Over recent months, we’ve witnessed the city slashing cultural budgets. In February, Berlin’s Minister for Culture Joe Chialo announced an additional €15 million in cuts. People are desperate to preserve their spaces – The Berliner has well-documented the struggle to keep Berlin culture alive. One particular project has been documenting queer cultural venues in an incredibly creative way…
These venues aren’t glossy, million-euro tourist attractions backed by corporate interests.
An initiative titled Scanning the Horizon: An Immersive Archive is capturing the city’s queer establishments threefold: on a website, through audio interviews with the scene’s protagonists and through a unique virtual reality experience. Created by US-born visual artist Benjamin Busch, Scanning the Horizon looks deep into the spaces to document the past and present of uniquely queer Berlin environments.
So far, 11 places make up the online archive, including cornerstones of queer life in the city: BEGiNE, Ficken 3000, the Gründerzeitmuseum, Moviemento (home of Xposed Queer Film Festival), Möbel-Olfe, Monster Ronson’s, Prinz Eisenherz, Silverfuture, SO36 (and Gayhane), Sonntags-Club and Südblock. “The spaces are so chimeric that I can attach the word queer to it, because that’s what the word is,” Busch explained to me at his Schöneweide studio.
Documenting these spaces – where we have lived, loved, drank, fucked, cried and more – is absolutely indispensable
These places are so vital to queer life and to Berlin, each essential in shaping our utopias (a nod to José Esteban Muñoz’ 2009 landmark Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity which Busch cited as an inspiration) in the Hauptstadt.
These venues aren’t glossy, million-euro tourist attractions backed by corporate interests. They are grassroots, community-driven hubs – places built by and for queer people, shaped by decades of activism, creativity and resilience. These are the Kiez bars and gathering spots, the intimate darkrooms, the spaces carved out for women and voices from the former East and the all-night dancefloors alive with music from cultures around the world.
You might wonder: if these places still exist, why is there an urgency to archive them now? Busch answers: “Only in the present is it possible to document these spaces in three dimensions, and thus to archive them.” The project was conceived in 2020 and took shape between 2021 and 2024, during which Busch meticulously created 3D scans of more than 30 locations. Seven of these locations can be explored through a virtual reality headset, allowing users to walk through the digital recreations of the establishments, complete with immersive audio interviews.
Once inside Busch’s VR realm, I was immediately drawn in, exploring my favourite haunts like Ficken 3000, SO36 and Moviemento, listening to stories by Richard Stein, one of the minds behind Südblock and the individual responsible for getting queer parties into SO36. There are also fantastic interviews with Monster Ronson’s Ron Rineck and punk-drag artist Bleach, alongside comprehensive discussions at Moviemento, featuring owners Iris Praefke and Wulf Sörgel.
“I started it in 2021 and never claimed it to be complete. It will never be complete,” Busch explained to me. There’s such a vast number of queer spaces in Berlin – all of varying scope, size and legacy – that any claim otherwise would be false.
Through the immersive experience, I realised that while much of Berlin is fighting for funding to sustain its culture, many of these local venues receive little or no support. They are the homes we built, and are just as vital as the city’s more conventional cultural institutions, such as The Berliner Ensemble, Deutsche Oper Berlin and Pop-Kultur. “We need to stick together, our communities are important – beyond whatever grants come our way when the sun is shining … My work tries to support communities,” Busch concludes.
Documenting these spaces – where we have lived, loved, drank, fucked, cried and more – is absolutely indispensable. Sometimes, acknowledging what we have and fighting for the future are one and the same.
- Explore the online archives at queerspaces.berlin and follow Benjamin Busch on IG @benbusch.
