Apartment Block, Kreuzberg — I

Midday, and the sun comes down almost vertically. The balcony slabs cut their shadows clean, the recesses behind them go entirely black, and everything that is lit is lit without gradation. On the roof, a teal box with a rusted ladder running up its side.

This is the building opposite my flat, photographed from the window. It appears again in Das Haus gegenüber — but there the windows, the balconies and the aerials are taken out until nobody lives in it any more. Here they stay: a satellite dish, a curtain, a pane someone has left open.

This block has stood in front of me for years, and that changes how a photograph of it comes about. There is no visit, no decision to travel, no light to be found — only the question of when. The picture is the result of waiting rather than of looking: the same window, the same wall, and the few days in the year when the sun stands high enough to flatten it.

Part of Fremde Fassaden, an ongoing series of colour-shifted façades made in Berlin, with detours to Duisburg, Visby and Douglas. See the other works made in Kreuzberg.