Colour Block — Kreuzberg, Berlin

An orange block seen from its corner, with a teal panel set into the face like a door nobody cut. Four short pipe stubs come out of the panel in a line, evenly spaced, each throwing a small shadow. On the roof sits a smaller box and a rusted ladder that climbs to something outside the frame.

The colour is not the building’s. It is shifted afterwards — a decision, not a record. What the camera found was the geometry and the light crossing it; what I changed was the temperature at which you read them.

Nothing here was placed to be looked at: the pipe stubs serve a vent, the ladder serves a roof, the panel closes an opening no longer in use. Photographed straight on and shifted in colour, the same objects turn into intervals — the kind of marks a painter sets to keep a large flat area from going dead.

This is the same building as in Das Haus gegenüber — the block I photograph from my window, month after month, in one fixed frame. Here it is taken from the street instead, from the side, once. Two ways of looking at the same wall. 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.