German Pavilion at 2024 Venice Biennale

The path from the dock to the island of La Certosa passes over a long pier. It’s an in-between area that reveals stunning views: Sant’Elena and the city on one side, the island on the other. It’s not clear where the island actually begins, it’s not clear if I’m heading towards the future and leaving the past behind or if I’m on my way from the future to the past. This is also where the idea emerged for the title of the German presentation at the Biennale: Thresholds. In a time of global crises and wars, we asked ourselves the following question: What do places of solidarity look like? How can we leave behind the nation-state spatial constructs and ways of thinking? Change begins when I become aware of the temporary nature of my position. When dreams sleep on the threshold of awakening. The position of the threshold is this kind of temporary place between a past that is disappearing and a future that we have not yet entered. How can we succeed in creating a situation of transition out of the hard boundaries set by the German Pavilion with its dominating walls, a situation that opens up the gaze, stretches the moment, and turns a line into a threshold? How can a complete narrative be told in fragments? Perhaps the notion of the threshold helps to question the practice of logic.