the “Interconnection” room was a section dedicated to the city’s gentrification. Entitled “We’re staying! Wir bleiben! Gentrification and Resistance in Berlin”, this mini-exhibition was designed by Barbara Bernardi, Linda Paganelli, and Vincent Voignier, and stretched the length of a short corridor that had been carved out of the larger room. The right side of the corridor featured a collage, with photos of changing residential buildings, storefronts, and neighborhoods that had been stapled together. The left side featured headphones and screens through which visitors could listen to both facts and experiences related to urban renewal. A world of information flowed through the headphones – those visitors eager to conclude the lengthy exhibition could easily float through this final stretch. If so, they would miss hearing Andrej Holm speak of the sheer desperation of displacement in contemporary Berlin. Likewise, visitors breezing past the photos on the right would not notice that they might encounter these locations in their treks through Berlin. Later that day, as I bounced out of the Kottbusser Tor U-bahn stop to join our team on Kreuzberg’s Oranienstrasse, I found myself facing Café Beylerbeyi, chronicled in Berlin Global’s gentrification collage. I wished I had time to drop by, and ask if the exposure from the exhibition was changing their everyday routines.

For a short time, gentrification was the final stop in Berlin Global’s narrative of how “Berlin affects the world”. As I moved through this corridor, I found myself wondering about the curatorial decision to include this section at the very end of the exhibition, as well as to embed it in the Interconnection section. I wondered also about the choice of the corridor-like partitioning of the space of the final room, as well as the aesthetic decision to reveal the “seams”, so to speak, of the collage. In an exhibition filled with glossy images printed on glazed glass, passages with motion sensors, and interactive screens galore, the makeshift look of the gentrification section seemed decidedly out of place. The skies hanging over Berlin appeared out of joint, broken up by the small metal staples dotting the collage. Upon finding out that this was a temporary addition to Berlin Global’s permanent line-up, I felt as though the mini-exhibit’s aesthetic strategies, its fleeting and piecemeal qualities were meant to mirror the precarity of tenancy in Berlin, implying a shared liability to transformation or termination.  This was mirrored in what a lot of the voices appeared to be saying – that they wished Berlin would not become like London, Paris, or New York. In other words, that they wished the world would remain at bay. This was an ambivalent choice for an exhibition dedicated to global connectivity, but a daring one as well.