June 7, 2023 |
Berlin’s Berghain needs no introduction. With its weekend-long parties and a reputation for being the city’s ultimate pleasure palace, the old power plant turned techno mecca has a reputation for turning away hundreds of punters week in, week out, who are eager to see for themselves what truly goes on inside the hedonistic, anything goes nightclub.
With a strict ban on photography throughout the club, queer artist Daniel Marin Medina invites you inside Berghain’s hallowed halls through a collection of intimate sketches he began creating in 2019.
“Sexuality is something that I think about incessantly,” says Medina, 30, who moved to Berlin from New York six years ago. He first experienced Berghain on a trip to the city a few months before making the move. “I remember watching people dance, and they looked crazy, but after a while, I realised they were dancing knowing that no one was looking at them.”.
In his early Berlin years, Medina blew a lot of his money going out, “I was coming home exhausted and sad,” he says. His nightlife experiences became enriched once he began sketching: “My little sketchbook was full of experiences and people [I encountered]. It became a way for me to reclaim some power back in how I was going out.”
Through his sketches, Medina has been able to connect with a multitude of personalities. “Initially, I would just sketch friends; a lot of them were always out,” he says. His artworks capture bodies piling into cubicle stalls, sweaty torsos mashed together on dancefloors and limbs intertwined in the club’s darkest corners. “Towards the end, especially around 2021-2022, I would have people come up to me and say, ‘Oh, you’re the guy who draws’, they recognise me now. There’s a purity in loving dancing and meeting people.”
Artworks by Daniel Marin Medina.
