der himmel unter berlin

In April 2026 I was invited to be the artist for Diversity Day (Tag der Vielfalt), organising a workshop with 100 children from 4 primary schools in Berlin that would culminate in a monumental sculpture.

After hearing what the kids wanted – to play with their bodies, meet each other and have fun – I decided to create a huge cyanotype workshop that would eventually transform into a giant tent.
After a lot of preparation, the workshop took place on a very feared rainy day, yet somehow, through playful thinking and good energies, we managed to find alternatives for the objectives to be met : moving, meeting, playing.

Der Himmel unter Berlin was born : a collective artwork about diversity, play, shelter and the sky itself.

The sky became our medium, without which the prints could not exist. Play shaped the forms. Diversity formed the tent.

Referencing Wim Wenders’ Der Himmel über Berlin – but instead of angels watching over the city, the protagonists are Berlin kids meeting each other beneath the same sky, under this collective cyanotype sky of their own making.
One tent was created for each school, each existing on its own while also forming one giant shared structure for larger gatherings.

The tent became a metaphor for the sky itself : a shared shelter where everyone can exist, dream, play and have space.

The symbol of the tent holds many realities at once. At home, a tent becomes a world of memories, imagination and safety — a space where children invent stories of their own. In nature, it reminds us both of our fragility and of our distance from the natural world, needing shelter in order to feel safe within it, while also evoking adventure, simplicity and reconnection. In nomadic cultures, the tent is not temporary but a true home : mobile, adaptable and deeply tied to ways of living that are increasingly threatened with disappearance. Nowadays, the tent carries more precarious meanings — migration, displacement and the temporary shelters offered to people forced to flee their homes, suspended between one place left behind and another still unknown.

For Diversity Day, I wanted to hold all these meanings together: to remember how quickly life can change and how important it is that everyone can find shelter somewhere – whether physical or within themselves – and above all, make sure that everyone has the space to do so.