Bring Your Own Bike #03
Westhafen, Berlin
- Weather
- Performance
- Bring Your Own Bike
Edition 03
Along the Working River
25 September 2024
Westhafen,
Berlin, DE
17:00-19:00
6km
17°C
Light Wind, SW 5 mph
Humidity: 71%
Air quality: Moderate
During the CYCLE UP! residency at ZK/U, the smell of melting metal drifted in from Westhafen every morning, and the air sensor facing the port kept flagging poor air quality. The closing ride took that air as its starting point. Setting off from ZK/U, a former freight depot on the Spree, resident artists and local riders followed the artist's performance bike, modified during the residency, through Moabit, a neighbourhood built a century ago around coal arriving by barge.
Kraftwerk Moabit, a coal-fired plant just four kilometres from the Brandenburg Gate, still pipes heat into Berlin's homes. It has to stay close to the city centre because heat cools as it travels. Around Berlin's largest inland port, silos of sand and construction waste, containers waiting for freight trains to Hamburg, and barges hauling the same cargo as a hundred years ago sit beside a handful of new hydrogen tanks, making it hard to say which century the waterway belongs to.
BYOB (Bring Your Own Bike) is a participatory cycling performance series that explores polluted weather as a collective, embodied phenomenon. Participants ride their own bikes through polluted industrial areas, weathering together under the artist's guidance.
Here the bike is a speculative tool that turns the body into a sensing instrument, tuned to headwind, exhaust, and the smell of oil rising off water. Each pedal stroke is a small negotiation with the air itself, part of a communal practice where environment, socio-political climate, and the human body meet.
The performance has taken place at industrial sites across Europe and South Korea, including ports, refineries, and energy infrastructure. Each ride is shaped by the uneven atmosphere and politics of its location: who breathes what, and where, and who is even allowed to get close enough to ask.
Participating Cyclists
Anita Rind · Claude Pailliot · Gaëtan Collet · Grigoris Bourdalas · Heejung Kim · Kyoko Kagata · Simona Binko · Tuçe Erel
Residency Coordinator
Anita Rinda · Natálie Černá · Simona Binko
Program Production Assistance
Heejung Kim
Photography
Zuzana-Markéta Macková
Funding
Cycle Up! project
Co-financed by
The Creative Europe Programme of the European Union
