Mein süßes Lieb

In the organizer's words:

In her book The Gentrification of the Mind, American author and ACT UP activist Sarah Schulman describes how AIDS in New York in the 1980s triggered gentrification as a displacement process: Due to the sudden mass death of majority gay men in Manhattan, whose remains in cardboard boxes still stand in front of their front doors, while upstairs housing prices are already rising up to tenfold and the Gentry is moving from the suburbs to the inner city - a substitution of the urban mentality takes place, the era of gentrified cities as we know it today begins.What gentrification is as an ongoing process, according to Schulman, AIDS marks as a culmination, a crisis, and a shock: the disappearance of the city as a space of possibility and a source of political movements, revolutionary visions, and ways of life in favor of economic gentrification and cultural homogenization; in short, the end of visions and the arrival of the suburban mentality.Gay liberation, Schulman argues, did not originate in the suburbs. It comes from the city. And when you destroy its urbanity, you limit the possibilities that cities generate - and so the whole world loses out.

In this solo evening for Christine Groß and choir by Tilman Hecker, a Berlin version of Schulman's theses will be created in the form of a collage of texts, files, newspaper reports, interviews from the beginning of the untold AIDS crisis of the 80s until today. In addition to the different effects of AIDS in the still divided, then reunited city, the development of queer, certainly as a consequence, plays a special role in it and the related question of who benefits today from the struggles of AIDS activists and actors of gay life in the 1980s. This content has been machine translated.