The Big Hen's Call: The Republic of Chicken Audio Guide | Promona Sengupta & Jorinde Schulz

This audio walk, researched and produced over the tumultuous and radical years of 2023-24, and placed at the chicken shops and other much-loved landmarks on Berlin's Arab street, Sonnenallee, is a testament to life, joy, violence and resistance on this street. Intertwining speculative fiction, real life interviews, news stories and historical analysis, The Big Hen’s Call is a loving tribute to the street we call home.

● A public art project by Promona Sengupta and Jorinde Schulz ● With special thanks to A,B,H,E,P,K,S for lending us their voices and thoughts ●

The land mass between Hermannplatz and Weichselplatz, pierced through by the concrete serpent of the mighty Sonnenallee, is one of the busiest neighbourhoods of Berlin, favoured by working class Arab migrants and refugees for living and for business. However, the residents of this neighbourhood are forced to share their space with the punitive arms of German realpolitik, the police, the secret service, and informers. Under various pretexts, often illegitimate, illegal, racist and Islamophobic, the state continuously meddles in the everyday goings on of the neighbourhood through surveillance, police violence, raids and regular gang-like intimidation of its residents. This exceptional approach towards Sonnenallee, reaching military action-like proportions during raids on shisha bars and anti-genocide protests by Palestinians and their allies, plays out in broad daylight, witnessed by the locals as a daily reality while being regularly overlooked and normalised by the rest of the city. This methodical stage management of the gross internal contradictions of German “democracy”, where inherent racist values of the state and society get ratified as necessary law and order maintenance, and in turn get met with local resistance, defiance, and pleasure, unfolds especially at the three cardinal chicken shops of Sonnenallee – Risa, Azzam and City Chicken.