Scanning the Horizon: Queer Spaces Berlin, 2021
Interactive website with point cloud scans and audio interviews
Online: queerspaces.berlin
“We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality.” —José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia
Scanning the Horizon: Queer Spaces Berlin aims to create a digital archive of selected queer spaces in Berlin. It currently hosts ten spaces that were digitally captured by Benjamin Busch using an architectural LiDAR scanner and then made accessible online. The spatial portraits are expanded through interviews with the space operators, allowing the locations to speak for themselves and tell their own story. Audio transcripts are available in English and German. The project sees itself more as a listening practice. In it, the cold and ostensibly neutral gaze of the scanner is complemented by the warm data of the interview.
Scanning the Horizon premiered alongside a panel discussion with representatives from the spaces at the Schwules Museum in Berlin on December 9, 2021.