Dorothea Grießbach, City_Neighbourhood_Videos_II, 2014, Hamburg

Dorothea Grießbach, Stadt_Teile_Videos_II, 2014, Hamburg

 

For her research project City_Neighbourhood_Videos_II, Grießbach assembled teenagers from Sonnenland to create their own internet videos about their ‘outside’ experience of urban publics to be viewed by their friends and YouTube followers on their screens at home. The Sonnenland settlement was built in the 1960s and is located eleven kilometres from the centre of Hamburg, in Billstedt. For many young people, Billstedt, the Sonnenland streets and the local community project are the centre of their urban life and not, for example, the inner city of Hamburg. As a documentary filmmaker and researcher, Grießbach was interested in internet videos from a local context, from Hamburg Billstedt, which is on the outskirts of the city. Her research question was aimed at different ideas of the public and the interests of the teenage video makers to publish on the Internet.

“The public is outside and not inside”, says one of the teenagers from the media group of the Sonnenland district project. For City_Neighborhood_Videos_II, Grießbach invited the teenagers to leave behind their internet presence and go outside into the city with their cameras and with their videos. In the preparation, the discussion revolved around where they wanted to show something and what was relevant to show. The result of the negotiations was the idea to display the videos on the passenger TV monitors in the busses and subway trains on the complete network of the Hamburg public transport system. For this special kind of public screening, two very different clips were realized: The first one consisted of different 360-degree pans of the centre of Hamburg. The second short clip was produced like an advertising video by the media group for the media group. This process was also accompanied and documented with a camera by Grießbach. The pictures and sounds created in this process became part of a video essay that Grießbach created on her research and research question: What pictures do the teenagers decide to show outside – in their district, in the urban area, in the public sphere of Hamburg? What interests them about publics or what do they think is interesting to show to a public outside of Sonnenland? The project made this point of view visible, bringing into focus a topic Grießbach investigated in later projects with the group.

 

Researchers: Dorothea Grießbach

Collaboration: Stadtteilprojekt Sonnenland e.V.

Formats: Creating a Media Device