The Cabinet

In the courtyard of the former Stasi headquarters, the façade becomes a monumental projection surface. At first, a large filing cabinet appears – an everyday piece of furniture, closed, orderly and functional. Files are stored inside it. At the same time, it alludes to the building itself and to a system that gathered information, monitored people and shaped reality through classification and control.

Gradually, the rigid order is set in motion. Drawers open, papers and archives change, grids shift. The clear, administrative structures evolve into an increasingly poetic and surreal visual world. Digital animations meet handcrafted stop-motion images made from plasticine. The material appears visibly worked: it can bend, stretch, break or change shape.

The façade thus becomes a boundary between inside and outside, archive and memory, control and freedom. Opening the filing cabinet feels like a search for what lies hidden within it. The installation does not reconstruct historical events in detail. It invites reflection on how systems can shape perception and reality – and how collective action and imagination can make change possible.

A soundscape is also planned for the installation. It may include voices, spoken fragments and atmospheric sounds; the specific audio content is currently still being developed.

In the waiting area in front of the entrance to the former Stasi headquarters courtyard, an explanatory video by the artist about the project will be shown. The video is in English with German subtitles. The transcript can be found below:

This recording concerns The Cabinet.

What you are about to see is a cabinet.

The Cabinet is a work about a history, but not a history told in the conventional way.

A history of Germany between 1945 and 1989. A history of division, of borders, of surveillance and control, but also of resistance, of voices , of imagination.

But this is not an illustration of these events.

We have tried to approach them as if they were fragments of a collective dream.

In a dream, things are rarely stable.

A wall can become a screen.
A room can become a city.
A piece of paper can become a border.

Times behave differently.

Events that happened a year apart can appear next to each other. Something that seems insignificant can return later and suddenly acquire another meaning.

You may notice repetitions, interruptions, delays, distortions or changes that do not behave like conventional cinematic editing. These are intentional.

This is why The Cabinet does not attempt to reconstruct history literally…

What does history look like when we dream it?

The historical material is treated in the same way as a dream treats memory.

It fragments. It repeats. It disappears. It returns transformed.

The Cabinet is conceived specifically for the façade of the former headquarters of the Ministry for State Security in Leipzig.

This is not a neutral location.

The building was once a place where information, testimonies and surveillance records were collected, classified and controlled. Files were created. Lives were divided into documents.

The same architecture becomes a place where information begins to escape.

The Cabinet is both an archive and a machine for transforming the archive.

Technically, the work combines projections, light, sound, animation, stop motion and physical materials. These materials are brought into dialogue with neural synthesis, artificial imagery and synthetic vision.

The handmade and the generated.
The physical and the digital.
The historical document and the artificial image.
The recorded voice and the imagined voice.

These different techniques and visual traditions are not quoted directly, but absorbed into a single visual system, where material processes and synthetic images coexist and transform one another. 

The projection is not simply an image placed onto architecture.  is designed around the physical presence of the building, so that the architecture itself becomes part of the image-making process. And gradually, the images move from a history of political control towards something else.

From division to connection.
From silence to voices.
From surveillance to collective presence.

This is where the dream becomes important.

For decades, the system appeared solid.

The borders were controlled.
The population was monitored.
Dissent was suppressed.
The future seemed already decided.

Until suddenly, what had seemed impossible became possible.

It is not only about what happened in 1989. It is about the transformation that 1989 made possible.

We invite you not to look for a direct translation of the historical events.

Instead, look for traces.

Look at the spaces between images.
Look for fragments.
Look for repetitions.
Look for transformations.

Look for the moment when an object stops being what it was.

The Cabinet is not a place where history is stored.

It is a place where history continues to change.