unawkward girl: Cardboard Milkshake

Two years ago I thought it was strange when people in my class who'd heard that I want to study in the Netherlands came to me and told me not to go, that it was a grey place and that I'd get depressed. I didn't really understand what they meant, it's hard to imagine grey when all you know is sunny.

The last month has been that grey. The sky is one solid grey mass that seems near and far and thick, like a cardboard milkshake. The sun moves across the sky as if it's four o'clock. Dessau is a depressing place when it's sunny. In this weather it's hard to distinguish sky from buildings from people from cars. Cars keep their lights on. Bicycles keep their lights on. Buildings keep their lights on. The light struggles through the grey.

A month ago I laughed at daylight saving - why make the sun go down earlier? It's 07h30 now, instead of 08h30, and it's dark outside. It'll be light in 15 minutes, untill 16h30, by 17h00 it's night time. And it's only Autumn. So, now I know that I'm a brat from Brat Africa.

In and amongst all this greyness we have been working on the problem of the Junkers site - the beautiful old buildings, overgrown and vandalised that the city of Dessau wants to demolish at a price of 2m€. And perhaps they have a point. Why spend money on buildings in a shrinking city?

This has been a very difficult project, mostly because of the incessant greyness and the depressing reality of this place. People are leaving Dessau because they own nothing here - the blocks of flats are all owned by a large corporation, assumedly the government, things never changed from earlier times and now people are able to pack up their things and leave without having to sell. It's easy to go over to the West.

So why would anybody want to come here? What's the place got to offer if even the locals are leaving. My project is to solve a problem, not to state the obvious, and as I see it the only solution to the problem is to sell Dessau to people who are not from here. To lure students in using the notion of the city as a romantic place and of coarse, the Bauhaus. The most important part of this project is certainly to convince myself. As the first step, I keenly awaited a day without grey skies and went out to look for photos that attempt to depict Dessau as romantic..

The old train station - it's no longer in use.

A residential block. The sites to the left and back of have been demolished and from here on there are only fields with some scattered factories. The building to the far left is the Kultur-Fabrik, an old factory where students stay in the summer for 50€ a month. It's beautiful and we think it's a great initiative.