HERZBERGE

The site of the residency - the social habitat of Herzberge - serves as the starting point of the artistic research and creation during the residency period. The psychiatric hospital Königin Elisabeth Herzberge is located in a small city forest and 100 hectare nature conservation area, surrounded by the industrial complexes and multi-lane motorways of Berlin-Lichtenberg. Established in 1893 as Irrenanstalt Herzberge , the hospital frequently changed in the course of the 20th century not only its name but also its ideological and medicinal-historical orientations. The stories of Herzberge - of the hundred-year-old inscriptions on the building’s red brick walls, of the 'double-bodied' newts in the Herzberg pond or of the former head of the pathology department who dedicated himself to environmental protection in the 1980s of the Eastern German GDR - are unique and at the same time embedded in larger contexts such as the global triumph of capitalism, the climate crisis and the ongoing questions about the meaning of life, healing and death, the boundaries of body and psyche and the separation of humans and nature.