In Transit: London, 1981 to Berlin, 2020
I can’t help but notice similarities between my parents’ photos from their academic year abroad in London from 1980-81 and those I took during my own (shortened) year in Berlin from 2019-20.
While in Berlin, the spaces and architecture that felt most aesthetically rich to me were derelict or decaying buildings and corners of subway stations that, apart from crisp, new signage or the occasional ceiling video camera, somehow recall the mid-20th century.
A noticeably postmodern stylistic quality belongs even to such mundane spaces as subways— whether this particular London Tube station or the Heinrich-Heine-Straße U-Bahn station were constructed in the ‘60s or the ‘80s, I don’t know. It almost doesn't matter. Something about that beige subway tiling, the curved surfaces, and the lurid quality of those fluorescent rectangular lights reveal aesthetic features simultaneously bland and specific enough to evoke an era.
It is this nondescript, indefinable form of the retro shining through Berlin’s corners and cracks that inspired me, every now and then, to imagine myself into the past.
Enough imagination, a bit of Simple Minds, and I could be there in an instant.
