After the fall, policy makers decided what needed to be archived. What is corroding is the site itself: it holds the traces of different passages. The walls of the entrance, and almost the entire building, are filled with graffiti. We see different layers of passage, and we witness that the official circulation was not adapted — instead we see traces outside the main route, the way brambles take over a garden enclosure.

There are many ways to look at the escape German officials took in order not to face, phenomenologically, the choices that had been made before them. But the focus on telling what was wrong in the East takes the resources away from understanding what went wrong. Every aspect of the East is deemed to bear responsibility for the collapse, and what they did wrong takes the form of: they are wrong, and we have to show it. We stop stirring the conversation around the details that could unravel the intent of the loser, and understand where the failure arose.

Beside the rusting fence stands a multitude of graffiti, themselves showing signs of wear. Zoé began to photograph them — as if the thing preserved next to the wall that separated the two Germanys is how it is being occupied, unguarded. The passer-through was not a guest but an inhabitant, who made decisions to permanently change a space so that it represented their imagination.

Today the building has multiple auras: one that leaks although it is protected, another that owns although it is only passing. The tension is a house that pushes artists through a cave of traces, both regarded as undesired — one that wants a uniform wall, and another that wants light to shine through the staircase and the building protected against the rain.

The aura of the building is, among many things, this accumulation of delays that makes the “unique apparition of a distance”. The project uses archiving and digital publishing as a method of digital reproduction that can substitute plurality for uniqueness. It looks at territorialising through monumentalisation, and scrutinises German memory culture after the fall of Berlin. It examines addressability in creating metadata for graffiti that assume ephemerality — a cave worth discovering — in the hope of understanding how we can create universal human histories, and how opacity can carry history as a rescue of the future and not as its cause. The first step is mapping these graffiti, which hold the traces of the East German soldiers who guarded the wall from the roof of the building.

This is the lineage the archive would hold. Bus mechanics, people’s-works labourers, border guards, squatters and today cultural workers have each left marks and habits in these rooms; repair or surveillance, confinement or escape, dispossession or self-building remain legible in the brick. What accumulates is a space at once physical and psychic, where the creative and intellectual life housed here now is inseparable from the somatic memory of everyone who worked, watched, was watched, and began again within these walls.