Keys and Gates

At Bernauer Straße in Berlin, a film crew re-creates an act of post-Wall departure: an actor with a briefcase walks the cobbled patrol road inside the Gedenkstätte Berliner Mauer — the only site where the machinery of the Berlin Wall survives intact (outer wall, death strip, patrol road, signal fence, watchtower). Bernauer was the symbol-frontier of the Wall era. The street the boundary: the south-side buildings opened directly onto West Berlin while their tenants stayed trapped in the East. In the first days after August 13, 1961, residents jumped from upper-floor windows; the GDR sealed the windows and then demolished the buildings. The border stayed in place for twenty-eight years, option of exit withheld.

This photograph is a document of a constructed image. A film crew has the actor walk; Eric photographs the instructed path. The leaving that was once forbidden is now not just ordinary commerce but the staging of it — and the camera records both the staging and the ground that recalls what staging cannot reach. The Wall fell on November 9, 1989; thirty-six years later, the gesture of free transit becomes content.

The Freedom Monument in central Riga was commissioned by public donation in 1931 and unveiled in 1935: a granite, travertine, and copper obelisk topped by Milda, a female figure holding three stars for Latvia’s three historical regions. Through fifty-one years of Soviet occupation (1940–91), the monument was somehow left standing; the surrounding regime couldn’t absorb its island of symbolism. The honor-guard ceremony at the base — three soldiers marching in formation — was discontinued under Soviet rule, reinstated only when Latvia regained independence on August 21, 1991.

This frame collapses four orders of surveillance. Guards perform ceremonial ritual. A woman in the foreground has stopped to watch. Eric photographs the woman’s surveyance. The viewer of the photograph becomes fourth-order observer. National sovereignty is enacted by the marching bodies; personal attention is enacted by the woman whose stillness frames them; the act of photographing the witnessing expands each recognition. The picture epitomizes the way presence accumulates around a ritual that, for so long, was not allowed to continue at all.

A basketball court within Tempelhofer Feld: the former Nazi prestige terminal and Berlin Airlift site that became Berlin’s largest public park in 2010 after the city closed the airport to operations. The terminal building, designed by Ernst Sagebiel between 1936 and 1941 as part of Hitler’s Welthauptstadt Germania, was at completion among the largest buildings in the world by floor area; after serving the Airlift in 1948–49, it continued under US military use through the Cold War, ceasing operations in 2008. Berliners voted in 2014, by two-thirds, against development of the field, keeping it deliberately empty: the only grand-scale European airport-to-park conversion preserved as commons by popular vote. The architecture of state-permitted aviation now hosts kite-flyers, picnickers, weddings, skaters, and children with toys.

On a sunny day, a child operates a remote-controlled four-wheel drive — a small-scale apparatus of personal control mirrored against the surrounding architecture’s grand-scale apparatus of state control. The basketball court is permitted civic-recreation infrastructure laid over a former military airfield; the child’s RC operation is a sub-permission inside that permission. The agency-of-control nests down to the smallest scale at which a body can author its own movement. The child is composed for non-identifiability — distance, posture, framing — which makes the photograph about the operation rather than the operator. The toy car traces a line the runway no longer carries. The bigger architecture quits enforcement, permits the smaller passage.

The same Tempelhof park as 2a, photographed at sunset. A handful of skateboarder silhouettes pause at the edge of the apron, the abandoned terminal a distant collection of radio antennae on the horizon, foreground figures rendered as typological outlines by the dissolving light. Along the two-kilometer runway designed for aircraft acceleration sprout diverse forms of self-locomotion: skaters, cyclists, kite-flyers, wedding processions, picnickers, and the occasional unsanctioned installation (see 8a).

Silhouette is the register of permission taken without need for it to be granted. The crowd self-anonymizes into ideas. Magic-hour light falls on the most prosaic of surfaces: poured concrete, astride military-grade asphalt. The aesthetic disproportion — sunset glory next to a Nazi-built runway — is illuminatory. Where the field once permitted only sanctioned departure under strict timetables, it now allows prolonged witness without hurry.

Riga’s Corner House at 61 Brīvības iela — Freedom Street — was built in 1912 as ornate residential building, then operated as the KGB's regional headquarters from 1940 to 1941 and again from 1944 to 1991; during the Nazi occupation (1941–44) it housed a Latvian Nazi-aligned youth organization and the German-appointed puppet government. Thousands were interrogated, imprisoned, and executed here. The building was converted to a memorial museum in 2014, interiors preserved.

