The Wall in the Head

'Virtuelle Mauer/ReConstructing the Wall', an interactive 3D installation of a stretch of the Berlin wall is on at Max Mueller Bhavan till Jan 24th.

The project recreates a kilometer of the Berlin Wall as it was in the 1980's in an interactive format where the user can navigate through the virtual world using a joystick. Tourists in the artwork, when approached talk briefly about the history of the Wall and its transformation from a wall running alongside buildings to a fence with barbed wire and some more reinforcements to become the concrete structure that it was in the 1980s. As the toursists talk, you can see the wall changing. From here on it's all up to the user to explore the area, one's curiosity is the limit. There is a Viewing Platform in West Berlin from where you can see the Death Strip (No man's land) with trenches, layered with gravel (so as to identify footprints easily) bordered between the East and West walls. A symbolic stark contrast in spaces so close. 

The West Wall is covered with colourful graffiti, which have been reproduced as was. At the section of the Wall over Waldemar's Bridge, right ahead of St. Michael's Church in East Berlin, the Wall is painted with the lower part of the Church which it obstructs. Thus giving an optical illusion of the full front view of the Church. Approach the Wall here and you're drawn into a dream sequence revealing how the section looks in the present times.

            

Screen-shot (from the project website) of the Waldemar Bridge on the Western Wall where artist Yadegar Asisi painted a trompe l'oeil image of St. Michael's Church in  1980s.

The Engelbecken Canal which was filled in during the time of the Wall to create the Death Strip is now back to its original water filled sight lined with neat gardens. From a nightmare to a dream in a second. 

Walking across the park to East Berlin we are back in the 1980s. One of the viewpoints in East Berlin is the St. Michael's Church from the top of which you get a bird's eyeview of how the world looked back in the 1980s from an East Berliner's perspective. Another is the East German Trade Union/Hospital Mitte building, which was one of the few buildings open to the public from which the East Berliners could see across the Death Strip and the Wall to West Berlin. The sight of dingy, dirty buildings, a colorful wall against a clean, barricaded wall enclosing the no man's land. 

Walking around one discovers many scenes and sounds, some mundane like that of the printing press, of sheep bleating at the Children's Farm. And some others like the sight of jeeps zooming by, honking, the Checkpoints and the guards who when approached 'interact' with you and based on your actions, you might even end up getting arrested.

The artist team is T+T, Tamiko Thiel and Teresa Reuter and the artwork is mainly funded from the Berlin Capital City Cultural Fund. Virtuelle Mauer is an ongoing project that's working on incorporating suggestions from personal memories of the Wall, and in widening the area covered.

The work is projected onto a big screen and while the virtual world is 3D, I'd expected a more 'real' experience when I read '3D' in the ad. It really was a thought-provoking experience, like stepping into a time machine, for, little remains of the concrete Wall in Berlin now. It resides in pictures, archives, in works like these and of course in the heads of the people. Most of us never will understand the 'Wall in the Head', taking a journey through a part of their world one can only imagine how it must have been to live "in the shadow of the Wall".

The installation is on till Jan. 24th from 9 am to 6.30 pm at Goethe-Institut/Max Mueller Bhavan, Indiranagar. Guided tours can be taken between 5 pm and 6 pm till the 22nd.

More info about the event on the Goethe-Institut site. Do visit the Virtuelle Mauer website if you can't make it to the installation,  it includes  details on the making of the project, screenshots of the work.