common over vacant, metadata

sound installation, transcript, series of digital prints
2021

In collaboration with Teresa Hoffmann and Stadtbodenstifung
10365, Berlin-Lichtenberg



10115, Berlin-Mitte



In the late summer of 2021, the project common over vacant took up public space in front of privately owned housing kept vacant. Leerstand (vacancy) is a symptom in evidence of financialization of land and housing. The market value of a house kept empty on a plot of land rising in price expands, even as its material structure decays, turning uninhabitable. Such vacancies often remain unregistered, slipping between the cracks of bureaucratic administration.

Common over vacant set up an open space refreshment and recording booth in each of the twelve official districts of Berlin. The residents, activists and passerby across the districts tell stories of forced evictions, of houses passed from owner to owner, of vacant housing appropriated as advertisement sites or neglected to the condition too fragile to occupy. 

The digital models of the vacant buildings were generated from multiple photographs taken at each site. The models and their physical counterparts make up emprty shells, a glitchy simulation of functional housing turned into tokens of value in financial speculation.

At each location a metal-panel speaker suspended from the scaffolding enclosing one square meter of public space plays excerpts from interviews and conversations recorded at previous locations.

The installation included printed transcription and cards with digital models of vacant housing and their postal code.
The project was funded by Berliner Projektfonds Urbane Praxis.

IInstallation view
Soft Encounters, floating university, 2021


Arts of the Working Class, Issue 23