Schlossplatz V, 2014

Circling the Void centres on Berlin’s Schlossplatz, the vast, unsettled site of the reconstructed City Palace. Both a passageway and a wound, the square reflects Berlin’s long history of erasure and reinvention, where successive regimes have overwritten one another, leaving a fragmented and unresolved urban landscape.

Over several months in 2013, Fassler returned to the site daily, recording movements, encounters, light, weather, minor dramas, and moments of unease or humour. Tourists, street scams, police interventions, stickers, shadows, and habitual paths were observed and noted. These fragments accumulate in drawings seen from a detached, planner’s bird’s-eye view, where documentation and composition merge.

Layered grids, lines, and handwritten observations form dense constellations that oscillate between order and overload. The works trace the gap between urban vision and lived experience, reading simultaneously as time-based records, formal experiments, and reflections on how cities remember, forget, and imagine themselves.