Sunday Outing 4: From the wood to the city – the controversial memory of Dresden

Meeting point: Zentralwerk

duration: 5 hours

We use public transports to go to the closed Heidefriedhof and then go to visit the exhibition NACHBARSCHAFTEN 2025 at Kunsthaus Dresden in the City Centre.

With Robert Thiele and Christiane Mennicke-Schwarz of Kunsthaus Dresden, Construct Lab and the Zentralwerk team.

The Dresden Heidefriedhof is one of the largest urban green spaces and a habitat for a huge number of animal and plant species. As a cemetery it is not only a place for individual rituals of mourning and peace, but also for the conflicts over history, violence and politics in Europe. Visiting the Monument in the Heide-Cemetery built after the war to commemorate the destruction of Dresden in 1945, we get to know the controversial remembrance discourse of this city. After the air raids on Dresden in February 1945, more than 17,000 dead were buried here. Due to the economic hardship of the post-war years, it was not until 1954, after conflict-laden planning, that a representative memorial site for the air war dead was completed. The memory of this event has been instrumentalised by different political forces until the present day.

After this, we visit the exhibition NACHBARSCHAFTEN 2025 at Kunsthaus Dresden – Municipal Gallery for Contemporary Art.

NACHBARSCHAFTEN 2025

The future has already begun. Five artistic projects, developed with 120 experts* from art, everyday culture and science for Dresden’s urban space, react to noticeable changes in European culture and society: An allotment garden as a new location for garden art, a society for beautiful and useful knowledge for the exchange between urban and rural spaces, a skyscraper as a temporary sounding body, a cultural lodge in the Dynamo Stadium and artistic-scientific interventions in dialogue with experts and citizens on zero waste and the recycling economy, a mobile stage designed by citizens* and a newspaper for a cemetery that creates new access to the culture of remembrance and mourning, in a place that could be just as historically significant as it is future-oriented, the Heidefriedhof in Dresden.