“Wandering Berlin”

A project about Berlin’s city vagrants

What do you do when you find yourself in a situation that separates you from your familiar surroundings? When you are so alienated from your social environment that, as a consequence, you are banished from the group and become an outsider? How can you survive then?

Marcha van den Hurk has explored this theme over the past few years, using the example of vagabondage.

Travelling through various European cities such as Rotterdam, Brussels and Paris, she meets people of no fixed abode, listens to their stories and visits their mostly temporary shelters. In recent months Van den Hurk has set out on her daily wanderings from her guest studio at the Stiftung Starke, which is situated in Berlin’s upmarket district of Grunewald.

In doing so she met not only vagabonds but also, on several occasions, accompanied the deposit-bottle collectors so often seen in Berlin on their daily routes through the city.

The photographs taken during these encounters now serve as the starting point for the drawings and spatial works that Van den Hurk will present in the exhibition space of the Stiftung Starke from Thursday this week.