Berlin will celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Peaceful Revolution and the fall of the Berlin Wall with a week-long festival in November, during which the city will be transformed into a large open-air exhibition and event location.
The 30th Anniversary of the Peaceful Revolution – Fall of the Berlin Wall festival will see 100 events take place at seven original sites of the Peaceful Revolution in the German capital, including Gethsemane Church, Alexanderplatz, the Brandenburg Gate, Kurfürstendamm, the Stasi Headquarters, Schlossplatz and East Side Gallery. The story will be brought to life at the places where it unfolded, using large-scale 3D video projections, animations and sound effects that will transport visitors back to the atmosphere of 1989 and 1990.
The festival will also feature concerts, open-air exhibitions, workshops, film screenings, talks with contemporary witnesses, guided tours of historical locations, and a film project for young people as well as a variety of concerts. This includes Patti Smith performing with Tony Shanahan at Gethsemane Church, while the Staatskapelle Berlin and DJ WestBam will perform at the stage show at the Brandenburg Gate.
One special feature of the festival will be a floating art installation made up of 30,000 handwritten messages. Berliners and visitors are invited to share their own messages, wishes and hopes for the future or their memories of the past, which will be integrated into a large-scale art installation, known as a Skynet, by Patrick Shearn of Poetic Kinetics. It will float weightlessly in the sky at Brandenburg Gate during the festival week. Participants can also post their digital messages on the project website here.
There will also be an augmented reality app that temporarily resurrects the fractious barrier between east and west. The MauAR app is available for download here, and it visualises a three-dimensional model of the wall along its former course of around 160km. It offers a haunting digital perspective on the division of Berlin that offers users insights into the border regime that cost the lives of at least 140 people.
The 30th Anniversary of the Peaceful Revolution – Fall of the Berlin Wall festival runs from 4 to 10 November and further information can be found here.
