Freedom Rocks: The Everyday Life of the Berlin Wall

Blake Fitzpatrick and Vid Ingelevics

 

“There is something starkly sobering, if not subversive, about the sudden ambiguity of the Berlin Wall—a paradigmatic object that had once appeared so unquestionable.”

Christopher Sharp, ARTINFO, February 1, 2009, writing on the film work of Lars Laumann

 

Freedom Rocks is a collaborative project between Canadian artists Vid Ingelevics and Blake Fitzpatrick that began in 2003. The title is taken from the branding found on a bag of small Berlin Wall souvenir pieces sold in Toronto in the early 1990s. The project began with the goal of documenting the post-1989 movement of the Wall, both large full segments and small fragments, from Berlin to North America. This website functions as a nexus point for the intersection of our work with many different registers of the ?continuing history of the Wall in its atomized and dispersed form.

The charting of the Wall as a mobile ruin has revealed an object with shifting symbolic value and power. No longer activated by Cold War associations of fear and dread, the project has evolved to depict the everyday life of the Berlin Wall in a contemporary post-Cold War context in North America and in Berlin as it challenges assumptions that the Wall's history ended when the Cold War did.

 

For more information (PDF) click here

Blake Fitzpatrick - click here

Vid Ingelevics - click here