Neighbours

Developed during a residency at Home Base Lab in Berlin, this temporary intervention reactivated an abandoned communal drying structure in a former East Berlin housing estate.

Once used not only for drying clothes but also as places of informal encounters between neighbours, these structures gradually disappeared from everyday life after German reunification. White pieces of fabric bearing the names of local residents were suspended from the structure. The names reproduced exactly the typography and information displayed on the entrance doorbells of the surrounding apartment buildings, transferring a familiar register of the neighbourhood into a shared public space. By relocating these everyday markers of identity, the intervention made visible the social composition of the housing estate and temporarily restored the structure as a place of collective recognition and encounter.