THE OPPOSITE OF GRAY

Review, interview, article 

German press publications translated into English

THE BLACK-RED THREAD

The Ruhr area from a different point of view:  The documentary »The Opposite of Gray« presents leftist collectives.

On the motorways A1, A2, A31 or A43, large brown-white signs inform the readers where they are located, namely in the ‚Ruhr Metropolis‘. Until 2013 there were similar signs that still had ‚Ruhr Area‘ written on them. This term is apparently frowned upon now. It probably reminded the marketing strategists of ‚Regionalverband Ruhr‘ [regional association Ruhr] too much of physically hard work, blast furnaces, coal dust, labour struggles and solidarity. The latter is the central theme of ‚The Opposite of Gray‘, the new documentary by the Berlin film maker Matthias Coers. With the predecessor film ‚Rent Rebels‘ the sociologist has caused a sensation. He let people have a say who are fighting in Berlin against being expelled  from their neighbourhood social networks. An ode to the emergence of urban protest movements. ‚The Opposite of Gray‘ creates a link to this. On one of the ‚Rent Rebel‘ screenings the director got in contact with people from ‚Recht auf Stadt – Ruhr‘ [Right to the City – Ruhr]. Together they started to explore the multifaceted scene of the Ruhr Area. They interviewed people who are active in the social niches of Dortmund, Oberhausen, Bochum, Duisburg and Essen.

The Film features 20 self-organized projects that intervene in everyday urban life. Examples are the initiatives Kitev (Culture in the Tower) and Refugees‘ Kitchen, that develop local forms of living and working together with people from all over the world, including refugees. It passes the floor to representatives of the anarchist book and culture centre Black Pigeon, the sociocultural centre Syntopia, the bookshop Taranta Babu as well as the bar and event location/venue Nordpol, which is run in the Dortmund Nordstadt ‚against the social cold‘. It also features a feminist female graffiti sprayer, as well as people from ecological community gardens, neighbourhood meeting points, repair cafés and tenants‘ initiatives, all of them self-governed, independent and organized collectively.

In one scene you can see a living room in the middle of the street. The ‚Ruhr Region‘, which is characterized in many areas by vacancies, fallow land, standstill and anonymity, offers opportunities that are no longer available in gentrified fancy-schmancy cities. A moving highlight of the film are the talks with the sympathetic pensioners of the Duisburg citizens‘ initiative ‚BI Zinkhüttenplatz‘, who after five years of self-organisation in the neighbourhood can finally raise their glasses to the maintenance of their district. ‚The Opposite of Gray‘ shows what can be achieved with social struggles when people decisively pull in the same direction. ‚Solidarity is the secret of our success‘, says the combative BI spokesperson to put things in a nutshell.

The film also opens a new perspective on social structures. At the beginning of the 1980s, my father-in-law, who was recruited in 1965 as an economic migrant from Kurdistan, was still working at the blast furnace at ‚Hoesch steelworks‘ in the north of Dortmund. At that time, as a teenager, I listened to the songs of the blues band ‚Das dritte Ohr‘ at the youth centre Unna-Mitte: ‚Nordstadt is a murderous city. No one knows no one and in the elevator everyone prefers to be alone.‘ The de-industrialization of the Ruhr Area was already apparent back then. Peu à peu, the Hoesch workers were dismissed. The old steelworks in Oesterholzstraße were disassembled, shipped and rebuilt in China in 2002, where it contaminates the air with dioxin until today.

The ’structural change‘ has hit the Dortmund Nordstadt hard. When politicians talk about ’no-go-areas‘ in North Rhine-Westphalia nowadays, then they mean ‚problematic districts‘ like this one. Today, about 60,000 people live here, more than two-thirds of which are migrants, the unemployment rate (24%) is four times higher than on average in Germany. Nevertheless, Nordstadt is one of the most lively areas in the Ruhr Area. In the film, an editor of the street magazine Bodo gives a striking explanation: ‚This is urbanity, this is not only beautiful, this is extreme and pretty colourful. The Nordstadt is never gonna be a bourgeois suburb and that’s why I can move more freely here. It’s a struggle for public space that has taken place here.‘

The proverbial black-red thread that runs through the film is the question, how very different people can get together in the Ruhr Area, struggle for social free spaces and develop utopias. The diversity and vitality of the projects presented makes you want to network, also concerning the resistance against racists. A resident of a trailer camp in Duisburg, that is threatened with eviction, makes clear: ‚There are many projects in the Ruhr area. If they did more networking, the brown swamp/mud could be held up.‘ ‚The Opposite of Gray‘ is an invitation, too.

