However, with the decline of industry and the end of lignite mining, the neighborhood lost its economic and social foundation. Apartments were abandoned, entire rows of houses were boarded up, and infrastructure gradually disappeared. What remained was a fragmented urban landscape in which the past and present overlap.

Amid the remaining residents, vacant lots, and the first signs of new uses, structural change is evident here on a small scale. Lauchhammer Neustadt 1 exemplifies the question of how places can continue to exist when their original function is lost, and what new meanings emerge in the resulting voids.

For the Lausitz Biennale, one of the vacant apartment blocks will be reopened for the first time and transformed into a temporary art space. Here, questions of loss, memory, and the future are reexamined.

Artistic Positions

Christian Hasucha’s work “m i t t l e r w e i l e” adorns the approximately 50-meter-long facade of a vacant building. Taking as his starting point windows that have been bricked up and sealed with wooden panels, Hasucha engages with the existing visual patchwork and supplements it with twelve additional panels on the first floor. These feature oversized letters that together form the word “mittlerweile.” In the evening and at night, the letters become visible through light projections. As they alternately appear and disappear, “Mittlerweile” can be experienced as a state of transition.

Claudia Pilsl uses a participatory photographic technique known as camera-less photography. in which plants are imaged directly onto light-sensitive material. Together with residents, she collects native plants during walks through the neighborhood; in one of the vacant apartments, Pilsl teaches the photographic technique and creates a space for collaborative artistic work.

The artist duo Matrosenhunde presents “Nothing Is Lost Yet”, an interactive installation that transforms the building at Zillestraße 1 into a walk-in book. Large-format fabric panels hanging from windows and balconies feature drawings and text fragments from conversations with residents. Personal memories, everyday observations, and historical traces intertwine to form a multi-layered narrative. A QR code leads to expanded texts and a digital map of the locations where the conversations took place.

Anke Hannemann’s installation “VERITAS” combines a modified sewing machine from VEB Nähmaschinen Wittenberge with a historic wedding photograph of her great-grandparents in Sorbian traditional dress. The machine sews ceaselessly in reverse with a gold-plated needle—a process that produces no product but rather negates itself. This movement becomes a symbol of the attempt to preserve the past without actually being able to bring it back.

The participatory project “Spurlos verschwunden” by Frida Teller and Marie Kublik explores the visibility of female poets in the GDR and today. In workshops, texts by female authors from the GDR enter into dialogue with contemporary voices. Three writing workshops are complemented by two embroidery workshops, in which verses and personal statements are transferred onto fabric.

At the center of Anja Nürnberg’s large-format charcoal drawings “Ikarus 280.3 – Voices of Lower Lusatia” is the Ikarus 280.3 articulated bus—once a defining element of everyday life in the GDR. The works condense memories of crowded bus rides, the smell of diesel and coal dust, and social dynamics (“Schlenki” and “Schlipsbus”) into an atmospheric visual space.

Louisa Frauenheim is developing a sound-floor installation in a former bus stop waiting area. Several megaphones intermittently produce the roar of jackhammers, followed by periods of absolute silence. This rhythmic sequence becomes a physical experience and points to tensions between labor and destruction, progress and overwhelming demands.

Through intensive research and the compilation of curated artifacts, a space emerges that reflects on the past and present while simultaneously opening up future scenarios that can be experienced through biotechnological processes. The installation combines Sorbian folklore, GDR ephemera, historical objects, and laboratory elements into a hybrid experiential space in which the boundaries between fact and fiction are deliberately blurred. The result is Bernhard Schipper’s Sorbian Futurism.

The video work “Letzte Kumpel” by Johannes Weilandt portrays four former miners from the Mansfeld region and their perspectives on a vanished world of work. The focus is on memories of physical labor, camaraderie, and the loss of a system that defined their identity. Today, the protagonists meet at a shooting club—a new social space in post-industrial daily life.

An accompanying discussion format invites the audience to engage directly with the themes.