An amusement park in East Berlin, abandoned for the past 11 years, will be reopened this year as a haven for public art, writes Julie Ma.
The amusement park, which opened as "Kulturpark Plänterwald" in 1969, was reborn as "Spreepark" when it was privatized after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and closed in 2011, is now home to graffiti covered dinosaur models, murky ponds, and overgrown grounds.
According to Ma, a curatorial team including George Scheer and Stephanie Sherman, directors of the Elsewhere museum in North Carolina; Spinello Projects founder Anthony Spinello; and Miami-based experimental artist Agustina Woodgate, hope to "use the ruins to shed light on Berlin's cultural history and imagine the city's future."
A series of workshops with creative thinkers are scheduled for June. "The results of the ideas from the workshops will be displayed in Kulturpark's public debut starting at the end of the month. After all that brainstorming, the team behind Kulturpark hopes to draw together a proposal for the site's future."
FULL STORY: Kulturpark: An Abandoned Amusement Park Becomes a Public Art Space
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