The publication Hansaplatz is a joint project by artists Heidi Specker and Heinz Peter Knes with Leonie Herweg from the GROTTO art space in Berlin.
Knes and Specker show the urban space - their immediate neighbourhood in the Hansaviertel - from a personal, yet documentary perspective. The images are complemented by their conversation, which is dedicated to the writers Ingeborg Bachmann and Witold Gombrowicz, both of whom lived in the Hansaviertel neighbourhood in the 1960s on a scholarship at the Academy of Arts.
The publication was designed by Lina Grumm (HIT) and financed thanks to adverts from local companies and institutions. At the beginning of May, the GROTTO art space distributed 1,300 unaddressed copies as mail art to all households in the Hansaviertel - as a gift to the neighbourhood and an invitation to look at the district through different eyes.