Author: Christoph Schäfer
CV Christoph Schäfer (DE) is an artist whose work is committed to issues relating to the urban domain, and comprises strong visual, spatial, performative, theoretical, and activist strategies, alchemies and dances. He engages in long-term projects in urban contexts as well as in social movements. Since 1995, he has been part of the Park Fiction Project, a self-organized initiative that brought together a group of residents of St. Pauli district in Hamburg, in a collective process of production of desires, deriving in the delving, attaining, and development of a public park on the riverbank, by which they managed to release an expensive plot of land from the clutches of real estate developers. Schäfer participated in Documenta11 in Kassel (2002) as a member o this collective project. Other projects include: research into irregular settlements and gated communities in Delhi and Bangalore (developed as a guest of the Sarai Media Lab); the installation Auslaufendes Rot, an anti-monument for the Red Ruhr Army (in the context of RUHR.2010); and sub-curation of the congress “Unlikely Encounters in Urban Space.” His book The City is Our Factory (2010) tells the story of the city in 156 drawings from the Neanderthal period to the Right to the City movement in Hamburg. He is also part of Es regnet Kaviar (“It's Raining Caviar” - Action Network against Gentrification), and the neighborhood organization NoBNQ. Together with Margit Czenki and quartiervier architects, Schäfer developed the concept for ContainerUni, a temporary campus for Zeppelin University, Friedrichshafen/Lake Constance. Schäfer is a founding member of the transdiciplinary team PlanBude. http://planbude.de