Leire Pérez Dezcallar and Matthias Beckmann
Artists in Residence: Berlin and Sineu 2025
Duration: until 9 November 2025
This year, Leire Pérez Dezcallar and Matthias Beckmann completed the exchange programme with the new cooperation partner espai sant Marc on Mallorca.
Matthias Beckmann worked intensively on Sineu, a place that still breathes something of the old Mallorca and its history, but is of course also affected by the tourism that characterises the island. He produced numerous coloured drawings, some of which are presented in the exhibition.
Leire Pérez Dezcallar
“The neighborhood felt familiar from the very beginning. Its inhabitants, coming from many different countries, seek ways to communicate within an urban landscape full of contrasts. Vegetation grows through the cracks in the concrete, climbs effortlessly over walls, while graffiti leaves its fleeting marks on doors and facades. Between plants and people, the city seems to fill every gap, as if trying to counteract the fear of emptiness: that horror vacui which nature and urban art strive to dispel.
During my residency, I explored Lichtenberg, pausing at places where the urban and the vegetal meet. This exploration became the starting point for a pictorial and installation-based artwork that imagines new ways of inhabiting the city, focusing on those spaces that act as small reservoirs of hope.
Each place visited reveals a story, a tension, or a possibility for dialogue with nature. They are spaces of encounter, shared culture, collective care, or collaborative construction.
I was particularly struck by the parks that emerge almost unexpectedly every few meters: places where plant life grows freely, untamed. In some of them, community gardens transform into spaces of shared learning and coexistence. Among the places I explored are the Landschaftspark Herzberge, the Community Garden and the Intercultural Garden Lichtenberg.
From this exploration emerged a large vertical canvas (160 × 350 cm), created through photographic transfer and acrylic painting. Each section combines images of real buildings from the neighborhood with painted vegetal forms, building a visual narrative oriented toward hope. Large eyes appear among the wild vegetation, representing the invisible gazes of the inhabitants, as if observing the city from within nature itself. Roots intertwine and spread, much like the green heating pipes (Fernwärmeleitungen) or the railway tracks that cross the area, forming living networks that sustain daily life in the neighborhood.
The work invites us to see the vegetal world not as a mere decorative background, but as an active presence: symbolic, political, and sensitive. In this way, the Lichtenberg neighborhood becomes a living metaphor for that invisible, interconnected ecosystem that sustains urban life.”
Pictures: Mattias Beckmann
