Welcome City

Summer 2015: Paula Hildebrandt sets out in search of a language to describe the reality of a diverse urban society in all its everyday madness, bewildering beauty, and contradictions. In her explorations, she addresses the themes of arriving and staying, as well as questions of belonging and the limits and ambivalences of German welcoming culture. She comes into conflict with bureaucracies and government agencies, examining the relationship between hospitality and civic engagement. In doing so, she tests artistic research methods as an experimental system: infiltration, camouflage, and micro-actions as the smallest shifts in the certainties of everyday life. It becomes clear: the “Welcome City” is not an intellectual space, not a political program, not fiction, and not a utopia, but rather a city that can only be experienced through encounter.
Through texts and images, the book recounts personal experiences in Hamburg between 2015 and 2017. Empirical observations and speculation, fact and fiction intermingle. The book will be of interest to anyone seeking artistic perspectives and performative arrangements within the “Welcome City.”