"Experimentation and freedom": Inside the exhibition documenting the history of Berlin techno – Mixmag

What do you hope to achieve when people visit the exhibition?

For me it's important that you get a sense of really telling a visual history of the Berlin club culture since the wall came down and since the techno scene really started in Berlin through the eyes of these very different photographers and artists. I would also like to show maybe just a sense of experimentation and freedom and the space that we've had in Berlin for the past 30 years and I think this kind of freedom and diversity in the club scene still exists today. I think this club scene is under pressure and you see clubs closing and while I think it's still a very important part of Berlin I think it's also something that's worth fighting for. This freedom that we have in Berlin is not something you can take for granted and each generation has to fight for it or make it happen and I worry that maybe in a couple of years time we will look back at this period and see that something has been lost or that it doesn't exist in this sense any longer so that's also part of the reason for this exhibition.

The clubs in Berlin could only happen because there was a lot of sense for experimentation for example the clubs in the early 90s, they were in empty buildings in the central heart of Berlin, you could get them for very, very cheap rent because they were empty and then you just said, I want to run a gallery and then you just did a gallery opening with a DJ, selling drinks every night. But you only got a 3-month lease so you were running something on the assumption that it could be over in 3 months.

But gentrification in Berlin forces a club to close and clubs are being driven further out of the city center and with these economic pressures it's just getting a bit safer, and there's less room for experiments and I see there's a threat of that being lost.

Would you want the exhibition to be taken elsewhere also? Or do you feel it would be more appropriate to keep it in Berlin?

I think it resonates a lot with Berlin and it's also no accident that the exhibition happens now, on the 30th anniversary of the wall coming down because the scene wouldn't have been possible without this. On the other hand, there's so many people visiting Berlin and seeing this exhibition and I see that there's a great interest. I think that's there's certain values that are inspiring other clubs around the world, for example in Georgia. So yes, I would like to see this exhibition travel and we are talking to some museum spaces at the moment but we don't have anything fixed yet.

Read this next: How the fall of the Berlin wall shaped techno

What does the fall of the wall mean to you personally?

It had one of the most single biggest impacts on me as a person: I was a teenager in West Berlin when the wall came down and then just 4 months later I went to the first techno party and it was one of the first techno parties happening in Berlin. It was one-and-a-half years before the first techno club Tresor opened, and what happened in these months and years after the wall came down is that saying that reunification first happened in Germany on the dancefloor and at least for me and the generation of people that I went out with you can definitely say that that was the case because what happened is that people came from West and East, they came together in spaces that were completely new to both of them. It was a great thing to discover for everyone, and then this radical new form of music, it really created a sense of being in this together maybe just for a night but the sense of a community has been really influential and has really shaped my life and that of many others.

How do you feel the fall of the wall has impacted music in the past 30 years?

What you also have to remember is these early techno parties in Berlin, that was a time when you couldn't play techno records for a whole night because the genre was still so new that you didn't have enough records, so the DJ would play New Beat from Belgium or Underground Resistance records but also Electronic Body Music and it's this mixture of styles that came to be known as techno.

Then once the scene started a lot of DJs started to produce music, a lot of producers said we're formally doing music and they really started making techno tracks and especially what I think was very influential was through the wall coming down and spaces like Tresor happening, this is what formed the beginning of this relationship between Berlin and Detroit, this still has an impact to this day.

Do you feel the techno scene is just as inspiring and influential today as it was 30 years ago?

In a way yes, I think so. For me this is not music of the past, it's still something very current. On the other hand I have to say I am of a generation which has lived through the beginning, the excitement of seeing something completely new happening, that's something every generation has to go through for themselves, but there's nothing really that's followed up after techno.

When house and techno happened, you really had a completely different way of going out that's still intact today and I don't see anything radically changing this. For me techno is still the last European youth movement that has happened, so in that sense it's not as radical any longer, but on the other hand there's so many great tracks being made and great things being developed that it's still very exciting.

No Photos On The Dancefloor is currently running at C/O Berlin until 30th November

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"Experimentation and freedom": Inside the exhibition documenting the history of Berlin techno - Mixmag