Ben de Biel: Elegantly Wasted / Ritter Butzke Berlin

"Your brain urgently needs a holiday"

This is what the Ritter Butzke flyers say and the result is, of course, "From euphoric to exhausted". Ritter Butzke was set up by Johann von Jena and friends after he came across the empty factory premises of Aqua Butzke Werke in Ritterstraße in Kreuzberg in 2006 while looking for a temporary party location. The club then operated illegally from March 2007 to January 2009, was closed by the authorities and reopened legally in 2010. "It was probably the biggest illegal club in the world ... I was of the opinion that we were already having the time of our lives with this huge speakeasy - without bureaucracy, bookkeeping, regulations and staff schedules. I was worried that the fun that came with the freedom would be lost relatively quickly." This was by no means the case, because in the 2010s, "Berlin is regarded as the city where the party culture of the 21st century was reinvented", as Max Dax says in his interview with Johannes von Jena and Ben de Biel. The photo series in this volume were taken by Ben de Biel, who has been photographing at Ritter Butzke since the very beginning. This was not only frowned upon in the clubs, it was actually forbidden; they were seen by everyone as "safe spaces". But Ben de Biel, who ran the legendary Maria am Ostbahnhof, was someone who was deeply rooted in this scene. In the 1990s, he photographed the squatter scene in Friedrichshain, "10 years later, my nightly taxi rides home from Club Maria. At Ritter Butzke, I then started photographing parties typologically myself, because it was the club culture that had brought me to Berlin over 35 years ago. I also knew that nobody had photographed Berlin clubs to this extent before me, and I had a camera, but above all I had a very personal approach ... I knew that club culture is an essential part of Berlin. Heiko Hoffmann, editor-in-chief of 'Groove', curated the exhibition 'No Photos on the Dancefloor' at C/O Berlin in 2019," says Ben de Biel, and "even the last visitor realised how few photos exist from the beginning, from the first WMV, the first Tresor, the Mauerloch and all the other clubs that existed in the post-reunification period."

Exhibition: Urban Spree, Berlin, 14/11 - 31/12/2025