
Stadtreinigung
Wschód for Art Basel - Statements
16-21.06.2026












Stadtreinigung brings together scenography, architectural sculpture, digitally controlled woodworking, video slideshow, and sound collage to examine the environmental, material, and psychological consequences of urban waste, using Berlin as a case study. The exhibition traverses the city, reading its landscape in museological terms, considering how societies select urban artefacts for preservation, archiving, or conservation. It draws on the history of urban planning and city-cleaning practices, examining contemporary relations between reconstruction, waste, and urban development.
The title Stadtreinigung refers to the Berliner Stadtreinigungsbetriebe (BSR), one of Europe’s most significant municipal waste management institutions. The installation and accompanying works map infrastructures of waste management, scrap yards, wastewater treatment plants, landfills, and sites of wartime destruction, treating disposal practices as a framework for examining how value is assigned and organised within society.
The exhibition consists of two sculptural forms whose visual language draws on half- scale roll-off waste containers. It endeavours to capture man-made landscapes emptied of human presence, foregrounding traces of habitation and use. Recessed vitrines embedded within the lefthand side container houses fictional cameras, with viewfinders acting as peepholes leading to the screens beneath. The first video documents street-level refuse, while the second surveys processing facilities, wastelands, and construction sites. Enclosed speakers emit a collage of industrial construction and highway recordings, inviting engagement with waste as a multi-sensory phenomenon. The righthand side container functions as a fragmented partition, presenting bricolage sculptural forms that translate waste-management-related architecture into fragmentary models. While the slideshows depict observed reality, the sculptures introduce a speculative perspective, reframing contemporary waste-management technologies as artifacts of an uncertain future.