I Don't Love Berlin, Crazy City
Editor: Pia-Marie Remmers
Proofreading: Rebecca A. Layton
Illustrations & Design: Rahel Süßkind, Lena Henke
Photos: Katalin Déer
Lithography: Misch Dettling, Fotolabor Kunstgiesserei St. Gallen
17.4 × 25 cm, 80 pages
© 2022 Lena Henke; Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König, Cologne; the authors
At once a comic book, image atlas, photographic archive, and anti-guidebook to Berlin, I Don't Love Berlin, Crazy City, imagines the present and future of the cities Hansaviertel, taking seriously its postwar moniker as “the city of tomorrow” [“die Stadt von Morgen”].
For the past decade, Lena Henke has produced a body of work that explores her personal and bodily relation to the architecture and urban design of the cities she inhabits. Her new set of sculptures, which appear in the publication as animated comic book characters, excavate the local histories, kitchens and household artefacts of the Hansaviertel, while spewing wisdom on gender, technology, and urban space from an eclectic group of cultural references ranging from Max Frisch and Klaus Theweleit to Donna Haraway, Paul B. Preciado, Leslie Kern and others.
The publication is published on the occasion of the exhibition Lena Henke: Auf dem Asphalt botanisieren gehen at Klosterfelde Edition in Berlin, April 30 - June 30, 2022.