Boris Sieverts
(1969)
Germany
  

 

 

 Boris Sieverts studied arts at Düsseldorf. After working as a shepherd in France, he worked with several architectural agencies in Germany before founding Büro für Städtereisen in 1997 in Cologne, where he lives. Buro für Städtereisen is a city travel agency where Boris Sieverts operates like a hikers’ guide, organizing walks in city outskirts. Through reports he writes up on city suburbs, and Cologne’s in particular, situated as they are on the right bank of the Rhine, Boris Sieverts notes every situation and encounter in great detail. He analyses the sensations brought about by these and tries to formulate the project underlying his excursions in this type of extremely complex territory: the project of “poetic densification” (Verdichten) of these territories by transforming the usual perception of them. Boris Sieverts focuses and concentrates on these “areas of wasteland” and “empty lots”, areas which are intrinsically strong, as is the whole landscape of the suburbs, in the expression of the absence of preconceived form and appropriation. A new way of looking at things arises by way of a selective itinerary through these “areas of wasteland”, where spaces follow on from spaces, and where the wild aspect, in the sense of a phenomenon without projects, which nobody has appropriated, is invariably juxtaposed with the preconceived and the appropriated. In 2002, Boris Sieverts became an expert member of the technical committee for e2 contest, an international competition on the urban condition, subsequently exhibited at the Pavillon de l’Arsenal in Paris. His writings on sensitive walks have been published in particular in the magazine Site in Germany, and translated in the French magazine Le Visiteur.