Meine Kiezgeschichte (My Neighborhood Story) 2025
For the second time, the Initiative LUNA PARK is giving children’s creativity space and a special platform: this time, the young authors came up with all sorts of wondrous, fun, and insightful stories – in the form of modern fables and legends – about their favorite places in the neighborhood. They wrote them down, read them aloud, and recorded them for a podcast. At the final presentation of the project, a selection of these stories can be heard, accompanied by photographs of the locations that inspired them. The presentation in the auditorium of the Gesundbrunnen Primary School will also feature a reading by Berlin actress Dorothee Krüger, who has exciting tales to tell about the legendary “Bang of Wedding.”
Many of the children who took part in “Meine Kiezgeschichte“ (My Neighborhood Story) speak a language other than German at home. This made the process both a major challenge and a tremendously exciting and inspiring experience – coming together to tell stories and write their own short texts. Experienced authors, media professionals, and educators supported the children in shaping, recording, editing, and producing their stories as a podcast – all while strengthening their language and media skills along the way.
The final presentations will take place
on Monday, 22.07.2025 at 11:00 am and at 2 pm
in the auditorium of Gesundbrunnen Primary School, Prinzenallee 8, 13357 Berlin
Please register at: assistenz.lunapark@gmail.com
Meine Kiezgeschichte 2023
The “Meine Kiezgeschichte” project aims to develop an audio walk in the Gesundbrunnen neighborhood. As site-specific “audio plays to walk along to”, audio walks can shed new light on a familiar location. In recent years, artistic collectives in particular have used this format and discovered its subversive and political potential – for example, when decolonial approaches confront striking points in public space.
“Meine Kiezgeschichte” (My Neighborhood Story) now understands the view of children from risky situations as a valuable and missing perspective on the neighborhood. Their experience is relevant for the urban history of tomorrow. The project works with their biographical material: they are encouraged to formulate their own anecdotes, which are put together to form a walk around Gesundbrunnen elementary school. As the majority of the participating children do not come from German-speaking families, it is both a challenge and an enrichment for their sense of language to get into storytelling and ultimately write a short text themselves.
Using various media that demonstrate storytelling in an elaborated or reduced form (classic text, graphic novel, newspaper article), the aim is to convey a feeling for narrative material and how everyday experiences can be conveyed to others in language.
There are also questions of dramaturgy when it comes to combining the selected stories into a whole. Another focus of the project will be on the media skills of the participating children, as the participants will set the written material (audio recordings) to music, record the texts and edit the audio material with the help of an audio editing program, supported by media educators.
The project also offers the participating children, who often come from families in at-risk situations, a self-awareness: even my everyday experience, what I experience in Wedding, is important when talking about this place.
The final presentations will take place
on Thursday, 21.12.2023 at 2 p.m.
on Friday, 22.12.2023 at 11:00 am
in the auditorium of Gesundbrunnen Primary School, Prinzenallee 8, 13357 Berlin
Please register at: assistenz.lunapark@gmail.com
Around 35 pupils from the 6th grade of Gesundbrunnen Primary School in Wedding took part in this project and will present their own stories about their favorite places in the neighborhood as a digital “audio walk”. The places selected by the children are presented in their own words and photos. The author Nadire Biskin will read live from her book “Ein Spiegel für mein Gegenüber” (A mirror for my counterpart) with a reference to Wedding.
The project “Meine Kiezgeschichte” is carried out by the Initiative LUNA PARK in cooperation with, among others, the Gesundbrunnen Elementary School, Ballhaus Prinzenallee, MiK Youth Art School, the Badstraße Youth Club, and GemBeKi (Gemeinsinn für Berliner Kinder) gGmbH. It is funded as part of the “gemeinsam digital” initiative by the dbv (German Library Association), within the framework of the support program “Kultur macht stark – Bündnisse für Bildung)” of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research.
