In the mid 90’s Walt Disney Feature Animation released a movie about the processes that took place in Berlin after the Fall of the Wall — Pocahontas. It was one of the most succesful productions of the decade and had a profound impact on an entire generation’s rejection of colonization. In the animation movie a white man from the Old World is looking for freedom and fame in the New World, full of ‘colours of the wind’. In 1989 Berlin there were no colours at all, just wind, but an identical conquest took place, when David Michael Hasselhoff ascended an elevated platform above the Berlin Wall on New Year’s Eve, unaware of the fact, that up there he would stage one of the most iconic perfomances of the dawning last century.

Kids across the globe grew up with the idea that Hasselhoff’s performance that night, was responsible for breaking down the Berlin Wall. Only years later they would understand that some of the locals of East-Berlin were facing a fate somehow reminiscent to the one Disney’s Pocahontas encoutered on the eve of the settler’s arrival.

Nevertheless for a brief moment before Hasselhoff and his followers claimed the dead earth of East-Berlin, hardcore, hooliganism and rave culture emerged in a split second of soft anarchy during the early 90’s. Desolate ruins and vacant factories of bankrupt state-corporations were converted into venues for raves. Techno shattered the crusted socialist soil of this ancient swampland.

The following presentation aims to give an unprecedented account on ‘THE COMPLETE HISTORY OF BERLIN TECHNO 1448-1989’. Both dates are key, since on both dates a wall around Berlin came down — one was protecting its locals (1448) and the other one was imprisoning them (1989). Whereas 1448 marks the beginning of an occupied Berlin with the invasion of the Hohenzollern hard-liner Frederick ‘Iron Tooth’, 1989 marks its end.

The exhibition starts with a sound installation (‘Bear’, 2022) in a parked VW ID.3 rental car, just outside of Number 1 Main Road. Once you enter, you come across a receiption desk which features 8 plastic forest animals (‘Free Swampland’, 2022). In the background you can hear another sound installation in the tower (‘Eagle’, 2022). Whereas the bear represents the initially free locals of Berlin since the town’s foundation in the middle ages, the eagle represents the dynasty whose iron-fisted grip chained Berlin from the moment they erected their fortress right on the marshland outside the medieval wall of Berlin.

The main presentation takes place in the main room and features a conference table with a plastic bear, a plastic skunk and remote controlled velociraptor toy (‘Occupied Swampland’, 2022), all staged for a live reenactment of the wall falling in 1448 and 1989. Finally these parts will be tangled together in a live presentation based on 5 videos (‘THE COMPLETE HISTORY OF BERLIN TECHNO 1448-1989’, 2022).

Warning: The historical representation of THE COMPLETE HISTORY OF BERLIN TECHNO 1448-1989 is vastly based on the oral accounts of an employee at a local city museum and the far-fetched assumption that Pocahontas is based on the incidents in Berlin in 1989. The first is historically verified, the second is a purely personal conspiracy theory.