My beautiful partner exhibited at 1857, then a brand-new exhibition venue in the Oslo district known as Grønland. In 2010, I visited Oslo with another former boyfriend (an in many ways better looking, but also more depressed German individual than his aforementioned counterpart). Certainly in Oslo – which, slightly delayed, followed in the footsteps of Copenhagen – and Bergen cities that have all somehow become ‘mine’. The dream of a place where one could act, innovate, and believe in the utopia of another collective kind of agency – a city of occupying and owning one’s own space – disappeared. In Berlin, this crushed the dream of a capital city, central in Europe, where property speculation and gentrification had no foothold. In short: pecuniary problems turned personal. By the time we got out of the 2010s, the difference between the fiscally strong and weak had become a difference that is no longer ‘ zwischen Oben und Unten, sondern zwischen Dir und Mir’ (between the upper and lower , but between and you and me) as a an old graffiti in the Kreuzberg district says. A train passed by and, almost randomly, some just happened to fall into this ever-moving paternoster lift. The 2010s was the decade of financialisation, the decade when money became an interpersonal issue. It was a decade in which your decision to buy a flat or not would determine whether you became a millionaire. And the only reason that my then-boyfriend and I got a foot in the door amidst this ceaseless Black Friday mob on a market with far too few rental flats on offer was that someone had typed the wrong date in an advertisement headline and we, by chance, spotted the right date in the fine print. When I was last looking for a new lease in my former city, so many people turned up for the showings that the crowds had to be admitted in groups. I’m not on the property ladder and can’t get my foot on the first rung. I have given up entirely on keeping tabs on property prices, since it is not really an option for me any longer. The coffee is better these days – and Nordic – but also costs twice what it used to. Today, a flat of that size would probably cost closer to EUR 500,000 if not more.
In 2010, I could have bought a 100-square-metre flat in Neukölln for about EUR 200,000. After all, the 2010s may have been Berlin’s last decade as Europe’s artistic centre par excellence. That particular perspective possibly holds a stint of symbolic significance. Ten years functioning as an educational journey into and out of Scandinavian contemporary art. For my part, the decade started in Copenhagen and ended in Oslo, all while weaving in and out of my more permanent residence in Berlin.
In that sense, the decade has passed synchronously with a symbolic time period in my own personal biography: from young to grown-up from new to semi-old, or just a little ‘used’. This year I am turning forty – 2020 (or 20+20) is my 40.
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