Ecke Weserstraße
You’re twenty-five in Berlin-Neukölln and you understand, finally, that your life is the kind of life people make art about. Not because you’re special, but because you’re young and you’re doing drugs and you’re having sex that feels like an emotion and you’re listening to electronic music at the right venues with the right people. It’s what happens when you’re that age in this city with money and free time.
Grafikdesigner Hayung von Oepen and literature student Johannes Hertwig decided to document it. They called the project Ecke Weserstraße,
after that corner in Berlin-Neukölln where the whole scene seems to coalesce. I don’t know which one they were doing—celebrating these people or documenting them—but I’m not sure the distinction matters much anymore. The camera just watches.
What’s strange is how aware everyone in the scene is of being in the scene. They’re not living these lives by accident—they’re living them with the knowledge that someone else might be watching, might be filming, might turn this moment into something that matters. So the project works. Either it captures something true, or it captures how self-conscious everything has become. The same thing, really.
I never actually saw the finished work, just heard about it after the fact. By the time the dates passed, the moment was already becoming memory, already becoming material for something else. That’s the thing about documenting your own scene—by the time people see it, you’ve already moved on to being a different person. The footage is always chasing what was.