BERLIN

Berlin has been a personal and creative touchstone for me since I first visited in 2004 for the film festival premiere of Kai: Home and Belonging in Post-coup Fiji at the Globians Film Festival in Potsdam. 

In 2006, Berlin was one of sixteen cities about which I made a video montage for the Venice Architecture Biennale. The Berlin video collage (embedded left) takes the abundance of space in Berlin — the richness in emptiness — as its central theme. A swift visual journey through the disparate neighborhoods of Marzahn, Neukölln, Charlottenburg and Kreuzberg reveals a public life that creatively adapts its expansive spaces to reflect the character of an increasingly diverse city of immigrants. 

In 2010, I was awarded a three-year fellowship at the Institute for Public Knowledge at NYU along with nine other scholars, artists, engineers, writers. In addition to this project’s scholarly outputs, I produced a photo essay of images I'd taken in Berlin and Mumbai, which was exhibited at the Institute for Public Knowledge throughout 2013.

In 2015, I spent three months in Berlin completing the manuscript for Citymakers: the Culture and Craft of Practical Urbanism in the glorious environs of the Agora Collective. I returned three years later to conclude the book tour at the Floating University. 

Within Berlin are some of my favorite places in the world and I know the city will remain an important part of my future work.