raumlabor_berlin – Montagne allégorique, 2026

raumlabor_berlin’s Montagne allégorique (allegorical mountain) transforms 120 tonnes of compressed wastepaper into a walkable landscape of passages and sheltered spaces. The material is both industrial residue and a medium through which ideas and information have circulated. The landscape’s grotto-like interior draws on a Romantic tradition in which caves offered places for solitude and dreaming beyond the ordered social world. It recalls the Grotte des Étroits near Lyon, traditionally identified as the place where Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau spent a night outdoors. In The Confessions, he remembers becoming absorbed in reverie and waking to the surrounding landscape. It also refers to Plato’s allegory of the cave, in which prisoners mistake shadows for reality and discover the possibility of seeing otherwise. Animated by a bubbling pink lake and whispered voices, this parallel world offers a temporary respite from production and consumption, creating a space for social dreaming where other ways of living together can be imagined.

raumlabor_berlin is a collective practice operating at the intersection of architecture, urbanism and artistic intervention. The collective conceives the city as a process shaped by use, negotiation and transformation. Its projects engage sites in transition, where social, spatial and temporal conditions intersect. Through temporary structures and participatory formats, raumlabor_berlin creates situations that mobilise local knowledge and collective action. Rather than proposing fixed solutions, the collective activates existing conditions, opening spaces where alternative ways of inhabiting and living in the city can emerge.