A bicycle handlebar and saddle become a bull’s head. This plastic collage, also called assemblage, was created by the artist Pablo Picasso in the 1940s, which entered the art world under the title “Tête de taureau”. In the visual arts, a working method that many artists use, the term assemblage has gained a foothold in other fields as well. So also in urban research, in which the concept of assemblage is applied to the exploration, description and analysis of the urban.
The city is not understood here as a whole, but as a multiplicity. It is about making city and the processual relationships between things, living beings, structures, ideas or thoughts – visible and invisible, past, present and future. It is about asking how the city is constantly merged, disassembled and always new assemblages arise. With a view to the pluralistic and dynamic aspects of the urban, the CityLeaks Academy is dedicated to the exploration of the street space. Art projects, workshops, keynote speeches, city talks or public dinners invite visitors to exchange theoretical and practical knowledge and develop artistic strategies for the appropriation of public space. With his site-specific interventions, the artist Mathieu Tremblin from Strasbourg explores the streets of Ehrenfeld. The Cologne artist Andrey Ustinov questions the commercial occupation of the street space with his project ICONOCLASH. The question “who owns the city?” And what artistic practices and strategies are needed to reclaim public space resonate in both projects. Temporary and informal architectures realized by students of the Alanus University for Art and Society and the TH Cologne in cooperation with the architectural collective orizzontale from Rome will also play a role in transforming the Hüttenstrasse and the railway arches into a common space. Because this is the architect and activist Stavros Stavrides from Athens, a space made by the people who use it – sometimes in direct disregard of existing rules and sometimes through a specific negotiation of existing rules.