western im/mobility. ligna's radioballet, western transit zones and the public sphere
TRANSCRIPT
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Western Im/Mobility. LIGNA’s Radioballet, Western Transit Zones and the
Public Sphere.
Wolf-Dieter Ernst
University of Bayreuth
MusicTheatre Cluster
Universitätsstrasse 30
95440 Bayreuth
Abstract This paper seeks to discuss the work of the performance group LIGNA with regard to the issue of im/mobility. LIGNA – like many other western performance groups – use mobile media to organize smart mobs and other interventions into the public sphere. Concentrating on the transit zones of western consumer culture, i.e. train stations, pedestrian areas and tourist sites; the group draws into question both the regulations of media and of bodily conduct. Though historically considered as open to the public, transit zones nowadays are in many cases public-private property, controlled by surveillance systems and security guards. Behavior within this sphere is subject to regulations that are enforced predominantly to secure commercial interests. According to Rancière, these places are restricted as venues for articulating political concerns: usually (ordinary) citizens do not consider them appropriate for political rallies or political encounters; instead, the people prefer to enjoy the opportunities they afford to deliberately move and shop around.
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LIGNA’s Radioballet, Western Transit Zones and the Public
Sphere.
More and more theatre-‐makers choose modern urban transit zones as a site of
action often exploring the possibilities of mobile media. In site-‐specific events,
pervasive gaming and smart mobs, theatre practitioners such as LIGNA explore
alternative possibilities of making performances with scant regard for the
conventions of traditional theatre. This presentation seeks to understand these
new formations of theatre as a somewhat twisted and distorted version of a
common performance of western mobility associated with notions of progress,
flexibility and flow, which has become a characteristic for the urban life-‐style
and shapes the notion of the public sphere. In looking at LIGNA’s performances
as a medium of reflection, I will discuss how this special kind of mobility relies
on certain regulations, which not only determine the architecture of the public
site but also the traveler’s bodily conduct. While it is true that cultures have
always been mobile, LIGNA’s intervention makes apparent, that western
mobility in its focus on the secure and efficient flow of traffic foregrounds if not
excludes common notions of immobility such as lying down, sitting or standing
motionless, or gathering informally other than to pursue common aims such as
work, leisure, sports.
Political ly making art? LIGNA’s strategy and the Radioballet Le ipzig
In 2003, a Hamburg based group of free broadcast activists by the name of
LIGNA staged the Radioballet Leipzig at the city’s main station. This “exercise in
lingering not according to the rules” i consisted of about 500 participants
gathering in the highly commercialized station hall where they performed what
was called a “ghostly distribution”ii. Generally speaking, their aim was to test
out the juridical limits of the public sphere, which the group considers as being
dominated by privatization, mass media coverage and surveillance cameras.
The group of three, Torsten Michaelsen, Michael Hüners, and Ole Frahm, started
to explore alternative forms of radio broadcasting back in 1996 and drew their
lessons from critical reflections on the media by Siegfried Kracauer and Bertolt
Brecht.
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It is worth considering their theoretical background before we move on to the
Radioballet itself, because – and I should mention this right from the beginning –
it certainly is a rather conceptual performance we are concerned with. In one of
their publications, the radio activists remind the reader of an instance in media
history they consider their point of departure: When the Nazis seized power in
Germany on election day in January 1933, the journalist Kracauer went out on
the streets of Berlin expecting some kind of rally or even a street battle, only to
find the public space empty and at “an abnormal low temperature”iii. The reason
for this failing in the political counter-‐culture according to Kracauer was not so
much that people were afraid of the Nazi terror but rather the fact that most
people preferred to stay inside and listen to the news on their radio sets. As
early as in 1928, Bertolt Brecht concluded that the media hegemony which was
about to come was at the core of the crisis of the public sphere and concluded,
that “[t]he broadcast system must be changed from a distribution system into a
communication apparatus.”iv Brecht’s call for participation signifies a critical
approach towards the media which reverberates, for example, in the pirate
broadcast movement of the 1970s, as well as in Geert Lovink and Joanne
Richardson’s calls for “sovereign media”v. Those following Brecht have since
then aimed to radically change what they consider the anonymous and
contingent audience formed by a one-‐to-‐many medium into a political
association of people as a many-‐to-‐many network.
