Sophiensæle is located in a building rich in history—a history told by the ceiling decorations, cracks in the walls, and drawings on old doors, as well as by the intangible spirits and memories that inhabit this building. The walls, stairwells, and columns also reveal much about the evolution of labor over the 120 years of its existence—and about emancipation, resistance, democratization, and self-organization, as well as the violence, coercion, and exploitation that manifested within and alongside it.

Building on the format of the Historical house tours regularly offered at Sophiensæle, three Berlin-based artists are developing new site-specific performances as commissioned works for the festival. The After Work Tours take individual moments between past and present, personal memory and political history as a starting point for artistic explorations of the building—and tell the story of how work shapes bodies, biographies, and ideas.

For over a century, Sophiensæle has been a place where people gathered around shared struggle: trade unionists, revolutionaries and more recently artists. Researching this history, dancer Laurie Young came across Milly Witkop, anarchist, syndicalist, feminist, who brought to these halls a belief that care work is labor and collective refusal is a form of power.

Young first performed here with Allee der Kosmonauten in 1996. She now wonders what the next thirty years of the building will hold. Retracing both her and Witkop’s steps, she leads a guided tour through the rooms of Sophiensæle, moving between their two moments, and asking what would happen if cultural workers ceased to work.

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