Halle (Germany) (AFP)
Inherent from the massive architecture of the Communist GDR, the prefabricated sets remain in Germany homes of poverty and tension. In Halle, however, artists illuminate everyday life by transforming these buildings into works of art.
Painted at the very top of the building, a kind of spaceship, half-satellite, half-long view, flat. His occupant descends from a ladder held by two men. In the background, an azure sky, that one has the impression to see through the facade.
Under this three-dimensional perspective, the motifs, sometimes drawn in trompe-l'oeil, seem to come alive and the tower fades.
"The artists chose this blue because they wanted to break the very hard and very severe architecture of this district of + Plattenbau +", the German name given to these prefabricated buildings, "and to create something very light", says Philipp Kienast, member of the Freiraumgalerie collective of artists and urban planners.
Elfriede Schulz is enthusiastic. For her who lives there for more than 40 years, this spectacular project, unpublished in Germany according to its creators, could finally restore the execrable image of these towers.
"I'm always told: + ah, you live in these buildings in Plattenbau! +", Says the former teacher of 79 years miming an expression of disdain.
"That's why I'm delighted that these creations of images and colors can bring something to these buildings," she says, "something good".
- "Identify" -
Of the four eleven-story buildings that serve as canvas, two are already completed. By the autumn of 2019, all facades, more than 8.000 m², will be painted to the smallest corner.
At the origin of this project, the HWG real estate cooperative wondered "how to create a residential complex with a certain originality, to which its inhabitants can identify", when it had to renovate these buildings in 2018, explains its director Jürgen Marx.
Because cohabitation is not easy in this district born at the end of the 70s, separated from the old city by a wide peripheral with dense traffic and where the residents of various social origins, German and foreign, remain suspicious towards each other. the others, he enumerates.
It was different at the time of the GDR, when these apartments close to the famous Francke Foundation, a cultural and educational institution created in the 17th century, were very coveted.
They were even reserved in priority to citizens deemed worthy: officials of the single party SED, employees of the Stasi - the political police of the GDR - or police. What earned them the nickname "blocks of the great pundits".
- Red string -
For its 7 million-euro project, HWG turned to the Freiraumgalerie, which has made a name for itself in the city, brightening the houses of a neglected neighborhood around the slaughterhouses with its colorful graffiti. the city, closed shortly after Reunification in 1990.
For the buildings in Plattenbau, the artists chose to tell "the small and the big story", to show the aptitudes like the limits of the human beings, a balancing act symbolized by a painted red thread that connects the characters.
The message in the end is that "nothing stays that way, everything changes," says Jürgen Marx.
Another originality is to have involved the residents. "We invited people to take certain postures - someone who catches something for example - and photographed them," says Philipp Kienast.
Without doing their exact portrait, "we painted characters in the same position, so that people can recognize themselves on the walls," he describes.
- "Clear the fear of the other" -
As everywhere in the former East Germany, Halle, located in Saxony-Anhalt, does not escape the rise of the extreme right, which has just achieved a new breakthrough in elections in neighboring regions Saxony and Brandenburg.
It is also in this city, homeland of the composer of Baroque music Haendel, that the identity movement, partially related to the Islamophobes of the Pegida movement, has set up its headquarters.
It is surrounded by several districts of Plattenbau, including that of Neustadt, sadly known for being one of the poorest in Germany, with high crime.
For Jürgen Marx, the key is to restore social cohesion, and one prerequisite is to "erase the fear of the other". "When we know each other, everything becomes easier," he says. The art on the facades of buildings can, he hopes, help to know each other.
But "when they come out and look at our walls, even if they do not like it, it's still a good opportunity for these people to get closer" and to discuss these paintings, he says. "What they would never have done otherwise".
© 2019 AFP