mowe Festival for Art and Urban Culture (2025 - 27), Keyvisual, credit: Studio Itch
Exhibition: Critical Souvenirs – Archive of the Present with Critical Design Collective | CittiPoint
Critical Souvenirs is a student exhibition that questions a place's essence, archiving the present by offering a poetic response that challenges traditional memorabilia.
08. May 2026
16:00h-21:30h
CittiPoint Operation Himmelblick
Müllerstr. 141, 13353
CittiPoint – Parkdeck 4
barrierefreier Zugang mit Aufzug auf P4
Each student group was asked to design a critical souvenir – an object (or series of objects) that captures and questions the essence of an iconic site, neighborhood, or environment. This is not about producing a commercial keepsake, but about creating a thought-provoking artifact that reflects the site’s hidden stories, overlooked dynamics, or layered contradictions. The souvenir operate as a small-scale critique, poetic response, or spatial memory – an entry in a larger, imagined “archive of the present.
About the Artists
Critical Design Collective is a group of students studying architecture, interior architecture, and graphic design at Whitecliff University of Applied Sciences Berlin. During their first year, they work in interdisciplinary teams of four within the confines of their “Critical Thinking” course, inaugurated in 2025, to discover the nature of design and how it affects people by studying iconic places in Berlin. They uncover stories, relationships, and conflicts through a series of critical designs in various forms wheter it be an object, an event, or a scenario of an event for that place. The members of the collective change every year as they continue on their studies and the new ones join the program.
The course is conducted by Anna Bernhardt, Sait Ali Köknar, Omer Polak and Miriam Dreyer