While Tempelhof was a thriving industrial district in the early 20th century, nowadays, its old industrial neighborhoods seem mostly composed of empty buildings and ruins – an eclectic mix of car workshops, junkyards, wholesalers and food delivery services scarcely populate some of its areas that otherwise feel left behind from another time. The aim of the exhibition on animated architecture and the group seminar that took place in the months leading up to it, is to point at the act of abandoning through a critical lens, highlighting the burden that outdated infrastructure represents within urban ecosystems, while stressing the tension between public and private space as well as the power dynamics at play in urban planning.

Shaped by a series of discussions moderated by curator Guilherme Vilhena Martins, on animated architecture seeks to point at notions such as ‘waste’, ‘purification’, ‘extraction’, and ‘hegemony’. The exhibition at soft power, an art space itself located in a former and largely empty factory building in the old industrial district of Tempelhof, presents a group of works that range from sculpture to photography and video installation – staging a dissection of still life that sketches the possibility of critique based on different instances of emotional response, thus hinting at a sense of gesture and animation; a careful touch among the waste.