With their artistic strategy, however, LIGNA does not fully subscribe to this
emancipatory rhetoric. Rather than following a counter-‐cultural agenda they
feel has become outmoded, LIGNA is interested in sounding out possibilities for
a gradual transformation of both the broadcast media and its audience ‘out
there’. For this purpose, the group often mixes alternative broadcasting
methods and choreographic practice on site to critically investigate the
interplay of media and public-‐private spheres dominated by commercial
interests. Perhaps the best way to describe their work is to think of it in terms of
a ‘politics of perception’, as theatre scholar Hans-‐Thies Lehmann has proposed,
to distinguish the act of politically producing theatre today from political
theatre as either conveying a message by means of theatre in the sense of
Piscator and Brecht or as a socio-‐political situation, which of course has been a
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characteristic of any theatrical event since the ancient theatre assembling of the
‘polis’. Let us come back to the Radioballet then. In the Leipzig event, politically
making theatre took on the appearance of a rather informal smart mob, which
the group describes as such:
“Around 500 participants -‐ usual radio listeners, no dancers or actors – were
invited to enter the station, equipped with cheap, portable radios and
earphones. By means of these devices they could listen to a radio program
consisting of a choreography suggesting permitted and forbidden gestures (to
beg, to sit or lie down on the floor etc.). These suggestions were interrupted by
reflections on the public space and on the Radio ballet itself.“vi
The main idea of the Radioballet obviously is to create temporary moments of
public disobedience, which on the one hand the state authorities would hardly
consider as serious matters for prosecution and on the other hand would still
cause sufficient irritation and further discussion to be noticed as effective
political statements. For the Leipzig event, they asked participants to perform a
series of gestures as if doing exercises.
FIG. 1 LIGNA RADIOBALLET LEIPZIG
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“The radio ballet in Leipzig consisted of three stages: the first one displayed
gestures that are still normal and allowed: like giving someone your hand and
so on. The second stage examined the limbo between permitted and forbidden
gesture: for example turning the hand from vertical to horizontal for begging.
The third stage consisted of forbidden gestures and activities, like starting to
smoke. Untying and taking off shoes or lying down are also some of the
activities that quite easily get you thrown out of the building at least when
people demonstrate that they don’t want to get up immediately.”vii
The dist ribut ion of mobil ity and immobility
The scattered and ‘casual’ appearance of the gestures against the smooth and
polished surface of the location might be among the first things which would
probably call the spectators attention. If the event and its agenda is noticed by
the occasional passer-‐by at all, people would perhaps wonder why this smart
mob or – if you prefer – political demonstration remains so unspectacular.
Usually, one would expect a massive crowd gathering and shouting slogans, a
demonstration, which might even interfere with or even lead to total congestion
of traffic in and around the station. Here, the performer remain silent, almost
introverted, and perhaps their actions not even seem to have political
significance. Why then is immobility an issue for this political performance of
the public sphere? What kind of immobility are we looking at?
In order to address this question on immobility more precisely and in line with
the debate on the public sphere, it might helpful to discuss the concept of
mobility in more detail. In mobility studies according to Urry and Virilio, one
can roughly distinguish various qualities of mobility – loosely stratified
according to the ontological status of what is conveyed and becomes mobile.
