CIRCLING THE VOID

At the centre of Fassler’s current drawing series is Berlin’s Schlossplatz, the site of the reconstructed City Palace. Though located in the heart of the city and crossed daily by tourists, it remains an indeterminate, windswept space and a persistent historical sore spot. Berlin’s urban landscape reflects repeated attempts to overwrite the past, from Prussian rule through National Socialism and the GDR. Successive regimes sought to erase what came before, yet their traces remain, producing a city defined by layered and unresolved histories.

In Circling the Void, Fassler examines both historical erasure and the gap between urban planning and lived experience. Over several months, she visited Schlossplatz daily, recording movements, encounters, and fleeting details, from tourist photo angles and street scams to light, weather, and moments of solitude or humour. Seen from a planner’s bird’s-eye view, these observations accumulate in dense visual constellations. Moving between delicate geometric structures and immersive allover compositions, the drawings merge documentation and abstraction, functioning as both a record of time and place and a formal experiment in seeing and mapping the city.