Published in the daily newspaper ‚junge Welt‘ on 19.06.2017
https://www.jungewelt.de/artikel/312679.der-schwarzrote-faden.html
In German: http://gegenteilgrau.de/2017/06/20/es-geht-um-solidaritaet-das-ruhrgebiet-mal-ganz-anders/

MAKE YOUR OWN CITY

This is the motto of the March issue of the city magazine bodo produced in Dortmund and Bochum. It contains a detailed interview with filmmaker Matthias Coers talking about the documentary DAS GEGENTEIL VON GRAU / THE OPPOSITE OF GRAY and the movement in the niches of the cities.

Movement in the niches of the cities

Community gardens and tenants‘ initiatives, repair cafés and occupations of vacancies, utopias put into practice and obtained free spaces: The Ruhr area is not exactly the centre of urban activism, but scattered throughout the region groups and initiatives create their city by themselves. The documentary THE OPPOSITE OF GRAY by Matthias Coers and ‚Recht auf Stadt Ruhr‘ [Right to the City Ruhr] will be on at the cinema in the end of March and introduces 20 of them. An interview.

Matthias, you are a sociologist, filmmaker and urban political activist in Berlin. Your focus lies on the struggles of tenants against expulsion, gentrification or forced eviction. Why?

When I was looking for my first rented apartment in Osnabrück in the early 1990s, the housing market was already difficult. There were ‚housing shortage action days‘ and demonstrations, and I’ve been part of them, because I’ve always considered it to be important to have a good home that is affordable. Besides, I always had a strong connection to Berlin and of course I also experienced the house-occupying period of the 90s, the project period. Eight years ago I moved to Berlin, into a house where out of a sudden the tenants where confronted with energetic modernization and consequently with rents increased by 40 to 100 per cent. So I have re-examined the subject in order to fully understand: what does it really mean that there is a law that makes such rent increases possible? We have organized ourselves as tenants and at the same time I have also worked as a photographer and made short films for district groups and neighbourhood initiatives.

With MIETREBELLEN / RENT REBELS there is also a full-length documentary of you, which has now been screened throughout Europe.

Yes, we translated it directly into several languages and toured with the film so that it had more than 300 cinema screenings in about 100 European cities.
We have invited tenants to let them have their say and to raise awareness about housing as a social field and an important social issue. The protest has developed in such a way that everyone reflects about the urban society and how affordable housing can be created. The questions have really opened up in the society respectively the urban society.

However, there are great differences between the prevailing cities and regions.

True, Berlin for example is a special case. It had a housing market that was quite relaxed for a metropolis, because a lot of apartments were built after the decision to make Berlin the new German capital – but the people stayed away. After the year 2000 many people moved here, but at the same time all the public goods were sold in the neo-liberal wave, and finally most of the housing stock was sold, too. Now there’s a great influx into the city and it easily gets into a crisis: people are coming, that’s positive, but at the same time no relevant amount of new houses are being built and the situation is becoming more and more acute. In Berlin, and that is the peculiarity, the people become active. Because first, there is a prehistory – the political sensitivity of the 1970s and 80s, the squatting movement – and second, because the rent increases were so sudden. The people were used to affordable housing costs, until now the average rent often lies between five and six Euros per square metre. In the case of re-letting, you won’t find anything in more or less attractive neighbourhoods below ten Euros rent without utilities. Anyone who has to relocate or moves here as a new tenant will experience this as a shock. And so massive protest has developed rapidly here, there are a lot of initiatives, associations, tenants‘ struggles. In the many events that we have made with RENT REBELS, I have noticed: wherever we were invited, they actually have the same problem, but it is not being articulated, there is a lack of hope, no sensitivity in the broad population, to address the housing issue. And the film may have been a small contribution to groups that use it as an impetus and working tool to this day.

The Ruhr area with its ‚What can you do about it anyway‘ attitude seems to be almost the counterdraft. Whole generations of young people prefer to go to the metropolises.

Yes, of course: the Berlin point of view reveals the interesting contradiction that there is a lot of activism in the Ruhr area, but at the same time there seems to be only little. All the more important are the initiatives, which – contrary to the mentality – do not wait, but rather implement ideas themselves: a cultural centre, a neighbourhood initiative that runs a small café and provides tutoring lessons for children, a bike repair workshop – such small snapshots, that of course have to be put into practice day by day. This is real social work, but not in a Berlin-Neukölln milieu, where you go only three houses further down and there is something again.

Instead there is this characteristic kind of very average, often a bit run-down cities and districts, where the basic mood is: You know, we can’t do so much about it anyway. Few activists, many possibilities, that is the ambivalence: One could say, if you have a small, functioning working group in the Ruhr area, a certain concept, an idea and a real desire to implement it, then much is possible. The few handpicked people who decide to build up something need perseverance. Therefore it is all the more important to help them along a bit by showing their work.

