Photos by Danilo Serra
Thanks to: Melitta Ott, Nikolas Ott, Henry Wilke and Michael Deflorian
Danilo Sierra (1988), born and raised in Honduras, is a photographer currently based in Berlin.
This project aims to show the modern-time ruins located in Blankenburger Pflasterweg at the outskirts of Berlin. Once a prison of the German Democratic Republic, then police training facility, and later abandoned circa 1990, is now a place of decay, slow time, hidden art, vandalism and architecture-is-losing-the-argument-with-nature.
Time shows no mercy, and this compound is a proper example. The urban environment is always changing, and, in most cases, time flows in similar ways for everybody. However, there are bubbles in which the time stops, gets frozen, or just flows slower. In this place, the time indeed takes another pace, in fact, summer 2012 turned into the 90’s and then 2006 (considering the pop culture figures in the posters and the dates of the latest newspapers found there). Cars pass by in longer intervals, trees swing less, and human activity lags. Nature, on the other side, takes its place back, filling corners with sprouts, holes with branches, and walks its own way across the remains of the paved ground developing a whole organic metamorphosis. In silence.