The Berlin-based artist duo Calla Henkel (b. 1988, US) and Max Pitegoff (b. 1987, US) have been working together for over a decade. Together, they found and run venues as catalysts for collaborative artistic work. Their expanded documentation of these spaces traces the economic, structural, and often personal systems that build shared spaces, taking form through photographs texts and narratives. From 2013 to 2015 they ran New Theater, a storefront in Berlin-Kreuzberg where they wrote and produced plays with artists, writers and musicians. Since August 2019, they have been running TV, a bar, performance space and film studio in Berlin-Schöneberg.

Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff, Paradise, Episode 1: Tara & Josef, 2020
16mm film transferred to video on loop, oil on linen
22’30’’
Commissioned by Manifesta 13 Marseille
Supported by ifa Gallery
With: Artur Chruszsz, Joel Cocks, Milo Conroy, Kim Everett, Natascha
Goldenberg, Ann Göbel, Mia Goyette, Karl Holmqvist, Lisa Jo, Tarren
Johnson, Juan Pablo Larrain, Josip Novosel, Sarah Rosengarten, Ehsan
Morshed Sefat, Stefanie Sprinz, Talin Seigmann, Sabina Maria van der Linden

Paradise is the fictional bar that serves as the setting for Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff’s ongoing tv series, shot at their own bar, TV, in Berlin. Cast with a mix of bar regulars and employees, actors and neighbours, and set in 2023, Paradise is part documentary, part tv show. The show imagines a near future where a dystopian political landscape is offset by the possibility of hope and collective action. Paradise’s central characters are employed both as bartenders and newscasters by an ominously absent boss who seeks to transform the bar into a human-centred local news channel. Each of the employees reads prepared speeches to customers from teleprompters as the boss films their every move. Over the course of the show, the workers try to take control of their own narrative, ultimately penning their own scripts and transforming the bar into a worker-owned cooperative – but at what cost?

* Work conceived for the occasion of Manifesta 13 Marseille