Afternoon in Berlin
Elif Kalkan made a video of visiting her friends in Berlin. Just filmed their apartments, their dogs, the quality of afternoon light in someone’s living room, the kind of nothing that happens when you’re with people you know. No narration explaining it, no point beyond the thing itself.
I watched it and couldn’t stop thinking about why anyone bothers making work about this city. Berlin does something to people—you arrive, you’re caught by something you can’t quite name, you spend months or years trying to make art out of it, and then you realize what you’ve actually captured is just your friends’ apartments and the specific way light moves through a room. That’s the whole thing.
Elif’s from Istanbul, moved here, so maybe she understands something the rest of us miss. Moving somewhere teaches you what actually matters. Not the mythology, not the grand narrative about a place. Just the weight of an afternoon, a friend’s kitchen, the cat that’s been on that exact couch since you met them. The video is full of that. It doesn’t apologize for being simple.
I think what gets me is how rare it is to watch something that isn’t hungry for something else. Everything made about Berlin—the photos, the essays, the videos—seems to be reaching for meaning. This is just documentation. Elif with a camera, her friends, afternoon. It doesn’t need to be more.
I have people I know in Berlin too. Watching it, I wasn’t thinking about the city as this place you read about. I was thinking about them right now, probably in apartments like this, with their own afternoons, doing the exact same quiet thing. That’s what the city actually is. Not the idea of it. Just that—people existing in rooms, knowing each other, time moving in that particular way it does when you’re not watching.