Urry, for example, lists five independent types of mobility:
-‐ “The corporeal travel of people for work, leisure, family life, pleasure,
migration and escape, organized in terms of contrasting time-‐space
modalities (from daily commuting to once-‐in-‐a-‐lifetime exile)
-‐ The physical movement of objects to producers, consumers and retailers;
as well as the sending and receiving of presents and souvenirs
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-‐ The imaginative travel effected through the images of places and peoples
appearing on and moving across multiple print and visual media
-‐ Virtual travel often in real time thus transcending geographical and
social distance
-‐ The communicative travel through person-‐to-‐person messages via
messages, texts, letters, telegraph, telephone, fax and mobile”viii
Usually, mobility and immobility represent two sides of one coin and form one
framework. Thus mobility must be considered as a relational term, which only
gains significance if the static entities connected to the specific kind of mobility
are equally considered. In looking at cultural mobility (Greenblatt), mobility and
immobility is often related to the distribution of political, economic or juridical
power. Here, one’s mobility can lead to another’s (enforced) immobility, as, for
example, in the field of political or economic migration, and most evidently in
the case of people forced into exile. The different qualities of mobility and
immobility can also form a flow of compensation across the different layers. For
example, people in former East Germany, who were usually not allowed to
travel to the capitalist states in the West, undertook collective imaginary travels
and performed virtual and communicative mobility to compensate for their lack
of physical mobility. Or, tourists from Europe can easily travel to North Africa
due to their economic power, whereas most North-‐African citizens must
produce sufficient reason in order to convince European state authorities they
are not seeking economic asylum. If we now consider the event by LIGNA in the
framework of mobility, we will certainly be left in doubt about why they asked
their participants to produce gestures of symbolic immobility. It is as if this
form of immobility does not relate to any kind of common mobility. It is neither
caused by anything in particular, as for example when protesters lock
themselves to objects, nor is it a clear cut contradiction of mobility, as is the case
for example in the freeze-‐technique of Frozen Grand Central.
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FIG.2 FROZEN GRAND CENTRAL
And also, it is not immobility such as waiting or standing in line – an action, we
usually perform in order to benefit from something else. To start discussing the
performance in more detail, let us consider the site of performance first. It is
interesting that LIGNA does not use the station as a kind of public stage to bring
a political message across. Rather, they explore how the station has already
become a stage for the late capitalist aesthetic economy. In order to reveal the
blueprint of this economy, the group carefully studied the regulations, which
apply to this transit zone.ix Additionally they took advantage of the fact that
increasing privatization and surveillance of the area around Leipzig’s main
station has been a controversial issue among left-‐wing partygoers since
reunification, not least due to the particular cultural significance Leipzig and its
streets and squares gained during the 1989 revolution. It turns out that a whole
set of rules of conduct assure that the premises can serve the two intermingling
purposes its two investors, the Deutsche Bahn AG, Station and Services and
Promenaden Leipzig promote, i.e. shopping and travel. Among these
regulations, we find what LIGNA call ‘excluded gestures’. For example, it is not
allowed to assemble for other purposes than to travel. Also, it is forbidden to
beg for food or money or simply to lie down, and consequently, a traveler is
implicitly required to remain in constant motion.x This is why a station is in fact
considered to be much more a transit zone than a place to meet or to socialize.
Of course, there are restaurants, smoking areas and shops where people can
stay for a certain time period, but mostly these are viewed as facilities for those
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waiting for their connecting transportation, who, in availing themselves of the
opportunity, would expect to spend some money on a drink.
FIG. 5 THE STATION AS A MALL
Benches to stretch out on, comfortable resting areas, or a spot to eat your own
food – all of these are outside the given regulations.
The regulations of course represent Rancière’s concept of the “police”.xi Yet, it
would be misleading to think of the ‘police’ as the law only, and to disregard the
configurations of the perceptible, which first of all define on which side of the
law you are situated.
