the berlin annex

An annex of The 8 Museum is a city in which encounters have occurred. Unlike the annexes of other institutions, it holds no building, employs no staff, and has acquired nothing. Its collection remains permanently installed where it was found — on enamel plates, doorbells, trackside signals, ghosted glass, and a great deal of spray paint — and is maintained, without their knowledge, by the residents, the weather, and the municipal services of the city itself.

The Berlin Annex was established in July 2026, in the course of four days' fieldwork, and is the museum's first holding in Germany — the collection's twenty-fourth country, a milestone the committee marked by adjourning for lunch. The city writes on itself more freely than any other premises in the register — save, perhaps, Athens, a comparison the committee has prudently declined to referee — and the annex's works arrive accordingly: sprayed, stencilled, stickered, wheat-pasted, and periodically painted over, a maintenance programme the museum neither requested nor requires. Seventy-seven works were encountered on the 28th of July alone, the busiest single day in the museum's recent fieldwork: more than twenty kilometres on foot, in a pair of rather comfortable walking shoes acquired only the previous afternoon — provisioned, strictly, for October's Camino and its 8-walking, but pressed into service early, to no recorded objection from the shoes. One work rides a ghost of glass between the museum and a passing tram; another keeps its post, faithfully, at S-Bahn trackside. Each of the annex's works was photographed in situ, untouched, under existing conditions, and left exactly as it was. Visitors to Berlin are advised that the entire collection remains on public display, though here it must share the walls.

the collection

eight of the annex's 140 works; the remainder may be traversed via the map