Ben de Biel: Elegantly Wasted / Ritter Butzke Berlin

"Dance about it" or "come over and let yourself go" and "your brain urgently needs a holiday"! These were the words on the Ritter Butzke flyers and the result is, of course, "From euphoric to exhausted". Ritter Butzke was set up by Johannes von Jena 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 the beginning of 2007 until 2009, was closed 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 where the party culture of the 21st century was reinvented", as Max Dax explains 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. However, Ben de Biel, who ran the legendary Maria am Ostbahnhof, was someone who was deeply rooted in the scene and accepted it, especially as all visitors were aware that they were being photographed by him. In the 1990s, he first photographed the squatter scene in Friedrichshain: "10 years later, my nightly taxi rides home from Club Maria. I then started photographing parties myself at Ritter Butzke, because it was the club culture that had brought me to Berlin over 35 years ago. I also knew that no one had photographed Berlin clubs to this extent before me, and I had a very personal approach ... I knew that club culture is an essential part of Berlin." Thomas Wochnick also wrote about the "Elegantly Wasted" exhibition at Urban Spree (14/11 - 20/12/25) in the TAGESSPIEGEL on 21/11/25: "If you stand in the exhibition at the Urban Spree gallery ... you basically look into this world from the outside. And you do it, because there is no other way, with a voyeuristic gaze ... On the one hand, you can feel how your own gaze becomes an intruder. On the other hand, you also sense the calmness with which the photographer moves through this world, not as a foreign body, but as part of the dancing people. No other photographer has ever achieved this in a comparable way."