re:claim Ehrenfeld

The music that was played there in all kinds of clubs before they had to make way for the (collapsing) new buildings set the tone for the parade and made it loudly clear what was moving the colorful procession through Ehrenfeld's streets. The unconditional will and the urban necessity of free spaces for music and nightlife brought the people in large numbers, partly in costume, partly with posters and in any case with a boisterous mood onto the streets. Mobile architectures loaded with speaker towers, miniature loudspeakers, light cannons and smoke cannons accompanied the protest march. The already completed demise of the Underground, the imminent one of Heinz Gaul, the already lost night harbors of Sensor Club/Papierfabrik, Werkstatt/ Jungle Club, the struggle for survival of Jack in the Box and the Luisenviertel struggling with the absurdity and inadequacy of the bureaucratic superstructure of the city of Cologne - they are all reason to protest against the apparent basic logic of urban development. For where the cultural diversity that brings upswing and pumps creative energy is displaced - centrifugally flung out of the city's interior - rents rise, creative people disappear, and there is soon nothing left of the city as a city. With the exodus from Hüttenstraße, from the CityLeaks Festival Center, we spanned the dramaturgical arc to the exploratory starting point of this year's festival. In Lichtstrasse began - in the context of the artistic research residency re:framing Lichtstrasse - our journey of discovery and exploration through that neighborhood, which in 2011 also washed the City-Leaks Festival into Cologne's urban space, and in Lichtstrasse it ended. On the way between the two central festival streets, and their inherent urban dialectic of empty space and densification, the procession roamed through the bustling Körnerstrasse, turned onto the enterprising Venloer Strasse, paused briefly at the sites of culture and club death on Vogelsanger Strasse, to culminate with bangs and trumpets at the Lichtstrasse festival.