Presenting sounds, archival drawings, and cartographic representations, the exhibition Radio-Activities aims to raise awareness of the contemporary role of the built environment by examining the time when the intricate worlds of politics, aesthetics, and information technologies began to populate the ether. The exhibition is the outcome of research conducted by the Chilean architect Alfredo Thiermann on the infrastructure built for radio in Berlin, starting in the Weimar Republic and running up to the Cold War period.
Exactly 60 years after the construction of the Berlin Wall, Radio-Activities re-examines the material conditions under which two fundamentally opposing political and aesthetic worldviews coexisted within a single city. Inhabiting this apparently divided territory, both these forms of conceiving space conquered, protected, and competed over constantly fluctuating borders through the means of electromagnetic waves and sonic signals. Crossing over the seemingly impenetrable Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall, radio was paradoxically a highly material form of construction, albeit built using very different architectural means. Combining sonic and visual material, the exhibition presents Berlin’s disputed architecture of radio in three different scales: the city, the building, and oscillations.
