In August 2011, Berlin’s major political parties were running their campaigns for the upcoming election of the House of Representatives (Abgeordnetenhaus). Although the parties stand for different programs and values, there was no clear position on housing politics. To draw attention to this political dedifferentiation, Brandlhuber+ launched a poster-campaign: mixing the colors of the major political parties—SPD (Social Democratic Party), Bündnis 90 die Grünen (Alliance 90/The Greens), CDU (Christian Democratic Union), Die Linke (The Left) and FDP (Free Democratic Party)—in equal parts resulted in a brownish tone: RGB 165/96/36 CMYK 14/40/80/20. This color of political evenness was printed on posters and billposted in public space. The initiative enabled an intensive public discussion about the need for a repoliticization of housing issues in Berlin.
Archipel was an exhibition built upon the manifesto for a shrinking city The City in the City—Berlin: A Green Archipelago by Oswald Mathias Ungers, Rem Koolhaas, Hans Kollhoff, Arthur Ovaska, and Peter Riemann, that took place at two venues: Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.) and KOW. The book served as a historical foil for a dystopic explanatory model of Berlin that used to be characterized by urban heterogeneity—but has been experiencing a reorganization and a deliberate redistribution of social life since the early 2000s: The center of the capital has been occupied by a well-heeled clientele and prestigious apartment complexes and has forced everyone who cannot or will not bid anymore out into the suburbs. Social archipelagos have emerged, new cities within the city, all organized in a similar homogenous way: the welfare recipients over here, the art scene over there, a migrant neighborhood somewhere else.