The “Fondation Suisse” is the most prominent dormitory of modern times. To mark the 75th anniversary in november 2008 raumlaborberlin was commissioned to find a temporary solution for a recurring problem: the missing space for big festivities. In summer the >piloti< called terrace underneath the building would have been perfect, but in november it was too cold. We proposed to wrap the space with an inflatable, translucent membrane and thereby transform the semi public ambient to semiprivate. For three days the pneumatic hall gave home to concerts, speeches, dinners, a conference and a party.

”We Are Coming!” will present a selection of their many projects divided into the categories ”Relational Fetish Objects”, ”Transformed Urbanity” and ”Urban Narratives”. They also speculate about the hidden futures of the fjord city in an interactive cooking performance and present the newest (and possibly most original) link between Oslo and Berlin; a submarine and a wall-to-wall pool of white water in the gallery.

For the “house of imagination” raumlabor berlin interlaces two architectural ideas of living in Torstrasse 166: A 1:1 modell of a Plattenbau flat type P2 which is living reality in Halle-Neustadt and many cities of the former GDR is built into a Gründerzeit flat. Both models date from a time of mass production of living space, the Gründerzeit as a market driven approach, the P2 flat as a government-controlled approach.

The ctiy mattress is an installation in public space. It is a triangular pneumatic structure, measuring 15 metres on each side. As catalytic object it is a platform for various actions. The over-scaled soft surface questiones our behavioural codes in public space, especially the physical actions of the bodies within the space. The city mattress is an experimental condensator for acting in public.

Construction work is going on at “Wonders of the Prairie”. In the eyes of the public a boat is built from pieces of wood, junk, and offset-metals at the Alte Feuerwache. A sign points out that raumlabor-berlin is building a submarine which will be sent onto a „dangerous“ journey on the Neckar and Rhein to Ludwigshafen on Sept. 20. At its destination it will be handed over to the Kunstverein Ludwigshafen.We are looking for ten courageous persons who navigate the vessel on the difficult journey and for persons who want to participate in the building of the boat.

“Aus Flug Hafen Sicht” takes place from April to June 2008. Directors, choreographers, architects and artists will offer excursions to areas of one of the strangest territories in Central Germany. Wishful economic thinking and melancholy, departure and failure converge here like nowhere else: an empty airport building, which was to supposed to become the motor of development for a whole region, next to a more or less abandoned village between motorway and runway.

If things continue as they are on earth we’ll soon all have to move to the new planet which has been discovered south of the Orion Nebula. How should we live there? What will we need? What language will we speak? What songs will we sing? Over a twoday period, a model of the new planet will be built on the stage of the Kammerspiele including hymns, pamphlets and poetry.

What meaning does the historical centre of a city carry and who has sovereignty over that meaning? Shortly before the demolition of Palast der Republik in Berlin, raumlaborberlin built a huge mountain formation in, on and in front of this controversial building. The mountain showed that even a rough concrete ruin can become home to people, their past and their dreams. Its size, grace and speed, along with the countless installations, performances and record numbers of visitors to it, caused a great storm within the political debate; a storm which unfortunately calmed all too quickly. However, this still remains one of the boldest projects on this list.

“Silver Pearl Congress Centre and Spa” was a temporary hotel and festival centre for “Art goes Heiligendamm”. In appearance it alluded to the profile of the Hotel Kempinski, Heiligendamm, “The White Pearl”, where the 2007 G8 summit took place. It had a spa, a sauna, a golf course, comfortable slumber suites with a view of the sea and a security fence. There you could do what was prohibited in Heiligendamm: proclaim your opinion, demonstrate at the fence and relax.

One-day activities in public space. The following questions were examined: can wasteland be produced? And what would Vienna’s citizens do with it? The quality inherent in wasteland is that it is open to appropriation, to new interpretation and varieties of city and interaction; it provides room for alternative social developments.

Urban allure or simply madness? The film “U(topie) 18” throws new light onto a thirthy-year-old utopia: the underground line U18 that has connected the cities of Essen and Mülheim since 1977. This model line that runs along the central strip of the A40 has seven stations. Planners, politicians and actors are asked of their intentions in interviews. These reports confront the everyday realities and hopes of today’s residents and users.

The unimune consists of the main programs Conference Center, Museum and University accompanied by the programs of public lobbys and administration to the complex. The unimue is set in the “veterans village”, an urban agglomeration quoting the arabic city in the way it is organised and the roles of public and private spaces are negotiated.

A portrait of the steel magnate Lakshmi N. Mittal, the new owner of the former local steelworks “Lehnin-Steelworks”, is painted onto a wall hanging from a photo found on the internet. Location: on the Aleja Solidarnosc, the main street that connects the central square to the steelworks, the socalled “Axis of Labour”.

A large prison is located in a residential area in south Munich. Societal harmony and societal sanctioning face each other as parallel worlds. White Spots intervenes in this district with thirtythree cars of the same colour which fluctuate through the streets following a secret choreography.

The “Star Grinder” is a mobile planetarium in a camper van. It visits remote places, discovering regional stories from which acoustic images are created, and which can be experienced inside the vehicle. Star constellations that are generated from the individual tales are projected onto the inside of the dome using the “Etonian Method”.

Have you ever entered an exhibition through the back door or been given a tour of a city by non-locals? “Lost strangers”, newcomers to Berlin who don’t know the city too well, present August Strasse to the exhibition visitors. They tell them its history in freshly-learned German and present the 4th berlin biennale to them from their very own personal point of view. The tour ends at the backdoor office at the start of August Strasse where visitors can look up what they did not understand and take it home with them.

Wolfsburg in the year 2036; the Volkswagen works have moved to Romania. Large parts of the city have been abandoned. A globally operating property developer has taken over the city and has started a large-scale advertising campaign. Using so-called transformers, the city is converted into a noble suburb.

The “Kioskisation” team visited four Eastern European cities to look into the kiosk situation in the microrayon. The results are kiosk trail maps, kiosk collectors’ microrayon, a manual on how to start a kiosk, a documentary film (all in four languages) and a transportable kiosk cinema.

A photography installation in the Shell House: as a trompe l´oeil, “Switch” transformed a corridor in the GASAG office building. A fictive straightening of the corridor intensifies the perception of this specific spatial situation and the relationship of inside to outside.