Jojo Caitlin, The Palace Collective24 Images
“Berlin is over. You missed the best years.” Like most new arrivals in the city, these are the words Scottish-German photographer Jojo Caitlin heard when she moved to Berlin in 2020. At the time, it was a fair assessment. The city was shuttered by pandemic measures, and she spent long evenings staring out her window at the TV Tower, wondering: “Is this it?” In the five years since, she’s grown up with the city and witnessed it come alive again in the best ways – its music scene, the flow of life, the people – and mutate in the worst.
“Berlin has always been a city in flux, and it’s a common cliché that Berliners live with a nostalgia for the past, romanticising what once was while being sceptical of the direction it’s heading in. My uncle even heard ‘Berlin is dead’ when he lived here in the 90s, just after the Wall came down,” she tells Dazed. “The issue today is that the political atmosphere is pretty frightening, with increasing censorship over Palestine, police brutality on the streets, and the rise of the far-right.” She also cites mounting living costs, cuts to cultural funding, the growing chokehold of tech, and the widespread closure of nightclubs and creative venues. “There’s an overall sense of disenchantment with the place.”
Increasingly disillusioned with the city’s artistic and political institutions, Jojo seeks personal motivation in the “DIY spirit” of grassroots initiatives like The Palace Collective, a non-profit organisation centred around creative collaboration and arts-based community development. The Palace currently operates out of 90mil, a multidisciplinary community space and “urban regeneration project” tucked beneath the railway tracks at Jannowitzbrücke, housed in a derelict office building slated for demolition. Every year, The Palace organises an art residency at an actual 16th-century palace in Poland, a few hours east of Berlin, bringing together around 200 international creatives from diverse fields for two weeks of experimentation.
Playfulness and possibility underpin Jojo’s image series from last autumn’s residency. Each morning, she’d wake to singing echoing through the palace corridors, before wandering its halls and grounds, encountering performance rehearsals, impromptu jam sessions, makeshift “gym” classes, movement and art workshops, costume creations, and moments of embrace on the grass.
“Before going to The Palace, someone mentioned that it was ‘the quarter-life crisis you didn’t know you needed’, a phrase that would stay with me as I set out each day with my camera, no clear plan in mind” she says. “We coexisted in our own little universe and had so much freedom to collaborate, experiment, and create, away from the stresses of everyday life. Every day was as unexpected and spontaneous as the last. It was pure magic.”
For Jojo, there’s magic to the alchemy of film photography, too. “I love the mystical qualities of shooting on film. It’s a spontaneous and intuitive process for me, and I’m drawn to the unpredictability of it,” she says. “You never quite know what the subtle interplay of light, form, colours and film will be.”
One of her favourite pictures was taken during “dishwasher karaoke”, a performance that erupted around the washing-up station one night – “Just one example of the spontaneous co-created moments and self-sufficiency that make The Palace so unique.” Another surprise was her shot of the dancefloor; wisps of smoke and steam swirling like gossamer among the moving figures, illuminated by the morning rays.
The residency marked one of Jojo’s first experiments in capturing events and people. She came to photography via a career in climate justice, her early imagery featuring landscapes and natural forms from her time spent working across South America. Reflecting on the link between her artistry and activism, she finds herself returning again and again to Donna Haraway’s statement in Staying with the Trouble (2016): “We – all of us on Terra – live in disturbing times, mixed up times, troubling and turbid times.”
“Haraway writes that in these times of ‘vastly unjust patterns of pain and joy’, the task is to become ‘capable of response’,” Jojo explains. “After suffering severe burnout from my work in climate policy, photography became an alternative form of response. Observing the world through a viewfinder is like play, it fuels my curiosity, for sure, but it also grounds me and brings me to the present when the world seems to be spinning off its axis.”
Back in Berlin after the residency, Jojo continued her involvement in The Palace Collective, co-organising a solidarity fundraiser at 90mil featuring live music performances, ambient soundscapes and audiovisual shows. These days, she can no longer see the TV Tower from her window: an office building – a great slab of glass and steel – now blocks the view, its lurid screens blinking with KPI metrics deep into the night. But as long as there are community initiatives like these, she’s hopeful. “I really believe in the power of DIY spaces for collective healing in an increasingly troubling world – and for all Berlin’s flaws, this is one of the things it has always done best. Whether and how this can continue remains to be seen.”
Jojo Caitlin is a photographer, researcher and radio host. Keep up with her work via Instagram or her website.
