Since autumn 2025, I have been exploring places along the River Spree in the southeastern part of the city. It is an area that was profoundly shaped by Berlin’s rise to a center of the electrical industry in the late nineteenth century. Along the riverbanks, traces of this “Elektropolis” era remain, interwoven with layers of history: two world wars, four decades of the GDR, and more than three decades of reunified Germany.

Having grown up in East Berlin near these places, I feel deeply connected to them through personal experience and memory. Working at night, using the slow process of long-term exposure, gives me time to reconnect with these locations and recover faded memories. This project explores how human-made structures endure through shifting political systems, changing ownership, and evolving uses. It reflects on how places shape our lives and identities—and how past and present can coexist within us.