Ariane Müller: „Monument für Schröderstrasse“. Invited by Elisa R. Linn as part of „Public Afterlife“

Drawing on her research into counter-public spheres in the GDR and in the years following the fall of the Berlin Wall, Linn introduces the two artistic contributions with a reading from Sybille Bergemann’s *Das Denkmal* (1975–1986) and from *Das Gespenst verlässt Europa* (1990) by Heiner Müller and Sybille Bergemann. In the ensuing discussions, Linn and the artists explore which political narratives continue to resonate through the presence and absence of a monument, and how art reshapes public space in this context.

Monument for Schröderstrasse

Ariane Müller speaks about her work *Monument for Schröderstrasse* (2005), which examines the social and spatial practices that emerged after 1989 in the ruins of post-socialism and have since largely disappeared in the wake of urban renewal and gentrification. Taking Schröderstrasse—a temporary, self-organized art space in East Berlin that can no longer exist in its original form—as its starting point, the work reconstructs elements of this site within a museum. By inverting the relationship between interior and exterior space, the work simultaneously subverts the very logic of the monument itself. The multitude of doors and the reconstructed surroundings refer both to the openness of self-organized spaces and to the paradox of wanting to preserve them within a museum. How can (counter)monuments—understood not only as objects but as practices—keep political utopias alive and put into practice the right to the city as a collective shaping of urban space?

Ariane Müller is an artist and author living in Berlin and Vienna. *Monument for Schröderstrasse* was created for the exhibition *Situation* (2005) at the MCA Sydney, which compared the art scenes of Sydney, Singapore, and Berlin. The work also served as the starting point for the Museum of Society and Economy, a space that has so far existed exclusively online, conceived by Ariane Müller, which seeks visual—but not symbolic—signs of the social and political movements of our time.

Ariane Müller is the founder and editor of the magazine *Starship* as well as the publishing house of the same name. There she has published, among other works, books by Annette Wehrmann, Martin Kippenberger, and Hans-Christian Dany. Her first novel, *Handbuch für die Reise durch Afrika* (Handbook for a Journey Through Africa), was published in 2013 by the Museum of Contemporary Art Basel. She was a professor of art and text at the HfBK Offenbach and taught in the master’s program in Umeå, Sweden. Last year, her work was featured in a solo exhibition at the Vienna Secession.

Elisa R. Linn (Elisa Linn Roguszczak) is a curator, researcher, and author. She founded and directs Bard College Berlin’s first curatorial studies program, *Spaces of Appearances: Exhibitions as Counter-Public Spheres*. From 2022 to 2025, Linn served as co-director of the Halle für Kunst Lüneburg e.V., where she curated retrospectives of Jürgen Baldiga, Terre Thaemlitz, and Sophie Reinhold, among others. She completed the Whitney Independent Study Program. At the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, she is pursuing her doctoral degree under Marina Gržinić, researching the Berlin Wall as a “condom” in the context of counter-public spheres and migration aesthetics in the GDR. Linn has taught at numerous institutions and, during the summer semester of 2022, served as a visiting professor for the Chair of Art Theory and Art Education (Prof. Dr. Kerstin Stakemeier) at the Academy of Fine Arts in Nuremberg. Since 2012, she has co-directed the curatorial collective km temporaer; since 2021, she has also co-organized the Film Club of Polish Failures in Berlin-Mitte.

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