Victimsville. Or How Hedjuk Landed in Berlin 2030

Abstract

In 1984, John Hedjuk presented an application for the Holocaust Memorial of Berlin competition with the name of Victims. A proposal that consisted in 67 structures, with 67 inhabitants in each one, that should be ubicated in the plot by the Berlin citizens. In 2020, a group of architecture students performed the citizens/structures of Victims in an exercise of future imagination, where this Victim’s inhabitants were living in Berlin 2031. This Victims plot performance, was based in the resources and technics used in Dogville film by Lars Von Trier. Welcome to VictimsVille. This paper is going to explain the pedagogical experience of an architecture course, focusing on the construction of a near and technological future as a tool for thinking and developing architecture in practice. The physical construction of the inhabitants of Victimsville, their needs and the prosthesis necessary to coexist and inhabit the Berlin of 2031, we will review and expand concepts such as cyborg (by Donna Haraway), digitalization, virtual reality, politics of care or the political dimension of citizenship. These inhabitants are developed in the abstract representation of the Victims structures (these small, mobile and symbolic architectural elements that Hedjuk design in his work), with the aim of build the domestic and intimate space of VictimsVille with their body and their actions (or performances). © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.