Field Note–>Living Atlas<:/:>Berlin Edition<-A Transversal Zigzag Through Phantom Zones

During our walks in Berlin we record affective fields composed of atmospheres, symbolic impressions and fragments of memory. We map moments in which inner psychology and urban landscape overlap. In the series Memories Between Edges (now on show as part of group show “The Noise” at NL=US, Rotterdam) we applied transparent layers that overlap opposed colour fields – expressing this way of recording sites.

Rather than describing the city, we activate it as living archive. Through this haze we walk the line we want to draw, and it is the frame through which we look at the marked points on our map.

Again we stroll and this time underground, follow the Spree. We drift through silent green, where worlds we once shaped no longer offer new perspectives. It was always here though, as silence, a mirror of our soul, drawing from omission the spirit of enlightenment.

A temple, a raucous, glittering dancehall, flashing like a thousand and one Arabian nights. We hear Michael’s trumpet beebop and sense his flaming sword close behind. We smell future ruins in which there is no time to redraw boundaries. We feel that it is a garden in hell we once called paradise. We stage ourselves on this dangerous ground, becoming bodies of knowledge claiming self-determination.

Now we take a photograph at precisely this moment when intuition shifts into orientation. The photographic layer of the Living Atlas transgresses our affective mapping – the colour codes enable us to move beyond documentation. Linked to the image, each colour becomes an affective marker. Stringed together, they form a score through which initiated performers articulate their interpretation of the living archive. Fiction and documentation begin to overlap and reveal the city as an otherwise inaccessible mythopoetical playground.

Berlin Displaced Legend 11, 2025, digital color photograph, size variable