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MORE INFORMATION, MORE KNOWLEDGE www.berlin-sciences.com |
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No.1//Berlin Science |
 “Here,” says
Bernd Nehrkorn. He takes the visitor’s hand and adroitly places
the stranger’s fingers on the wood. Nehrkorn demonstrates how
he weaves the seat of a chair. His head is tilted backwards, and his
cloudy blue eyes gaze into a void. He only uses his left hand to work.
His right hand is paralysed. With his pinkie and ring finger he feels
his way, and his thumb and index finger thread the raffia. His fingers
are slender and delicate, a pianist’s hand that he uses to get
a picture of the world. |
| “We
have very beautiful pieces here,” he says. And just what is beautiful? “Things
are beautiful if they are nice to touch. Polished wood, for example,” he
says, and guides the stranger’s hand to the chair so it can find
out how “beautiful” feels. |
| Beautiful
pieces. Some are hanging on the wall, others are piled up downstairs
in the storage room: wicker birdhouses that look like huge, dark eggs;
cleaning brushes remodelled into egg-cups; laundry baskets as big as
washing machines; models of the Brandenburg Gate made from bristles – all
of them designer objects conceived for this workshop, whose façade
displays the word “Blindenanstalt” (“Institution
for the Blind”). Just an ordinary business, except for the
dots under every sign and the talking elevator. On the door to the
second floor workroom a sign says: “Korbmacherei” (“basket-making”).
26 dots beneath it form the same word in Braille. The same in the
elevator. Under the “down”-button: three dots. To go
up: five. And a friendly women’s voice announces every floor.
Just like in the underground trains. The voice says “ground floor”, the door rumbles open, and Gerd Liskow and Oliver Vogt step out in the hallway and then into the store that is brimming with the things produced here. “Where do we start?” Liskow, the manager, asks. He glances over the rim of his small, round glasses. “The floor isn’t very nice,” says Vogt, the designer. He stomps on the grey flooring, his feet clad in orange running shoes; an intern takes notes. Gerd Liskow’s business card reads “Union of Social Organisations”, and the flyer he likes to hand out to visitors lists 17 workshops for handicapped or mentally ill persons in Berlin: a carpenter’s shop, a painter’s shop, a catering service. Since the beginning of the year, the Blindenanstalt is a part of this. For 125 years it was a city-run enterprise, and now it has been privatised. Of course, the employees were not keen on this shifting of ownership: The Kreuzberg district simply ran out of money. A very ordinary story of privatisation, actually: The civil servants |
| have
left, and the business now has a manager who says things like, “We have to
break even,” and employees who fear the possible consequences
of the take-over and don’t want to comment on the topic anymore.
Still, there are not many managers around who will tell you, “We
certainly won’t dismiss anybody. That would be absurd. Our
job is just the opposite: to create jobs for these people.” Liskow and Vogt are standing in front of a glass cabinet; inside, there’s a lady’s shoe painted red with a brush on the sole. A shoe brush, of course. “We can do the painting ourselves now,” says Liskow, shortly after that the expression “break even” is mentioned again. Vogt nods, but he looks more like new production possibilities are already playing ping-pong in his head with fresh design ideas. Until seven years ago, employees at the Blindenanstalt simply made brooms and repaired wicker chairs – nothing to lure large numbers of customers into the store. Then Vogt and his partner Hermann Weizenegger came up with the idea that bristles could be worked into many more things than just mere brushes. The two designers were already known for their original concepts like do-it-yourself furniture: Customers would receive a pattern, a drilling plan and a shopping list from Vogt + Weizenegger, and the rest they had to do on their own. Since then the Blindenanstalt has born the name “The Imaginary Manufacture”, and Vogt + Weizenegger, together with other designers, have engineered more than 80 products that sell in places as far away as Japan: useful little tools and pretty knickknacks made from the materials the Blindenanstalt traditionally used: wood and hair, raffia and wicker – materials that need craftsmen with a trained sense of touch. When one of the senses, sight, is lost, the other ones are sharpened. “One gets big ears, the other gets sensitive fingertips,” says Katrin Schröder, who supervises the basket-making. The wall behind her sports two posters with pin-up girls – which is a little strange, because Ms Schröder is the only one who can actually see them properly. Isn’t that annoying, having to look at two naked bottoms all day? “Oh, they’ve been here for such a long time,” she says, “I don’t even see them anymore.” >> www.blindenanstalt.de |
