City Portraits - Gesichter einer Stadt
Local Agents & Mülheimer*innen
A city has more than a thousand windows. We want to make a section of it visible and let very different people have their say and become visible.
As part of the ARK Mülheim project, we get to know people from Mülheim an der Ruhr and talk to them about their lives in the city. How do they experience their life here? Which places are important to them? What makes Mülheim special for them? What is good and what needs to change in the future? What connects people and where are there missing points of contact between them?
Our team of local agents - people with multilingual skills and access to various Mülheim communities - are currently conducting interviews that show Mülheim in all its diversity. Very different people have their say. We conduct conversations in German, English, French, Turkish, Arabic, Ounjabi, Hini, Urdu ...
The interviews will be shown as video portraits in the exhibition "City Portraits - Faces of a City", which opens our summer program as part of ARK Mülheim. In addition, the interviews will be visible on a digital map of the city. The map traces Mülheim as a diversified city and opens up to different perspectives and voices.
CLICK HERE FOR THE CITY MAP!
Local Agents:
Paula Kuhn
Paula Kuhn is 23 years old and began studying communication science and applied philosophy at the University of Duisburg-Essen in 2017. She expects to complete her bachelor's degree in 2021. As part of her studies, she is addressing face-to-face communication, emergency communication, and human-technology communication. Her further interests lie in the areas of political communication and political philosophy.
Christopher Koczor
Born on 25 September 1984 in Erfurt. Christopher moved to Mülheim with his mother in 1990. He grew up in Mülheim an der Ruhr and completed his apprenticeship at Vallourec (formerly Mannesmann). He has also been working there as a foreman since then. He has been breakdancingsince he was 12 years old and and continues to dance to this day. Dancing remains his great passion. In the near future, he will have projects in youth work as well as preparing the youth for the breakdancing competition at the 2024 Olympics in Paris.
Gilberte Raymonde Driesen
German born in Senegal. She studied German and teaching in Dakar and Graz, Austria and worked as a secondary school teacher in Senegal. She is active in the areas of migration, integration, intercultural competence, diversity, global learning, and international school partnerships. She is currently working as a project manager in the diversity department at the CBE (Center for Civic Engagement) in Mülheim, while at Engagement Global she advises and trains teachers, speakers, and students on issues related to racism, forms of discrimination, intersectional perspectives, and empowerment for BIPoC. In addition, she works as a volunteer with disadvantaged families with migration or refugee histories and leads local and global projects for a global society with greater mutual respect.
Falak Sher
born in Punjab, Pakistan in 1985. He came to Germany in 2006 to study electrical and electronics engineering at the University of Duisburg-Essen. He has been working in the field of energy management since 2011. He is married with three children and is passionate about playing and following cricket and golf. When time allows, he likes to go to the theatre and cinema and Pakistani folk music is also one of his passions.
Omar Mohamad
studied business administration in Syria and event management in Germany. Since 2016, he has been volunteering in various projects, especially in the Ruhr area. "I am very interested in intercultural projects and work with each other instead of working next to another." He is also a member of the Grün-Bunte list for the integration council of the city of Mülheim.
Yazan Abo Hassoun
Performer, theater educator. Since 2017 active in the theater group RUHRORTER in Mülheim, the group works continuously, on a publicly visible corrective against the stigmatization and categorization of refugees and deals with the institutional and social exclusion of refugees.Since 2019 activities in the Ringlokschuppen: Intercultural mediation, development and supervision of cultural scouts, direct marketing, target group research, translation.
Sarah Rurka
Sarah Rurka is an event manager and musician from Mülheim an der Ruhr. She has been involved in the cultural landscape in Mülheim for several years, e.g. with the association Regler Produktion at the open-air stage and the Autonomous Center, and has been organizing live streams and online events since last year.