The frame shows what the museum kept in place: a wall of filing cabinets, an unmarked briefcase, an open door. No human figure. The composition is pure surveillance-architecture-as-object: the bureaucratic furniture of a state that watched, relentlessly and en masse, laid bare as evidence of itself.

A wall of small wooden cabinets inside Nils Frahm’s studio at Funkhaus Berlin, the former state broadcasting complex of the German Democratic Republic on the Spree’s northern bank. Funkhaus was built between 1951 and 1956 by Franz Ehrlich — Bauhaus-trained, Buchenwald inmate and forced laborer, and (devastatingly) the designer of the camp gate inscription Jedem das Seine. He brought modernist principles to the design of the GDR’s state-radio infrastructure: the complex’s Saal 1 is widely regarded as one of the best-acoustic large recording halls in the world. Decommissioned with reunification in 1990, the building was gradually colonized by musicians who inherited the architecture of permitted speech as substrate for their own.

The cabinets here hold scores, audio gear, creative material; the cabinets in 3a hold surveillance records. Same furniture-typology, same Soviet-bloc industrial design vocabulary, opposite-purpose contexts. State control can persist as form long after its function expires. What was once panopticon for surveillance becomes repository for art practice. If a building does not forget, it can change who keeps the keys.

A third layer sits outside the frame. Frahm’s studio is nominally available for rental, but Frahm himself is not. Photography and video of the studio’s interior are frowned upon: the gear, the layout, the working surfaces protected even though the room is superficially available. The exalted-and-keeps-to-himself performer extends the architecture of permission into the contemporary creative-industry register, with access gatekept at three nested scales: materially (the equipment), representationally (no photos), and industry-culturally (the hermetic artist). The photograph exists despite the taboo against existence. The cabinets rhyme with surveillance as the permission-architecture evolves.

The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, designed by Peter Eisenman with engineer Buro Happold, opened in May 2005 after seventeen years of political debate. 2,711 concrete stelae stand in a grid across 19,000 square meters of central Berlin, just south of the Brandenburg Gate on what had been part of the Wall’s death strip and the Nazi-era ministerial district before that. The stelae range from twenty centimeters to nearly five meters tall; the ground undulates and drops; the passages between stelae are about ninety-five centimeters wide. Eisenman refused to specify symbolic meaning: an explicit, deliberate refusal of figurative monument-grammar.

This photograph refuses it, too. The canonical Stelenfeld image is aerial or wide: the grid encapsulated by sheer quantity, abstraction retold as abstraction. Here our view is experiential: inside, low, rainstorm in focus by the texture of the nearest slab, and layered columns of slabs receding into a sky at the threshold of overexposure. Narrow depth-of-field privileges the specific moment of capture over the permanent past. The whiteness at the top of the frame is the photograph's admission that there is a horizon beyond which the visual cannot hold the event. The viewer is within the architecture. The photograph affirms Eisenman’s discipline by inheriting the limits of a handheld camera, the way the memorial itself occupies the limit of what a body can live.

RAW-Gelände in Friedrichshain — short for Reichsbahn-Ausbesserungswerk, the National Railway Repair Works — was an industrial rail-repair complex from the late 1860s through the GDR era. Abandoned after reunification, then squatted from the 1990s, it became one of Berlin’s iconic autonomous-cultural zones through the 2000s and early 2010s: clubs, graffiti, volunteer collectives, the kind of place where one part of the city gifted reprieve to another. The Kurth Group acquired most of the site in 2015 and has phased in commercialization since.

Graffiti from a walled-off area reads NOW IS OUR TIME, painted on the side of one of the original maintenance halls. Eric photographed it on July 1, 2011 — squarely inside RAW’s permissionless-culture peak, four years before commercial acquisition began the displacement. The declaration was true when it was made; the photograph is the document that survived: a document of survival. The site’s German name carries the irony etymologically: Ausbesserungswerk is a place for repair, and the squat-era community practiced exactly that, 150 years after the term was coined for railways.

