Together with the artist Andreas Koch, BETON Berlin will be traveling back in time to a specific location for the 2024 festival. In October 2002, Andreas Koch opened his exhibition ‘STADT’ at CAPRI, a project space at Brunnenstraße 149, where he covered the plinth-like fixtures of CAPRI's previous tenant, a flower shop, with black and white motifs of various Berlin façades (including Karl-Liebknecht/corner of Spandauer Straße, Urban-Krankenhaus and others). What today seems like a forward-looking discourse on urbanism was created by him in 2002 as a walk-in architectural landscape ‘City in Room Size’. In June 2006, the CARPI project space, founded and curated by Ina Bierstedt, Bettina Carl and Alena Meier, closed after five years of intensive exhibition activity.

BETON Berlin will trace the current Berlin references of Andreas Koch's work in CAPRI at that time. Together we will return to the project space, which today houses the customer office of an insurance company. For one evening, the Büsch Allianz general agency in Brunnenstraße will once again become a project space open to the public. By means of a lecture performance, Koch will virtually bring back the work of 2002 for the visitors and at the same time thematise the multi-layered transformation processes of an entire scene/generation here using Brunnenstraße and the surrounding area as an example.  The one-hour lecture performance will oscillate back and forth between a personal retrospective and a factual observation in terms of content, time and space, thereby highlighting the dynamics of urban transformation processes.

In the current understanding, public space is understood as a process. Function and utilization are linked to social transformation processes, which in turn influence the perception and use of space. But what about the areas in urban space where the function and use has changed imperceptibly over a longer period of time?  Since 2022, BETON Berlin has been working closely with invited artists to open up and address areas of the city, from ice-age structures in Wedding and unused and converted squares in Friedrichshain to the seemingly unrealistic large-scale project of the A 100 urban motorway. The BETON Berlin project aims to temporarily give places, situations or atmospheres in the city's public space a new and ‘commented’ perception through artistic exploration. To this end, BETON Berlin researches special places or stories that have mostly fallen out of public perception and asks artists to occupy and comment on them in solo exhibitions. Through the artistic works and the BETON Berlin project, public situations with partly hidden site-specific aspects become perceptible to residents and the public. BETON Berlin emphasizes the importance of latent structures in relation to the entirety of a city and also raises the question of the necessity of dysfunctional and transformed places for people in Berlin.