The Tiergarten is in constant transformation: As the embodiment of an idea of nature, it contains all histories of Berlin simultaneously. Originally a vast forest for royal hunting, it was re-planned in the 19th century by Peter Joseph Lenné into a landscape park, to then be transformed during the Third Reich as a stage for parades with large trafficked roads. A battlefield during the II World War, its forest was chopped for wood during the hardest winters of 1946 and 1947. Reinterpreted in a modernist way as the green lung and consequently reconstructed in the post war years, it is currently under a new wave of reconstruction, its ecology of the wild and the social is changing along with it. The seminar concentrates on the research and cartography of specific historical and current layers of human, animal and floral nature.

Sandra Bartoli is responsible for the seminar Tiergarten – This Obscure Object of Desire 1