Undecoded Berlin

In Undecoded Berlin, artist duo Nabuurs&VanDoorn present a radical exercise in urban reading: not the city as image, but the city as instruction-based score. For six months the artists walked Berlin with a procedural methodology: forty mapped points, forty colour- codes, and one zigzag line drawn across the city. The result is not documentation. It is a choreography of affects.

The duo’s practice has always been nomadic, performative, and research-based. Territory, for them, never is simply the site, but the medium itself: an archive one walks through, a
sensorium one inhabits. In Berlin they treated the city’s surfaces, thresholds, proximities, and silences as an improvisational notational system. Here, map becomes play; movement is inscription; perception is a negotiation.

The core installation Living Atlas: Berlin Score (2025) conceives the exhibition space as a provisional cartography. A grid of colour-codes divides, redirects, interrupts circulation.
What first appears systematic — a structural color-code — is revealed as fragile fiction: the colours can shift, can be deleted, reused, folded back in. The “score” is not stable. It is a working method exposed.

The counterform to the installation is the print-object. The Living Atlas: Berlin Displaced Legends (2025): forty black-and-white photographs, each overlaid by a color-code — a chromatic event that refuses a passive truth of the photographic medium. These are not memories of a place. They are propositions: the city in a future tense. Visitors can take a print away. Each removal alters the sculptural stack. The work distributes itself back into Berlin through the bodies of those who leave the space. This is not a metaphor. It is the choreography itself.

What is at stake is the possibility of a poetics of orientation in a city that is permanently rewriting itself. Berlin is not approached here as a backdrop but as an interlocutor. The artists propose a methodology for perceiving its fissures, its unarticulated infrastructures, its ghost layers. The exhibition is neither survey nor thesis. It is a working atlas — unfinished, permeable — a system that breathes with the city’s own contradictions.

Nabuurs&VanDoorn consider the exhibition space as temporary operational center inside an
ongoing process. To see the work is to move through it. One walks the score inside the space, just as the artists walked the score in the city. The installation is a performance without performers. The choreography is carried by the visitors — by their paths, hesitations, distances.

In Undecoded Berlin, the duo articulate a language of the in-between: between trace and future, between cartography and choreography, between the seen and the unread. The city is not solved. It is activated. And in the moment of activation, Berlin becomes not a place to be described — but one to be rewritten.