HOUSE OF BRIDGES
Finding this apartment was a turning point for Kasia Korczak and Payam Sharifi, co-founders of the art collective Slavs and Tatars. Since forming in 2006, members of the collective had practiced apart. Now it was time to come together.
Sharifi is an American-Iranian writer, researcher and artist from Texas who has lived and worked in London, New York, Paris, Moscow and Tehran. Kasia, originally from Łódz, in Central Poland, has lived, worked and studied in London, Arnhem and Brussels. “It was the first time we were both in the same city as a collective, so it was the first time we had a home and a studio,” notes Sharifi.
They chose Berlin as their base. Slavs and Tatars is a research-based artistic practice, concentrating on the region between the former Berlin Wall and the Great Wall of China. Berlin Moabit is situated slightly north of the city center, near Tiergarten and the Reichstag. It was in the former West Berlin, but has working-class roots and was among the last neighborhoods to gentrify. “It’s a microcosm of the whole of Berlin: Most of the city is pretty communitarian, but here you have Germans, Turks, Africans, Arabs and Eastern Europeans all within half a
