FIRE: Safe & Sound

FIRE: Safe & Sound is one of the outcomes of visual artist Alona Rodeh’s artist residency at the Berlin Fire Brigade. Interested in what role firefighting plays in the city’s day-to-day emergencies, for nine months Rodeh joined the fire brigade on their 24-hour shifts. This publication, edited by the artist, includes four new essays by professionals who tackle the subject from different perspectives, together giving a sense of the current state of the subject matter. They are Thöre Schröder, a journalist, Gilly Karjevsky, a curator working in the urban sphere, Kristen McCleary, a professor of history, and Bruce Hensler, a retired firefighter with 41 years of experience. The booklet’s epilog is a photo essay compiled from the archives of the Berlin Fire Brigade: documentations of self-caused accidents of with Berlin fire engines.
FIRE: Safe & Sound was made possible with the support of ZK/U (Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik), the initiators of the Artist Dis-Placement Residency at the fire brigade in the framework of the Artecitya project, co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union, the Berlin Fire Brigade and the Berlin Senat Department of Culture and Europe.