2021
032c X KaDeWe
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Public-Facing Systems Activation (COVID)
Creative & Production Lead
Context
In early 2021, when public life was contracting under COVID restrictions, we were invited to reimagine the storefront window of one of Berlin’s oldest and most emblematic department stores — KaDeWe — not as a commercial display but as an interface between culture and public space. At the same time, Berlin’s experimental music festival circuit was grappling with how to exist in a world where venues and audiences were physically distant. The challenge was not simply aesthetic activation; it was responding to a moment where culture, technology, fashion, and physical place were all in suspension.
This experience treated 032c not as a publication, but as an editorial system, translating its intellectual rigor, contradiction, and cultural synthesis into a spatial encounter.
The design emphasized pacing, friction, and intentional ambiguity, allowing visitors to read the environment the way one reads a text.
Concept
Rather than treating the window as a conventional retail headset or branding surface, the project framed the storefront as an experiential threshold — a place where layered systems (fashion, music, public space, and technology) could be brought into a coherent encounter. The window became a broadcast to the public, extending festival energy into daily urban circulation, and introducing experimental sound, visual loops, and technological signals into a space reconditioned by pandemic life. It positioned KaDeWe not as commerce, but as a cultural broadcast medium during a time when traditional venues were silent.
Approach
We designed a multi-modal encounter that operated both physically and conceptually. Spatial elements were deployed in the window in concert with sound and digital logic, creating a sculptural piece that read clearly from the street, but also had depth, rhythm, and a relationship to ongoing experimental music cultures in Berlin. The installation referenced media structures — loops, sequences, and patterns familiar to both fashion and technology — so that it felt like a public cultural pulse rather than an advertisement.
Creative Leadership & Execution
I led the creative strategy and production execution, translating a multidisciplinary concept into reality under unprecedented constraints. This required intense coordination with cultural collaborators, music technologists, designers, KaDeWe stakeholders, and city permissions. A core responsibility was maintaining the integrity of the idea across every dimension — visual, sonic, spatial — while managing the practical realities of fabricating, installing, and presenting the work in a public, highly visible environment during a global health crisis.
Outcome
The installation expanded what a retail window could be: not a surface for messaging, but a conduit for cultural exchange. It seamlessly fused fashion, experimental music, and media art within an urban public realm that had momentarily lost its usual vitality. The work was met not as a “storefront piece” but as a public signal — a cultural pulse visible to everyday passersby, responding to the anxieties and dislocations of the moment with presence, rhythm, and systems coherence.