“The police is, essentially, the law, generally implicit, that defines a party’s share
or lack of it. But to define this, you first must define the configurations of the
perceptible in which one or the other is inscribed. The police is thus first an
order of bodies that defines the allocation of ways of doing, ways of being, and
ways of saying, and sees that those bodies are assigned by name to a particular
place and task […].“xii
Thus, the ‘police’ is also an internalized force defining very effectively from
within the way in which travelers move, what use they make of their bodies and
of the building. In his famous essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction, cultural theorist Walter Benjamin already noticed the tactile
interplay of bodily movement and architecture in saying: “Buildings are
perceived twofold: through how they are used and how they are perceived. Or
to put it a better way: in a tactile fashion and in optical fashion.”xiii Though of
course Benjamin’s assumption that the masses use their tactile senses to
perceive aesthetically merits closer explanation, which would have to take into
account the specific aesthetic and political debates of the Weimar Republic and
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the Fascist era, the example itself leads us directly to the case of LIGNA and the
smart mob, in as much as it addresses the issue of performance and
competence. A postmodern train station such as in Leipzig with its atmosphere
of heightened mobility cannot be dissociated from the fact that, usually, experts
in their own right perform their mobility in using the building properly. On
closer inspection, we see a certain social stratification of the people using this
place, which often remains unnoticed. Scarcely visible barriers to manage social
differences do exist and work effectively. At Leipzig station, local traffic often
happens to end on the more remote tracks whereas the more lucrative Intercity
transport claims center stage. Bulky luggage is hardly visible, let alone animals
or large families – all of which you naturally come across on stations in other
countries. Today, and not only in Leipzig, train traffic is designed to meet the
requirements of a limited target group, which not least through mobile
computing and communications enjoys the benefits of being both mobile and
still connected to the world in various ways.
And again, we can identify an interesting twist to this kind of mobility in public
resulting from the LIGNAS smart mob. Though the action is framed as ‘smart’,
one could argue that the know-‐how needed to participate is rather simple. One
has to know the rules and cues in advance, but only seldom does one have to
perform complicated choreographies or gestures beyond or even approaching
the average level of competence. The participants perform most effectively
when they take off their shoes or lie down, i.e. when the refuse to move. In
LIGNA’s own interpretation, a smart-‐mob is not an ideal occasion to put on a
show or to produce dazzling tricks, rather it is collective and ‘democratic’
gathering: Everyone can join in and do this.xiv In contrast, the passers-‐by in their
conduct are in fact performing as a special kind of expert in travelling. In fact,
for the largest part, they stay within the limits of their behavioral patterns and
are not seduced to join the mob or even to contribute to it and invent their own
performance.
LIGNA’s performance of the public sphere has yet another important aspect
concerning the matter of the observer. As in many other critical performances,
their intervention critically investigates how state authorities in a mediated
society tend to establish a system of surveillance devices and locals guards,
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which remain outside legal or political control. In Leipzig, for example, an
impressive ‘technological gaze’ combined with a system of local guards
observes the peaceful activities in the shops, restaurants and on the station
itself. Many activists have indeed interpreted this technological development as
a turn towards totalitarian surveillance in conflict with the principle of
individual freedom of movement and speech. They think of the police
predominantly as the petty police. On other occasions, as for example in the case
of the attempted bomb attack on Bonn main station in December 2012, it was
only the surveillance camera of a nearby McDonald’s restaurant that provided
important information about possible suspects.
www.leipziger-kamera.cjb.net
182 Videoüberwachungskameras im Leipziger Hauptbahnhof
öffentliche Bereiche kom merzie lle Be re iche De utsche Bahn & Prom ena den GmbH Andere
ka rte_hbf .pdf http: //s tatic.t woda y.ne t/leipzige rka mer a/files /ka rte_hbf .pdf
1 von 1 19.03.13 16: 07 FIG. 6 PERMANENT SURVEILLANCE CAMERAS AT LEIPZIG MAIN STATION MAPPED BY LEIPZIGER KAMERAS-‐
ACTIVISTS
However, as I would argue, the matter of observation is much more a matter of
the inner discipline, the ‘inner camera’ if you will, according to which travelers
perform their role and their bodies are distributed in a community. This aspect
of self-‐control rather than the hegemony of the Leipzig Promenaden or the
Deutsche Bahn is critically and ironically investigated by LIGNA’s call to
perform an exercise in ‘lingering not according to the rules’ in order to create
zones of uncertainty. As they rightly point out, the German word for distortion,
‘Zerstreuung’, can take on the notion of dispersion, distribution and, as well,
entertainment, all of which are concepts opposing the ideas of self-‐control and
containment.xv Thus we can conclude that LIGNA’s advice to spread out and
disperse within the space of the station aims at rethinking the configurations of
the perceptible, which usually and very effectively define our bodily conduct in
transit zones.