The East Side Gallery is a 1.3-kilometer stretch of preserved Berlin Wall along Mühlenstraße in Friedrichshain — the longest single section remaining. In 1990, 118 artists from twenty-one countries painted the street-facing side in the brief window between the Wall’s fall and reunification. The famous Bruderkuss — Mein Gott, hilf mir, diese tödliche Liebe zu überleben (“My God, Help Me Survive This Deadly Loveˮ) — Brezhnev and Honecker kissing, by Dmitri Vrubel, is on this section. In 2013, a developer removed part of the wall for new construction, triggering protests.

This photograph is of the other side — the East German side, looking toward to what had been the death strip along the river, dark and blank at night. The painted side is the front of the monument, where tourists congregate; the back, seldom photographed. Two cyclists and a couple pass through the frame as shadows, anonymous in motion and dim light. The choice of the unwatched face inverts the East Side convention: front-side murals and crowds become unseen darkness and fellow-journeymen. The shadows, in turn, play upon the Wall’s refusal of human passage: silhouettes moving past without possibility of transit or belonging. One of the cyclists is Eric; the photographer, for a split-second, is painted on the wall.

Preserved sections of the Berlin Wall fan out from Bernauer’s intact memorial, fragments left to weather under climbing vegetation, surfaces holding spray-painted layers from different decades. Trees rise and crowd the wall pieces as if mere terrain. Where the Gedenkstätte preserves the control-architecture against time, this stretch is preserved with time: greenery allowed to subvert what proximity the state once forbade.

This composition lets earth do half the work. The wall fragments are no longer the central subject so much as signposts that the city is subsumed. The graffiti on them is not the original Cold War scrawl but later: contemporary, layered, the Wall as live surface for whatever Berlin wants to say to itself this year. On display is a longer arc of permission-architecture: what is intentionally kept merges with what grows over. A more ancient way to commemorate The Wall may be to compost it.

The exterior cloister at Funkhaus Berlin: a covered colonnade running along the back of the state radio-broadcasting compound. Light splits the frame diagonally: columns recede in clean geometry on one side, shadow falls across the other, the floor between them drawing analogy to a bifurcation of permission.

Ehrlich’s design discipline carries here as visibly as anywhere in the building. The cloister is functional architecture — a covered walkway — treated as a formal exercise in column-and-shadow. Invitation alongside limited access. Held with 6b (the formal interior with chairs and clock), the pair folds Funkhaus’s outside and inside into one origami: the geometry and the atmosphere, surfaces outliving the political functions the building was built for.

A formal interior of Funkhaus: a row of red velvet chairs lined along one wall, a clock above them, a pair of closed double doors, parquet floor. The room is preserved past function: once a waiting space for broadcast recording and audience seating, now a breath-held vacancy with the chairs awaiting an audience who no longer arrives.

The clock is the load-bearing object. Broadcasting was the most clock-disciplined of state activities (schedule: to-the-second), and a clock on a Funkhaus wall is an agent of synchronization. Read against 6a’s cloister, the interior carries the warm-color register where the exterior carried the geometric one. Together, they make the building visible at the scale at which it was visited, inhabited.

Tempelhof under rain. The runway has turned slick and reflective, asphalt holding sky in mirror-form, clouds and citizens doubled on the ground. The runway was designed for aircraft acceleration, a most controlled and precise segment of kinetic warmaking: two kilometers of asphalt poured to specifications for jet operations. After rain, those same specifications hold the sky upside down for a few minutes until surfaces dry.

A bicyclist’s wheels make small contact lines on a platform engineered for thousands of times the load, and the camera notices the disproportion. Where the runway once organized acceleration into corridors of permitted departure, it now relaxes a single traversal into the poetry of impermanence.

An expanse of rusted metal wall near the Bernauer Straße memorial corridor, with a streetlight rising behind it and a white wooden cross standing in grass and flowers at foreground. The cross is one of the gestures scattered along the former death-strip line marking remembrance. Bernauer Straße was the site of the first deaths in 1961, with metal wall itself built as a later structure on the same line, in memorial register: a sign of how the city has continued to think about what to do with its blueprints.

The composition is sparse, syntactic, each element a separate noun placed in the frame. Wall: the system. Streetlight: the civic infrastructure that outlived it. Cross: the memento mori for what the system cost. There is no person in the picture, but an absent figure is implied subject. The streetlight is lit before daytime sky, neither needed nor relevant, but persistent — the way infrastructure stands resolute past its original calibration to a city that no longer needs it the same way.

