Ben de BielElegantly Wasted /
Ritter Butzke Berlin

“Dance it over” or “come by and let yourself go” and “your brain is in urgent need of a holiday!” That was what it said on the flyers of the Ritter Butzke, and the result is of course “From euphoric to exhausted.” The Ritter Butzke was set up by Johannes von Jena, after he had come across the disused factory site of the Aqua Butzke works in Ritterstraße in Kreuzberg in 2006 while looking for a temporary party location. The club then operated illegally from the beginning of 2007 until 2009, was closed down by the authorities and reopened legally in 2010. “It was probably the biggest illegal club in the world,” says Johannes von Jena. In the 2010s “Berlin is regarded as the city in which the party culture of the 21st century was reinvented,“ as Max Dax notes in his interview with Johannes von Jena and Ben de Biel. The photo series in this volume are by Ben de Biel, who has been taking photographs at the Ritter Butzke since its earliest days. In the clubs this was not merely frowned upon, it was in fact forbidden. With Ben de Biel, however, the operator of the legendary Maria am Ostbahnhof, it was someone deeply rooted in this scene, and accepted by it, who photographed what was going on – all the more so as every visitor was aware of being photographed by him. In the 1990s he had first photographed the squatter scene in Friedrichshain: “10 years later my night-time taxi rides home from Club Maria. At the Ritter Butzke I then began to photograph parties myself, because club culture was the very reason I had come to Berlin more than 35 years ago. I also knew that no one before me had photographed in Berlin clubs on this scale, and I had a very personal access to it … I knew that club culture is an essential part of Berlin.” Of the exhibition “Elegantly Wasted” at Urban Spree, Thomas Wochnick accordingly wrote in the TAGESSPIEGEL on 21/11/25: “Standing in the exhibition at the Galerie Urban Spree … you are essentially looking into this world from the outside. And you do so, because there is no other way, with a voyeuristic gaze … On the one hand, then, you sense how your own gaze becomes an intruder. On the other hand, however, you also sense the composure with which the photographer moves through this world, not as an alien body, but as part of the dancing crowd. No other photographer has ever achieved this in a comparable way.”

Exhibition:
14/11 – 20/12/25, Urban Spree, Berlin