Thirty years ago, when the Berlin Wall came down, the city was left with huge swaths of empty buildings in the former East: old German Democratic Republic embassies and factory complexes, some still riddled with toxic waste. It was both a daunting and heady opportunity for Berlin to reinvent itself and start over. Artists and musicians moved into abandoned breweries, warehouses and basements and slowly brought new life to neighborhoods like Mitte, Prenzlauer Berg and Pankow, which in turn attracted people from around the world. But now, thanks to rising rents, Berlin’s gentrified areas have become too expensive for many of its creative residents, and people have begun to move to farther-flung corners of the city. Three such neighborhoods are the historically industrial areas of Treptow-Köpenick, Rummelsburg and Oberschöneweide, 10 or so miles southeast of the city center, where some of Berlin’s most pioneering artists now occupy a string of former industrial buildings along the Spree River. It is in Oberschöneweide, too, that the Berlin gallerist Johann König, who represents several artists who have moved their studios to the area, is currently negotiating to take over and revive an old cable factory that will host artist studios and residencies. Although the area’s landscape may look post-apocalyptic, with its giant weeds and empty power plants, strangely, the future here can seem positively Arcadian: Real estate is still cheap enough that artists are able to buy, rather than rent, their spaces. Here, four artists discuss how their work is shaped by the Spree.

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