2025 –Photography, Mixed Media Installation / Kunstraum Kreuzberg Bethanien
Collaboration with Marina Resende Santos

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Since the contract worker housing complex at Gehrenseestraße 1, Alt-Hohenschönhausen, East Berlin, was shuttered in 2003, a thriving urban landscape has developed on the massive plot of land around the gutted buildings. This place is now about to disappear, as temporary commercial use, demolition, and eventually a new residential quarter will transform the space. The history and fate of urban plants are entangled with labour, migration, and the shifting dynamic between being wanted and unwanted in the city. At Gehrenseestraße, the same thing is happening with the graffiti in the ruins.

My photographic series focuses on this research site, poetically documenting the dynamics connecting spontaneous plants, wild graffiti, and the temporary artistic interventions of the activist Marina Resende Santos. The series explores the fragile coexistence of plant life and human traces on this changing site, revealing a network of urban memory and quiet resistance against processes of commercialization and disappearance. The images aim to make these interactions visible while questioning the ways the city transforms and rewrites its own margins.

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WHITE BENTGRASS
This image tells the story of a grass that inhabits the margins, thriving where other species struggle. White bentgrass emerges on riverbanks, fallow fields, and the edges of urban paths, forming delicate mats that stabilize soil and harbor micro-ecosystems. Its subtle green tufts, almost imperceptible in the vast landscape, symbolize quiet persistence. Despite centuries of agricultural homogenization and urban development, this grass continues to colonize overlooked spaces, linking soil, water, and life in small, almost invisible ways. Observing it, one becomes aware of the profound interconnections between plant, environment, and human intervention—a reminder that even the humblest species sustains a hidden network of life.

HOPS
This image tells the story of a climbing vine whose tendrils once scaled fences and derelict walls across Europe. Hops is a plant shaped by human use, cultivated for centuries to flavor beverages, but it also thrives spontaneously in neglected fields and riversides. Its vigorous growth, winding upward, reflects a strategy of persistence: seeking light and support wherever it can find it. Along the abandoned Alt-Hohenschönhausen buildings complex, hops trace the lines of former streets and courtyards, climbing walls and corners once shaped by human circulation, as if mapping the memories of those who passed through the site.

SOLIDAGO
This image tells the story of a perennial pioneer whose bright flowers punctuate the late summer landscape with shimmering gold. Solidago is known for its capacity to colonize disturbed sites, abandoned lots, and post-industrial fields, carrying a quiet lesson in resilience. Its roots, deep and tenacious, interact with fungi and soil microorganisms, forming invisible alliances that support its survival. Yet, like many pioneers, it is both celebrated and contested—valued for its aesthetic and medicinal qualities, criticized for its invasiveness. Inside the abandoned Alt-Hohenschönhausen complex, Solidago spreads along the paths of former streets between empty buildings, forming luminous lines of life and highlighting the interplay between urban disappearance, memory, and ecological persistence.

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— 2025 | Kunstraum Kreuzberg (Berlin/DE) • Group Exhibition “Techno-Ecologies and Bodies of Memory: the Environment as Battleground” 19.07-05.10.

This photographic installation has been developed as part of the project “Bodenwirtschaft (mit Hopfen für Johan)” by Marina Resende Santos in the framework of the exhibition Techno-Ecologies and Bodies of Memory: the Environment as Battleground curated by Marianna Liosi at the Kunstraum Kreuzberg. It comprises around 200 photographs that poetically document the context of the site. In the exhibition, these images are presented in an archive box that visitors can explore freely within the installation space. The installation recreates elements of the site, such as a fence, wallpaper, and plants from the location, which grow over the course of the exhibition.

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