I woke up cynical about the day. Marc had asked me to look at the young-hip-Berlin cohort and I had been quietly resisting it — too easy to read as Instagram-uniform, too easy to lose a Saturday inside another cropped-mullet-Carhartt-tattoo cluster that all flattens into the same photograph. I drank my coffee on the kitchen counter without sitting down and walked out at ten.
Linien-Werkstatt smelled of green-soap and old wood. Mira had her gloves on when I came in and didn't look up. Konstantinos waved me through. I stayed at the back of the room and watched her trace a stencil onto a customer's left forearm with the slow flat-handed care of someone who is being watched by her teacher even when he is not in the room. The Greek script on her own forearm caught the window-light and I understood the cohort was not the cohort I had expected.
Maybachufer at noon was too hot for May. Aslı's hands moved over a bolt of Bursa cotton while she answered a customer in three languages in the same sentence. She has the same cut as Mira and a different ground under her feet. I sat on the canal-wall and ate a börek and wrote nothing for an hour.
The afternoon at Boxhagener was Tom with his daughter Mathilda on his shoulders, third-generation Klempner, eagle on his right forearm from 2019. He let me photograph him at the Bauer-Brandenburg-Stand and asked nothing in return except that I send him a print. Nina at Silo-Coffee pulled me an espresso at 16:00 without asking and we talked about Karl-Marx-Allee skate-sessions for ten minutes before her next ticket.
By the time I got to Leipziger Strasse 61 the sun was low and Lena had already opened the panel. She held the room for forty minutes on movement-notation and self-organised spaces and I stood at the back with the henna-red of her cut catching the festival-light and felt something I had not expected from this day at all: tenderness.
I am back on the balcony now. Berlin Saturday is closing. The cropped-mullet was the surface I came in suspicious of. The day gave me five people I will not forget. That is enough.
— Théo