UNDECODED BERLIN

SOLO EXHIBITION BY NABUURS&VANDOORN

 

November 14 – December 12, 2025

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In the shifting, layered geography of Berlin, the artist duo Nabuurs&VanDoorn offer a new cartography of the invisible. Their practice - nomadic, research-driven, performative, has always taken territory as both archive and sensorium. Here, the city is turned inside out: Berlin becomes not simply a backdrop but a living palimpsest of fissures, traces, and future echoes. 

During their six-month residency at Scope BLN, the artists inhabit a state between arrival and departure, between gesture and inscription, where walking becomes a form of writing and the city an unstable text.

 

The central installation, Living Atlas: Berlin Score (2025), reimagines the city as a “score”: forty mapped colour-codes and one scripted line that weaves between structure and event. At first these colours seem fixed - structural elements of a cartographic system - but Nabuurs&VanDoorn deliberately disrupt that order. The colour-codes become fluid tools of navigation, mutable signifiers of perception. Presented as both score and site-specific installation, the work unfolds between painting, sculpture, and spatial choreography. Its grid subtly divides and reconfigures the exhibition space, inviting the viewer to engage physically - to unfold, to walk, to spectate. To see the work is to move through it; line by line, square by square, echoing the rhythm of the city itself.

 

As a counterpoint, the print-object The Living Atlas: Berlin Displaced Legends (2025) expands this score into a photographic dimension. Forty black-and-white images are not documents but spectral inscriptions - traces of something that once happened or might still be happen. The colour interruptions destabilise the photographic image as a truth-telling medium, transforming it into a surface of erasure and refusal.

The images are printed as free take away posters. As a form a participatory performative aspect, visitors carry the work back into the city. This multiplicity of actions is inherently performative, as the work continues to “act” in the world through others. The sculpture (stack of posters) will change each time a poster is taken away highlighting the ephemeral nature of the practice of Nabuurs&VanDoorn. 

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In Undecoded Berlin, Nabuurs & VanDoorn compose a performative architecture of looking and remembering. The exhibition becomes a choreography of attention, a mapping of the unseen infrastructures of memory and movement. Berlin emerges as both collaborator and cipher - an atlas that writes itself anew each time we walk its score.

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FINNISAGE OF UNDECODED BERLIN 

& SCREENING OF SOMETHING COULD ACTUALLY HAPPEN: ZWISCHENLANDSCHAFTEN

BY NABUURS&VANDOORN

 

Friday, December 12 at 06:00 PM

 

We kindly invite you to the finissage of the exhibition Undecoded Berlin and the screening of the film Something Could Actually Happen: Zwischenlandschaften by the artistic duo Nabuurs&VanDoorn. 

In their film, they turn Detroit’s streets into a living score. Symbols, colors, and improvised gestures guide performers through fragments of memory and archive, bending reality into a trance of chaos and cohesion. 

For 40 minutes, the city becomes play, the code a heartbeat, and the performance a seductive collision of past, present, and possible futures. Step in - something is actually going to happen. 

Performers: Ricardo Leverock (Yellow), Eleni Ploumi (Green), Kjell de Raes (Red).

 

In the exibition Undecoded Berlin, Nabuurs & VanDoorn compose a performative architecture of looking and remembering. The exhibition becomes a choreography of attention, a mapping of the unseen infrastructures of memory and movement. Berlin emerges as both collaborator and cipher - an atlas that writes itself anew each time we walk its score.

Their practice - nomadic, research-driven, performative, has always taken territory as both archive and sensorium. Here, the city is turned inside out: Berlin becomes not simply a backdrop but a living palimpsest of fissures, traces, and future echoes. 

During their six-month residency at Scope BLN, the artists inhabit a state between arrival and departure, between gesture and inscription, where walking becomes a form of writing and the city an unstable text.

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