The documentary THE OPPOSITE OF GRAY, which you made together with the group ‚Right to the City Ruhr‘, shows precisely such initiatives.

Together with people from the Ruhr area, who deal with the questions of rents, housing, but also free spaces, the idea came up to introduce different Ruhr area groups and relate them to one another. The idea behind it is that initiatives, who also work in a wide range of fields, are getting to know each other and that they realize beyond this difference: there are in fact many who try something at their respective location, in their cities. We have concentrated on five places: Dortmund, Bochum, Essen, Duisburg and Oberhausen.

The 20 initiatives presented cover an astonishingly broad spectrum – from groups who occupy vacancies to community supported agriculture. The question is: How do we organize ourselves as people, as a society? There are small but nice examples of how to make something different. This may be a bookshop that works as a collective, or a cooperative that allows different people to live together permanently, safely and fairly well. What can be seen in the film is the wide range of approaches and the diversity of the initiatives that intervene in the urban space.

In the end of March the film will make a small tour through the Ruhr area. Do you think it will work beyond the region, too?

I do not come as a filmmaker and do something about the Ruhr area, but I am actively co-working with people in the Ruhr area. Again, I couldn’t help but notice how strong the activists‘ desire here is, who say: ‚We need this for our own sake.‘ We will also travel throughout Europe with this film translated into English. Probably there are also approaches and groups in other cities, that we don’t know yet, in the Ukraine or in the post-industrial England. From our own local perspective, we often feel only the supposed insignificance and the troubles experienced at first hand and we underestimate their relevance. But it is a matter of great social processes that take place all over Europe and around the world.

Published in bodo – Das Straßenmagazin March 2017
http://bodoev.de/artikel/in-den-nischen-der-staedte.html
http://bodoev.de/artikel/bodo-im-maerz.html
In German: http://gegenteilgrau.de/2017/03/02/stadt-selber-machen/

PIONEER WORK IN RUHR AREA

Journalist Peter Nowak about DAS GEGENTEIL VON GRAU / THE OPPOSITE OF GRAY in the federal edition of the daily newspaper Neues Deutschland.

Revolting Ruhr Region

The seniors are in a festive mood. With their tenants‘ initiative Zinkhüttenplatz, they have prevented the demolition of a historic labour settlement. Although they didnt’t even get support by the The Left Party. Their inspiring struggle can be seen in the documentary THE OPPOSITE OF GRAY, which is premiering this week. Almost 20 non-parliamentary initiatives are presented in the film. The spectrum ranges from graffiti sprayers – in fact, thei’re solely women – and an anarchist info centre to projects with refugees and a vacancy cinema in Dortmund-Nord.

»All projects do pioneer work in the Ruhr area, a region with a strong structural change from industrial society into a crisis-prone service and leisure society.«

That’s how director Matthias Coers describes the connecting element of the presented initiatives to Neues Deutschland‘. Especially the project ‚kitev – Kunst im Turm‘ in Oberhausen and the initiative Refugees‘ Kitchen, a mobile kitchen in which refugees and artists work together, impressed Coers. The director became well-known even outside Germany with his film MIETREBELLEN / RENT REBELS, which documented the resistance against gentrification and rent increases in Berlin.

The History of the story: At a film event in the Ruhr area, Coers got in contact with the initiative Recht auf Stadt Ruhr / Right to the City Ruhr. ‚Together, we were thinking about how to make some kind of film showing the movement’s fight for a right to the city in the Ruhr area,‘ says Coers. The film work took two long years, because Coers did not make a film about but rather in cooperation with the initiatives.

It presents people who want to put their utopias to practice in the niches of the cities. This can be a ‚repair shop‘ or a occupied greenhouse, where seniors chat about how they have cracked a lock as if it were the most natural thing in the world. The short discussions in the film document the differences between the individual projects: while some are cooperating with left-wing politicians, others emphasize their autonomy from the state and parties. An employee of the Bochum street magazine »bodo« explains how a labour district became a refuge for migrants decades ago, and still is today. The artists of ‚kitev‘ who ‚migrated‘ from Berlin to Oberhausen ask themselves whether their project did contribute to the process of gentrification against their will.

The documentation is an up to date movement detector for a different Ruhr area. Thus the film with the vague title THE OPPOSITE OF GRAY might have been more appropriately titled with Auf-Ruhrgebiete / Revolting Ruhr Region. In any case the film makes us curious to see more and invites us to keep an eye on the presented projects.

Neues Deutschland federal edition of 22 March 2017, page 18
https://www.neues-deutschland.de/artikel/1045514.auf-ruhrgebiet.html
In German: http://gegenteilgrau.de/2017/03/02/stadt-selber-machen/

Special thanks to Vera Aulenbach for the translation.

Further information: http://gegenteilgrau.de/english/