Hanging around after a very long night

I took this picture in a small parkway around the city centre of Dortmund on a Saturday morning last autumn. I am not quite sure why these two guys were sleeping there because they didn’t look like they were homeless. Besides, they seemed to have planned this from the beginning since they had been wise enough to bring along some sheets. As there are many events around the city centre of Dortmund on a Friday night, I think they might have been on a concert or a party and knew before that they would not be able to get home after that. Apparently, some people do not mind hanging around in pretty uncomfortable, wet and cold places as long as they had fun the night before.

Hanging around on benches

There are some shops and a large round bench near my house in the eastern city of Dortmund. I think that these round benches are something special in the Ruhrgebiet. It allows the people to have eye contact with each other while hanging around there. Nearly every time I come along that bench some people are sitting there. Sometimes they just take a break after they have done their shopping without talking to each other, but most often they have a beer or two together, chatting about things that happened recently. The man on the picture is waiting for his pals to hang around with him. He is sitting there almost every day and I have seen him many times. This form of hanging around is very public and the round benches seem to be made for people who are searching for someone to chat with. I have seen round benches in England as well. However, the seats of these benches were reversed, so that the people were not able to have direct eye contact with each other. 

Hanging around without a place to call home

A friend of mine took this picture with the camera of his mobile phone last September. He thought it was funny because the person had a bottle of Oettinger, a well known and very cheap German export beer, in front of him whereof we had just bought some. The man was lying on the lawn at the back entrance of the central station. This is also where the Cinestar, Dortmund’s largest cinema and a post office are situated, so a lot of people were walking along the foot path behind him. Although he was not really asleep, he did not seem to care. Maybe it was because he was too drunk? The picture of a homeless person might be a little shocking for some people but nonetheless, I decided to use it for my blog. Dortmund is a large city and homeless people just seem to be a part of every large city. Furthermore, it is a very different form of hanging around in contrast to the other ones I described, as homeless people have no other choice than “spending time without activity”, most of the time. 

Hanging around at home

The people behind the project ‘hanging around’ are not only searching for photos with the motive of hanging around outside but also inside, in private rooms. Sadly, none of my friends allowed me to use a picture of him or her hanging around at home for my blog, as this is something more intimate than hanging around in public. The reasons my friends named for forbidding me to use their pictures were things like “My hair is a mess!”, “Looks like I have a double chin in this posture on the couch” or “I’m wearing my pajamas on that picture!”. Although I cannot show you the pictures, I am sure you might agree that hanging around at home is often more relaxing and comfortable than hanging around outside as you do not have to fear what strangers might think of you. Fortunately, my cat did not mind to be photographed while she was hanging around in her special private place. She does not look much different from my family and friends when they are hanging around at home ;)

Hanging around at TU Dortmund

If you are a student at university you might know this scenario: You have two seminars from 10am-2pm and the next one starts at 4pm. Two hours of free time at noon means time for lunch! But what will you do after lunch? There is still plenty of time left and you do not feel like reading the text for your homework. Yes, you will find a place you can just hang around! Many students have their favorite places at university to hang around. We have plenty of these places at TU Dortmund: nice lawns, many benches, cafeterias, libraries and foyers. And, as you can see in the picture, these weird stones are just perfect for hanging around close to a small piece of nature when the lawn is still wet from the rain of the last days.

Hanging around in Dortmund?

This blog is about a project for an e-learning seminar of the TU Dortmund called “Becoming e-literate: Language Learning in an Electronic Age”. The seminar is a cooperation with the Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg. The use of new media and web 2.0 in schools and in the EFL classroom has become an important and controversial topic. For that reasons the students of the e-literate seminar learn how to deal with new media in the EFL classroom in a critical way. Besides, they extend their own skills in using new media and foster their didactical knowledge.

Every student of the seminar develops an media project on his own, which will be presented on the internet. A group of students (including me) decided to deal with the topic ‘Dortmund’ as this is the city most of us live in and where our university is situated. We want to introduce our city to the rest of the world as well as to our cooperation-university in Halle-Wittenberg. One unit of this project is the role of Dortmund as a part of the “European Capital of Culture RUHR.2010”. 

This blog is my contribution to our seminar project. It mainly deals with a multimedia art project called “hanging around” that is connected to the European Capital of Culture RUHR.2010. It was originally founded in 2006 by the artscenico e.V and was part of the EU-CULTURE-Programme from 2007 till 2008. Their partners and artists are found in France, Italy, the Czech Republic and Romania. The pieces of art describe the motive of “spending time without activity” and are based on photography and videos. People spending their time with hanging around ,not doing anything particular, can be found in probably every culture and time. But why are people doing this? Did the rising number of unemployed people influence the culture of hanging around? Are there any differences between hanging around outside or in your own private home? Is the youth hanging around in a different way than older people? As our project needs to be related to Dortmund, I went outside on my own to take some picture of people hanging around and to find out more about the “art of hanging around in Dortmund”. Every picture has its own meaning and background story. I will present them in this blog and tell you about the places and occasions in which they were taken.