HFBK

Anna Scalfi Eghenter (Artist) and Valentina Viviani (Assistant Curator, 13.⁠ ⁠Berlin Biennale) in conversation with Nora Sternfeld (Professor of Art Education at HFBK Hamburg) about the project Clearing House / Die Komödie! [The Comedy!]

As part of the 13th Berlin Biennale, artist Anna Scalfi Eghenter realized the installation Clearing House / Die Komödie! [The Comedy!] in 2025 at the former military court building on Lehrter Straße, where Karl Liebknecht was convicted in 1916 for his resistance to the First World War. The title refers to Liebknecht’s exclamation “Die Komödie!” (“The Comedy!”) after the courtroom had been cleared. In the entrance area of the installation, red leaflets swirled through the space — reprints of the pamphlets with which Liebknecht called on workers on May 1, 1916 to refuse the “fratricide” of war.

With Clearing House / Die Komödie! [The Comedy!], Anna Scalfi Eghenter extends this historical and political inquiry into the digital and urban realm. Through a web-based platform, users around the world can enter their own interests, initiatives, needs, and forms of protest. These inputs are translated in real time into cartographic and visual patterns and transmitted back into the Biennale exhibition space. The result is a collective, immaterial cartography of shared concerns that connects local initiatives and experiments with new forms of political and artistic participation.

The event will discuss the relationship between art, activism, and technology, as well as the question of how collective action and solidarity can be organized today beyond the logics of economic exploitation and commodification.

The project is supported by the Italian Council Program of the Italian Ministry of Culture.