For the past year, our temporary space 11th Berlin Biennale c/o ExRotaprint has been a site of experiences and exchange. Here multiple stories have been told, shaped, and shared in an array of different languages that continue to be spoken and heard in the courtyard and on the street. This has been a place for experimental exhibition-making, for people to encounter one another, have conversations, drink tea, sit and read to each other, create and stage puppet-plays, draw and write, listen and dance. It has been a setting where the process of making is opened up to the unforeseeable consequences of mutual exposure. We, as incomers, have learned from our neighbors, from their careful curiosity and generous disposition—particularly the children, who were the first to claim a part of these quarters as their own. They knew it belonged to them more than to us, and they used it accordingly. We were sad to shut down when the pandemic hit the city, and rejoiced when it was possible to reopen the doors. We tried to act with care and find safe ways of meeting one another again, convinced of the importance of coming together. This place has been used as a safe house for process, a place where things could be slow, porous, and human scale. For us, it became as close to a home as we could imagine. It is a place made of hospitality, not ours to extend, but that of our surroundings, passersby, participants, guests, artists, and collaborators. People have briefly settled here, gathered, walked through, spoken to one another, and listened. What remains is a living archive of the hospitality gifted by them all.
