Berlin 1: Feuerle

Ngozi Nwadiogbu
Aug 25, 2017 · 3 min read

We huddle in this dark, dark, almost pitch black room with mere inches between bodies. We are eighteen, four over the allotted amount, ushered into an empty room to be cleansed.

We were warned three times before about this place. Once in writing, and twice by our guides. Skip this, they said, if you are claustrophobic or afraid of darkness. You will be sheathed in black. The absence of light rids you of any sense of distance, depth; all your conveneient measuring tools be damned. Disorienting, disassociating, special. These are the words they used.

When I first entered the Feuerle Collection I wasn’t sure what to expect. The museum, located in a reappropriated bunker from the second World War, seemed not much more than a slab of stone from the outside. It was a lot of cold, hard rock. Aesthetic appeal seemed secondary to stability, though its shape undoubtedly fits into Berlin’s eclectic mishmash of architecture and urban design. What lies within, however, took me by surpise.

The first room acts as a leveller. Virtually everything is burned away by the dark. Time, space, names, silhouettes, questions, and preconceptions are all vanished when the first chord of John Cage’s minimalist score hits the air. In their place, a weight settles. You turn the corner and feel choked by atmosphere.

In an open space, held up by raw stone columns, sits a resting place. Or at least that’s what it feels like. A handful of statues, large and small, are placed purposefully across the room. The light reflects off them and off their glass cages, creating duplicates. Suddenly there’s a crowned figure on the floor here and there, on the mirror too three times over; one becomes a crowd and the sculpture is compounded, pushing in from all sides.

These dieties are mutilated, almost all of their arms have been cut above the joint. It is not clear whether they were somehow all lost in the years since their creation, casualities of time, or if their injury was recent, intentional. Regardless, the statues seemed to look upon us as the luckiest of spectators. Had it not been for their missing limbs, their confident gazes and smiles said they would surely strike us down. Being in that room, in their presence, and coming out alive? A miracle.

Many of the collection’s other pieces: intricate furniture from Imperial China, more abstract and jagged sculpture works, and one enamoring commissioned piece resembling the roots of a great tree, all impress upon visitors the unique energy of the bunker. It is a place where miracles, like surviving nuclear fallout, could happen. Parts of the Feuerle are deeply spiritual. Others, perhaps not.

Some of the collection’s erotic, slightly fetishistic photography, withdrew me from the emotional resonance of the rest. F0r me, at least, it felt out of place, indulgent, sounded off alarms in my mind that questioned intent and authorship. But the Feuerle has no labels, no signatures; our private tour offered little in terms of explanation and so I was left with my gut feeling. To some degree, this is fitting, I think. A lot of the unique exhibition had been just that. Raw and unfiltered.

I left the bunker high on mystery and quiet. The sun was shining and pedestrians were walking and cars were rushing by on the road outside. Not a speck of darkness.

It was good to find the world still turning.

On the walk home, I thought: An interesting place. A sensory experience. A telling beginning to my life in Berlin.

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