The installation “OPEN” raises questions about the contradictions between temporality and accessibility of spaces. How can exhibitions and short-lived spatial interventions point beyond themselves and enable a deeper engagement with a place?

Eight confusing posters and three seemingly inhabited spatial fragments, created during the exhibition itself, challenge concepts of interim urban use, temporary activations, and pop-ups. Over the course of three days, we worked performatively on spatial fragments inside the KARSTADT department store that has stood empty for years. They build build, tinker, decorate, live, and through these actions asks when the capitalisation of spaces end and where life begins. They search for the threshold between life and fiction, for the point at which speculative ground, the supposedly “real” material world of construction materials, decoration and living, kitsch and fantasy intersect. They cut through spaces where generosity and exclusion can no longer be distinguished, and reassemble these contradictions in fragmented ways. Through “OPEN,” we question the necessity of certain spaces and who bears the responsibility for making them available.