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Conclus ion
To conclude, LIGNAs intervention at Leipzig main station reveals what Rancière
has termed the ‘political’ of the distribution of the senses, i.e. the negotiation of
two opposing tendencies: One is the tendency of those outside the field of
symbolic articulation to participate and be heard, the other is the tendency to
exclude people from symbolic articulation in pretending that whatever they
utter is incomprehensive noise. LIGNA’s ironically-‐naïve sounding of the
station’s regulations of bodily conduct and particularly their performance of
immobility sheds some critical light on the fact that the boundary between the
police and those being controlled is not fixed but in fact a matter of ongoing
political debate. A first finding is of juridical nature: The boundary of the law is
of course not symbolically fixed or prescriptive – or more concretely: “to stay in
any irregular and disturbing way” is nothing we can define or subscribe to for
good rational reasons or a simple belief in law and order, just because these
regulations if taken to their extreme would obviously demand even more
precise behavioral prescriptions and would maybe even require a form drill of
travelers. As this is not the case in Leipzig and other western transit zones, it is
apparently social stratification and the inner control of modern train travelers,
which – alongside a rather discrete control of the space by means of cameras
and guards – makes it possible to transport and serve so many people, as in the
case of a station the size of Leipzig.
A second finding is of political nature and would take on the form of an open
question: How is the public sphere is performed and in what way can we think
of this performance of western immobility in political terms? I have shown that
in LIGNA’s performance, the participants and the activists in the broadcast
studio tend to point out the boundary of the police and the political sphere.
Having learned their lesson in Brecht’s epic dramaturgy, the performance does
not set out to articulate any particular political message nor is it their aim to
establish a temporary social or counter-‐cultural situation very much different
from what they found in Leipzig. The mob is simply too loosely framed, too
silent and ‘laissez-‐faire’ in its gestural appearance as to be associated with a
strong political agenda. As doing Tai Chi in western public places would still
cause some disturbance and maybe amusement for the inexperienced spectator,
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so too LIGNA’s testing of forbidden gestures in the train station rather aims at a
super-‐thin layer of the political condition. It is targeting the conventions of
perception and the regime of the senses rather than homo politicus’ faculty to
communicate symbolically.
Apparently, artists such as LIGNA react to the fact that the public sphere in
western mediated democracies at first glance allows for all kinds of protest.
Especially a media landscape hungry for news makes it easy for protesters to
gain short-‐term publicity, which of course does not assure the protest’s efficacy.
Perhaps, then, resting, lying down or sitting on the floor might widen our
understanding of what it means to make things public, even more than shouting
out loud to demand the excluded or ‘unmarked’ become part of the public
sphere. At least this protest unlike other forms of activism is of a friendly variety
and the actions taken are most typical for the body. It takes its point of
departure from a noticeable desire once in a while to slow down in pace.
“I’m just sitting here watching the wheels go round and round/I really love to
watch them roll/ No longer riding on the merry-‐go-‐round/I just had to let it
go.”xvi
This is the refrain of John Lennon’s The Wheels. It might sound utopian if
understood simply as the expression of a lyrical narrator who refuses to move
and give in to the city’s industry. If, however, we read it as a critical comment on
the configurations of the perceptible, then imaginary travel can also mobilize
people, and then it remains to be seen who stays immobile: the car drivers
passing by one after another or the crazy tramp beating time.
