2015, 2K video, 30’25”, color, sound

Westkreuz, in the west of Berlin, is the point where the city motorway crosses the railway lines. Traffic islands, a lorry park and strips of overgrown ground lie in between, and the noise covers all of it. Two hitchhikers have to stay the night in a place that is built to be passed through. The camera mostly stands still and keeps them small inside this geometry. Marc Augé used the term non-place for spaces of this kind, and for what they do to the people inside them.

The film follows the two hitchhikers after a failed attempt to stop a car leaves them on a dead feeder road. They carry rucksacks and a tent; the luggage points to a distance already covered. The search for a sheltered spot turns into a reconnaissance of the site itself. The 2014 shoot proceeded situatively. The scenes took their cues from the location as much as from the script.

The film’s frame of reference is Augé’s Non-Places (1992): transit spaces that can no longer be read as relational, historical or concerned with identity, and that create “only solitude, and similitude”. Nomaden tests that diagnosis on two bodies that have stopped circulating. Again and again the camera slips into their subjective view, so that the passing traffic, constant and directed, becomes the measure against which their own suspended time is felt. With nightfall the interchange shifts from backdrop to presence.

At Westkreuz, concrete walls hold back the embankments the roadway sits on. The guardrail is dimensioned for the impact of a car, not for leaning on. The bridge is calculated for load; the gap underneath it is a by-product. In Non-Places Augé describes the condition of entry: anonymity in return for proof of identity, a ticket or a boarding pass. Whoever produces it becomes nothing but a passenger and is carried through. The two at the junction have nothing to produce. There is no roof except the underside of the bridge, and no ground that was laid out to be stood on.