2025 – Digital 4K – 15 min (Hybrid Documentary)
Make-up. project space︱Cinema Povera
Collaboration with Arnaud Lemonnier

A performance by Jakob Wirth & Arnaud Lemonnier
https://jakobwirth.net/
https://parasiteestate.com/

Synopsis

Jakob, a broke artist, and Arnaud, a zealous entrepreneur, are the founders of a new kind of real estate start-up, Parasite Real Estate. Their revolutionary concept: find unused buildings and define new uses for them. Between documentary and fiction, this film follows their new project in the heart of Berlin.

Description

Parasite Real Estate is a new Berlin-based start-up that aims to shake up the real estate market by finding new uses for buildings left vacant by their investors. Its two founders, Jakob and Arnaud, are firm believers in their new business. For their first project, they went to an abandoned 40,000M2 construction site and launched an experiment to define the most appropriate use.

Jakob, a space designer, had a hunch that the building would be suitable for housing. He moved in with his entire bedroom to test this hypothesis. Arnaud is obsessed with becoming the entrepreneur he has always dreamed of being. He set up his office opposite Jakob’s room to check on the progress of his experiments.

This short film follows a five-day artistic performance by these two artists and characters in a mineral desert in the heart of Berlin, abandoned after the financial collapse of its investor. The film takes place in a legal vacuum, since the building’s legal status is in abeyance, and a concrete vacuum, since these 40,000m2 currently have no function. It oscillates between the perspective of Jakob, an artist passionate about “experimenting with space”, and that of Arnaud, a self-proclaimed “disrupter” seemingly unconcerned with property rights; all the while offering viewers the chance to discover this new territory where they claim to have planted the flag.

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Statement

Like a parasite, Parasite Real Estate infiltrates the real estate world and its excesses. The company imitates its codes, driven by the character of Arnaud, the communicator who films his entire adventure and posts it on social networks. It presents itself as just another innovative company speculating on the future of a building. The film is thus crossed by real estate speculation, by these financial behaviors which consider the city as a movement of assets to be anticipated. As a result of these phenomenon, many spaces are left vacant or unfinished, like the incomplete architecture of the project’s central building, a vestige of a capital dreamed of but never realized. 

But Parasite Real Estate’s main aim is to sow the seeds of other possibilities, embodied by the character of Jakob, the idealist. Through him, the film claims a second form of speculation, narrative speculation: a creative process that attempts to unfold other imaginaries from the potentialities contained in places. So, when this character enters his new playground, he asks himself questions. What could be done with this empty space?  

The two very different characters in the film are united in their desire to escape from their precarious daily lives. Their different ambitions for the space coexist and feed off each other, highlighting the contradictions of an environment where artistic innovation and commercial appropriation often coexist in a troubled way. The narrative remains open-ended. It invites viewers to fill in the gaps and extend the stories sketched out. Like property developers speculating on the future of a city, it invites us to project ourselves into the urban space, to bring new meanings to it. 

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Make-up. project space
Speculative Tour – a different view of speculation

Event organized as a tour in September 2024 in Berlin focusing on highly speculative locations in the districts of Charlottenburg, Mitte and Wedding. The scooter tour includes discussions on speculative value, real estate and speculative niches, with contributions from a number of speakers: artist, researcher and activist Jakob Wirth, who specializes in interventions in public space; artist Marina Resende, one of the pioneers of urban renewal; real estate expert Alexander Zakharov; and the Habersaathstrasse initiative, which uses vacancy to combat the forces of speculation.