A multicolored phone booth stands alone at the beginning of one of Tempelhof’s runways: out of place, out of register, outside of any institutional reason to be there. On May 22nd, 2022, Eric placed onto the field this installation — the Teleporter Phone Booth — a recurring object in his music-art practice that doubles as public invitation and secluded threshold for permissionless performance.

Though the runway is designed for the most controlled form of departure — tracked aircraft following filed flight plans under air-traffic rule — the booth permits a different dimension of departure: one person, one teleportation by sound, one piece of communication-as-experience infrastructure detached from any institutional allowance to be where it is (indeed, security personnel challenged the presence of the installation within hours). Two scales of exit-architecture stack in a single frame: one literal, one transcendent. The booth doesn’t belong, the runway never permitted it, the photograph transcribes the transgression.

Tempelhof’s permission-history is the densest of any Berlin site. Weimar commercial airport, Nazi prestige terminal, US Air Force launchpad, public park preserved by referendum, emergency refugee shelter for some seven thousand people starting at the height of the 2015 Syrian crisis — and here the testing grounds for unsanctioned art. An art installation — designed for transport via music and sound — inherits and expands that layered history all at once.

The Berliner Dom, on the eastern edge of Museum Island, was built between 1894 and 1905 as Kaiser Wilhelm II’s monument to imperial Protestantism — the largest Protestant church in Germany, with about ninety Hohenzollern royal tombs in the crypt below. Bombed in 1944, restoration begun under the GDR in 1975, structural reconstruction completed in 1993, crypt reopened to the public in 1999. It is now an active worship site, a symphonic concert hall, and a piece of state-religious permission-architecture in the Wilhelmine register.

In front of it, on the Lustgarten plaza, Eric has laid out a red picnic blanket, set up a custom una corda piano, about to begin a concert that no one has booked or permitted. A concert within the Dom — or in front of the Dom — requires formal booking; a picnic does not. The blanket is the workaround. The bourgeois civic gesture of friendly gathering becomes cover for subversive action, twice-subversive in the context of concert as public benefit.

The intimate scale of the blanket plus small instrument in the foreground, against the monumental wonder of cathedral behind: both given equal weight in the frame. The instrument of one person’s invention faces the instrument of imperial tradition. Both make sound, occupy space, but only one requests permission to exist.

Moritzplatz sat within meters of the Berlin Wall during the division, with death strip running along the Luisenstädtischer Kanal corridor just south. Kreuzberg’s specific cultural texture as Berlin’s alternative-culture seedbed is partly a function of the Wall’s economic effects on the land here in the 1970s and 1980s.

A bus moves around the Moritzplatz traffic circle. On center island, the city has posted two large advertising boards, Karl Marx und der Kapitalismus and Richard Wagner und das deutsche Gefühl: Berlin lecture-series posters that validate the city’s choice of ideological conversations to surface for public discussion.

The photograph layers framings on top of each other. The institutional choice of which conversations to air. The attention of the two flanking strangers, constrained by the route the bus is following, as well as the viewer’s perspective. The historical shadow of the wall. Within the bus, itself a permission-space — ticket, route, schedule — the passengers see what the city has chosen to show them through the window the route provides.

Dresden was almost entirely destroyed by Allied bombing over three days in February 1945: about twenty-five thousand killed, the inner city flattened. The GDR rebuilt much of it in Plattenbau modernism and left the Frauenkirche as a deliberate ruin-memorial against what the regime called Anglo-American bombing — a narrative choice that shaped what was permitted to be remembered. After 1990, the Frauenkirche was reconstructed in baroque facsimile (1994–2005, internationally funded as reconciliation), and the Neumarkt was rebuilt in historicist style through the 2000s and 2020s. The choice was facsimile over both modernism and memorial-honest gap. The reconstructed stone outlines what’s allowed to be discussed by the future.

A lone runner moves away from the camera astride elevated, gothic-reconstructed pathways, a moody dream-like light through the air. The runner’s body liberates itself from framed view, embodying exit from sanctioned history. Motion blur and distance anonymize the figure naturally. The beauty of the rebuilt splendor, the reconciliation, and the question of what is omitted: still palpable, with unknown half-life.