i http://www. Republicart.net, p. 26 (last access, 14 March 2013) ii LIGNA: Constellation – Dispersal – Association. Historical Background Information on Gestural Radio Listening. http://www.republicart.net/disc/aap/ligna01_en.htm, pp.1-‐7, p. 5. (last access, 14 March 2013) iii Siegfried Kracauer: QUELLE iv Bertolt Brecht: QUELLE v “Sovereign media differ from the post '68 concept of alternative media (and its most recent metamorphosis into ‘Indy’ media) as well as from 1990s tactical media. Alternative media work on the principle of counter propaganda and mirror the mainstream media, which they feel needs to be corrected and supplemented. […] Alternative media have to appropriate Truth in order to
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operate. For sovereign media there is no Truth, only data which can be taken apart and reassembled in trillions of bytes.” Geert Lovink, Joanne Richardson: Notes on Sovereign Media, 2001 (Revised version from “Theory of the Sovereign Media" by BILWET 1998), http://subsol.c3.hu/subsol_2/contributors0/lovink-‐richardsontext.html (last access 14 March 2013) vi LIGNA’s description oft he Radioballet http://ligna.blogspot.de/2009/12/radio-‐ballet.html (last access 14 March 2013). vii LIGNA: Radioballet. Interview with Torsten Michaelsen, Michael Hüners, Ole Frahm http://www.momenta.net.tf (last access 14 March 2013), pp. 5-‐9, p. 6. viii John Urry, Mobilities, (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), p. 47. ix In their political performances, the group collaborates closely with local activists. The Leipzig Radio Ballet was organized in conjunction with an independent cinema, the Schaubühne Lindenfels, and the local branch of attac. x See for more details the regulations http://notes.leipzig.de/appl/laura/wp5 (last access 14 March 2013) „Untersagt sind: Personenansammlungen die den Fußgängerverkehr behindern sowie der nichtbestimmungsgemäße oder störende Aufenthalt / das Sitzen oder Liegen auf dem Boden sowie das Nächtigen / das Betteln und Hausieren“ (It is not allowed: to hinder the movement of other pedestrians by forming a group of people or by loitering in any irregular and disturbing way/ to sit or lay down on the floor or to stay over night / to beg or to peddle) xi Jacques Rancière, Disagreement. Politics and Philosophy, (Translated by Julie Rose. Minneapolis: University of Michigan Press, 1999), p.28f Rancière suggests a neutral use of the word ‘police’ to signify “a general order that arranges that tangible reality in which bodies are distributed in community”. ‘Police’ encompasses a whole set of police functions ranging from the petty police through to the notion of inner police and social conduct or behavior, which I addres in this paper. xii Jacques Rancière, Disagreement. Politics and Philosophy, (Translated by Julie Rose. Minneapolis: University of Michigan Press, 1999), p. 29. xiii Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. (Translated by J. A. Underwood. London: Penguin Books, 2008), pp. 5-‐37, 31; Dt. Walter Benjamin, „Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit“, (in: Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, Bd. I.2, Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1987), pp 471-‐508, p. 501. xiv See for further discussions of the smart mob as a democratic formation Howard Rheingold, Smart Mob. The Next Social Revolution (Cambridge: MIT Press 2002). Though LIGNA follows a distinct political agenda, it is remarkable that they maintain a keen interest in isolating their participants and securing their freedom of choice. For example, within their choreographic work they name the cues ‘suggestions’ rather than ‘directions’ indicating the individual’s responsibility to interpret the script in their own way. xv “The Radio Ballet was not a demonstration (that could have been forbidden by the D[eutsche] B[ahn]) but a “Zerstreuung” (a German term with different meanings: dispersion, distraction, distribution and, as well: entertainment). It also was not a mass arrangement: The participants could act where they wanted to, on the platforms, on the stairs or the escalators or in the “Promenade” (the
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shopping mall in the station). They acted as a free association, which transformed the coincidental constellation of radio reception into a political intervention.” LIGNA’s description of the Radioballet http://ligna.blogspot.de/2009/12/radio-‐ballet.html (last access March 14th 2013) xvi http://www.lyrics007.com/John%20Lennon%20Lyrics/Watching%20The%20Wheels%20Lyrics.html (last access 14 March 2013)
Capt ions
Fig. 1 LIGNA Radioballet Leipzig. Photographer Eiko Grimberg
Fig. 2 Frozen Grand Central, Caption from http://improveverywhere.com/2008/01/31/frozen-‐grand-‐central/ TC 00:00:52 (last Access 18th October 2013)
Fig 3 The Station as a Mall. Caption from Promenaden Express (Leipzig 27 th October 2012) p. 2, photographer Dieter Grundmann Fig. 3 Permanent Surveillance Cameras at Leipzig Main Station mapped by Leipziger Kameras-‐Activist Phil Lister from http://static.twoday.net/leipzigerkamera/files/karte_hbf.pdf