NUR BEI UNS (THIS ONLY HAPPENS HERE) is a critique of a particular contemporary social scourge: the effort to make out that something banal is something revolutionary, and the vulgarity of corporatist cooptation of intrinsically creative places into new commercial nodes.
An S-Bahn tour through the heart of Berlin. A collage of audio fragments from Youtube videos hyping Berlin as City of Superlatives. A quote from John 1: All things came into being through the word, and without the word not one thing came into being.
“All things came into being through the word, and without the word not one thing came into being.”
This Biblical quote sends us off on a 10-minute journey through the heart of Berlin, weekday prime time. That it is grey outside is not manipulative: one cannot account for the weather. But the greyness that we feel in traversing this terrain is inimitable: on the wide-open boulevards, where are all of the people?
As we set away, a collage of audio fragments from Youtube videos sounds, made by major stations both domestic (Deutsche Welle in particular) and international, as well as clips made by individuals for self-promotion or some vain desire to share their experiences with the world. They all achieve, in sum, similarity: hype, organized to mania. One announcer intones: “Berlin, City of Superlatives”. But in an age of demoralizing homogeneity can any place lay claim to uniqueness, let alone superlatives?
Through this torrent of untenable, unverifiable statements from respondents without credibility, we witness how language is used to create a reality that places them and their experiences in a particularly exalted, rarefied continuum, a video-vanity sponsored by the internet and ‘The State’ (which can mean any) in an unintentional but surely appreciated double-act of hype. The grating on-camera-all-the-time narcissism of Richard Florida’s ‘Creative Class’ unwittingly aids neo-liberal goals. In this atmosphere, a self-defined ‘creative’ cannot simply live somewhere, it must be the place to be: the internet allows no less, and it operates through language. Thus creativity is situated as the top currency, devaluing terms which had hitherto been helpful into jargon.