The TV tower at Berlin’s Alexanderplatz looks like an extra in Daniele Ansidei’s images of the reconstruction of the shopping center. The prominent Berlin landmark remains in the background: sometimes cropped, sometimes a point of reference disappearing in the fog. Instead, the focus is on what’s happening on the ground – the changes taking place amongst the plastic sheeting, construction hoarding, steel girders, and wall sections. Over two years, and without adhering to a stationary or chronological documentation process, he photographed the reconstruction of the shopping center, previously known as “Berlin Carré”, which in the 1990s represented the new face of post-reunification consumption. The images echo the complexities of a historic place that developed from a merchant city at the turn of the century to a shopping experience in the new millennium. The shopping center at Alexanderplatz represents an intertwining of different periods accommodating diverse social systems and ideologies; in this respect, the photographic medium is particularly relevant. Analog large format images portray a dimension of time, and add archival value through their materiality, allowing each image to become a selected moment. Unlike the limitless and fast rate capture digital images, the analog large format produces a limited number of frames through a more laboured recording process. In this regard, Ansidei’s images do not tell a story of the transformation of the shopping center, of its construction and reconstruction, which has been well documented since it was first built in 1886. Instead, they reveal the multilayered character of a place where social systems are exchanged and negotiated just as much as the goods in daily circulation. The artistic response of Ansidei was to collect and connect fleeting impressions, which in their entirety tell the story of a rather intangible place.

Over the two years, he repeatedly photographed each phase of the reconstruction, providing an overview of the transformational process through shifting perspectives. He directed his observations both inwards and outwards, repeating motifs such as the TV tower. The images reveal a site of commerce, by focusing above all on what sets that commerce in motion. Particularly striking are the transportation infrastructures, especially the stairways. A brightly lit spiral staircase seductively winds its way through a darkened area under construction. The plastic-wrapped new conveyor belts in the Kaufland store frequently appear until finally, they emerge from their plastic covers and rather majestically demonstrate their operational capacity. The attention paid to layering in the images – historical as well as architectural – is of no more coincidence than the focus on transportation. The images reveal an energy that turns this place into a spatial structure and transforms the touristy Alexanderplatz from commercial center to consumer paradise.

What Ansidei succeeds with his images is, therefore, a precise exploration and complex portrayal of this place through shifting camera perspectives: its history is recorded as a dialogue with the social outside, which doesn’t just show the way to a promising future, from past to present and old to new, but rather creates a moment of reflection about the breaks and gaps of continuous transformation.

Text by Agnieszka Roguski