I am my own museum!
Performance and audiowalk at Gründerzeitmuseum Mahlsdorf
Berlin, DE (2024)
with Poligonal Berlin
Curating the inaugural stop of Constellations – The Bus Tour, a Berlin-wide exploration celebrating displaced and disappeared sites of queer urban culture. This segment, titled I AM MY OWN MUSEUM!, centered on the Gründerzeitmuseum, a historic manor house and period-room collection founded and directed for 40 years by the pioneering trans* activist and antiquarian Charlotte von Mahlsdorf. The project utilized the museum as a stage for a site-specific installation and performance by Robin Leveroos, which was critically framed by an immersive, multi-layered audio portrait co-produced with Tobias Purfürst.
The curation highlighted the museum’s legacy as a gathering spot for queer communities in East Berlin. Central to the narrative was the history of the Mulackritze, a queer bar demolished in 1964, whose entire interior Charlotte personally salvaged and relocated to the museum's basement in Mahlsdorf. The audio piece functioned as a sonic bridge blending the sounds of the historic music machines Charlotte repaired with a choral narrative of queer resistance. It featured the voices of HIV activist and actor Ichgola Androgyn, alongside Andreas Schroeck, Beate Jung, and archival recordings of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf herself, as well as sonic extracts from Rosa von Praunheim’s 1992 film Ich bin meine eigene Frau and rare footage of the HIB "Spring Ball" held at the museum in 1977, sourced from the Sonntags-Club archives.
Listen here