Timeline

Reading Urban Spaces: Art & Urban Theory Reading Group at ZK/U

An exploration of how art, theory, and lived experience intersect in the life of cities

Bi-weekly Sundays from November through March, 16:00 – 18:00

Join the Art & Urban Theory Reading Group at ZK/U—an exploration of how art, theory, and lived experience intersect in the life of cities. In ten sessions throughout bi-weekly Sundays, we’ll traverse classic and contemporary texts to ask: How do urban spaces shape our ways of seeing, acting, and remembering?

Part 1 grounds us in the classics with Georg Simmel’s The Metropolis and Mental Life and Roland Barthes’ Mythologies. Together, they help us untangle how everyday city life molds perception and myth in the urban world.
Date: 16 & 30 November, 14 December, 16:00 – 18:00
Place: ZK/U, Siemensstraße 27, 10551 Berlin – Studio 1, first session on 16 Nov in the Conference room on the 1st floor!

Part 2 moves toward the production and transformation of space, reading Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space and Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project. These sessions dive into the city as a field of power, memory, and desire—where people, capital, and architecture meet and collide.
Date: 04 & 18 January, 01 & 15 February, 16:00 – 18:00
Place: ZK/U, Siemensstraße 27, 10551 Berlin – Studio 1

Part 3, reflecting ZK/U’s neighborhood in Moabit, addresses Berlin as a transnational contact zone shaped by East and Southeast Asian migration and memory. We dive into critical texts ranging from transnational history and diasporic studies to comparative urban and cultural studies. This segment is specially curated in light of the recent removal of the Statue of Peace (Ari) nearby—opening space for vital conversations about memory, belonging, and the shifting meanings of urban monuments and diasporic life.
Date: 01 & 15 & 29 March, 16:00 – 18:00
Place: ZK/U, Siemensstraße 27, 10551 Berlin – Studio 1

Whether you’re an artist, researcher, or urban dweller, this group welcomes anyone interested in reading, discussing, and ultimately reimagining the city’s possibilities.

If you’re interested please send an email to johnshlee1(at)gmail.com to sign up. The sessions will be in English.

Born in the US and raised in South Korea, visual artist John Seung-Hwan Lee has lived in Berlin since 2018 and was a resident artist at ZK/U in 2023. Since 2022, he has been organizing ongoing reading groups that weave together philosophy and art—covering themes such as movement, coding, phenomenology, and existentialism. Inspired by ideas from Maurice Blanchot’s The Unavowable Community (1988), the reading group seeks a form of community grounded in an open, non-instrumental space where togetherness exists without fusion or goal through the very act of reading and reflecting alongside others.