As part of 48 Stunden Neukölln on the theme of “Urbane Stille”, Gutshof Britz, Berlin Neukölln
The classic red telephone box was designed in 1924 by London architect Sir Giles Gilbert Scott for a design competition run by the British Post Office. It once served as a space for undisturbed, acoustically shielded communication by telephone. Over the past decade and a half, the last telephone boxes of Deutsche Telekom have disappeared entirely from public space. And yet this piece of street furniture stands like no other for the human need for quiet within the urban environment. Their (provisional) final rest – thousands of them – was found in a patch of woodland near Berlin. As an alternative to this undignified burial, some examples have been given new life elsewhere as public book exchanges. But might it not also be worth considering reviving the classic telephone box as public islands of quiet within the city? Or would they have no chance of survival there? In deliberately limiting himself to the purely photographic depiction of a relic of urban silence, Bodo Hartwig consciously steps away from his native medium – sound. Through this act of crossing over, he confronts his audience with the experiment of reconstructing sound, or silence, from memory or imagination alone.