Südost Serenade2026
Multimedia installation Karaoke booth, sculptural sound objects, 5.1-channel sound, single-channel video, projection, steel pipes, mixed media Approx. dimensions: 65 × 65 × 180 cm (karaoke booth) Commissioned for ALI(E/A)NSI, NOVILLA / Moving Poets Berlin, 2026 Supported by the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion |
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Südost Serenade is a multimedia installation developed within Ariel William Orah’s ongoing artistic research Xtatic Xtraction. Informed by Orah’s background in economics and sustainability, the research examines the ecstatic promises and extractive residues of economic and technological progress.
Created as a site-responsive artistic proposal for the exhibition ALI(E/A)NSI at NOVILLA, Südost Serenade brings this wider research into the specific context of Schöneweide, where Orah lives and works. It asks how the industrial history of this neighbourhood might be connected to histories and contemporary realities extending far beyond Southeast Berlin.
Researching Schöneweide’s industrial development led Orah to AEG, the Allgemeine Elektricitäts-Gesellschaft, and the construction of the neighbourhood as Berlin’s “Electropolis.” Here, electricity, technical knowledge, innovation and efficiency embodied the promise of a radiant modern future. Factories, power stations and electrical industries transformed Schöneweide into one of Berlin’s most important centres of industrial production.
Following the circulation of these technologies beyond Germany revealed another material connection: machinery manufactured by European companies, including AEG, was used within early power plants and other electrical infrastructures established under Dutch colonial rule in Southeast Asia. European technology entered colonial systems of administration, transportation, industrial expansion and resource extraction.
Südost Serenade brings these interconnected realities into dialogue: Schöneweide as a centre where the knowledge and machinery of technological progress were imagined, manufactured and celebrated, and colonial Southeast Asia as one of the regions where those technologies circulated through infrastructures shaped by unequal distributions of power, labour and natural resources. The work traces the dialectic between the ecstatic image of progress and the material, ecological and social residues accumulating across its global circuits.
This connection becomes an imaginative passage through which Hanōmannō travels. Inspired by Hanuman, whose stories have travelled and transformed across South and Southeast Asia, Hanōmannō is Orah’s hybrid sonic persona. Moving non-linearly between Southeast Asia, Southeast Berlin and different historical periods, Hanōmannō encounters colonial electrification, Schöneweide’s industrial expansion, war, East Berlin, German reunification and today’s promises of digitalization and green transformation.
Hanōmannō eventually becomes stranded at the historical Hasselwerder Villa, today known as NOVILLA. Here, Hanōmannō acts as an imaginary witness to the transformations of the building and its surroundings: from the home of Richard and Elsbeth Lehmann, through their persecution and dispossession under National Socialism, the building’s subsequent institutional uses, and its present life as an international space for artistic and social encounters.
From this journey emerges a speculative future. In Schöneweide in 2076, Hanōmannō founds the Allgemeine Empathische Gesellschaft, a fictional reappearance and transformation of AEG. Instead of producing technologies that obscure their origins, the company develops household devices that attempt to acknowledge their entanglements with colonial histories, resource extraction, exploited labour, ecological damage and the emotional conditions of contemporary life.
At the centre of the installation is Hanōmannō’s office: the Abteilung für Misstrauen, Migration und Melancholie (Department of Suspicion, Migration and Melancholy). Constructed as a participatory karaoke sound sculpture, the office invites visitors to perform Curiga Percaya (Trust and Suspicion), an original song reflecting on mistrust, polarization and social fragmentation. The booth operates simultaneously as a workplace, entertainment apparatus, fictional bureaucracy and temporary social space in which suspicion, migration and melancholy can be sung collectively.
The installation is accompanied by the artist publication Allgemeine Empathische Gesellschaft: Catalogue Edition 2076/7. Presented as a future company catalogue, it introduces speculative household technologies created for a society living through the accumulated effects of polycrisis. Through imagined materials and unconventional functions, its products respond to mistrust, displacement, isolation, ecological breakdown and the emotional consequences of technological life.
Borrowing the visual languages of historical industrial advertising, technical illustration and corporate innovation, the catalogue moves between sincere proposition and satire. It asks what an electronic object—and the company manufacturing it—might become if required to acknowledge the histories, labour, extracted resources and damage contained within its own existence.
Through Hanōmannō’s journey, the karaoke office booth, the song Curiga Percaya and the catalogue from 2076, Südost Serenade transforms the circuit between Southeast Asia and Southeast Berlin into an artistic proposition. It asks how another future might be imagined once the ecstatic promise of progress is confronted by everything it has extracted, displaced and left behind.
Created as a site-responsive artistic proposal for the exhibition ALI(E/A)NSI at NOVILLA, Südost Serenade brings this wider research into the specific context of Schöneweide, where Orah lives and works. It asks how the industrial history of this neighbourhood might be connected to histories and contemporary realities extending far beyond Southeast Berlin.
Researching Schöneweide’s industrial development led Orah to AEG, the Allgemeine Elektricitäts-Gesellschaft, and the construction of the neighbourhood as Berlin’s “Electropolis.” Here, electricity, technical knowledge, innovation and efficiency embodied the promise of a radiant modern future. Factories, power stations and electrical industries transformed Schöneweide into one of Berlin’s most important centres of industrial production.
Following the circulation of these technologies beyond Germany revealed another material connection: machinery manufactured by European companies, including AEG, was used within early power plants and other electrical infrastructures established under Dutch colonial rule in Southeast Asia. European technology entered colonial systems of administration, transportation, industrial expansion and resource extraction.
Südost Serenade brings these interconnected realities into dialogue: Schöneweide as a centre where the knowledge and machinery of technological progress were imagined, manufactured and celebrated, and colonial Southeast Asia as one of the regions where those technologies circulated through infrastructures shaped by unequal distributions of power, labour and natural resources. The work traces the dialectic between the ecstatic image of progress and the material, ecological and social residues accumulating across its global circuits.
This connection becomes an imaginative passage through which Hanōmannō travels. Inspired by Hanuman, whose stories have travelled and transformed across South and Southeast Asia, Hanōmannō is Orah’s hybrid sonic persona. Moving non-linearly between Southeast Asia, Southeast Berlin and different historical periods, Hanōmannō encounters colonial electrification, Schöneweide’s industrial expansion, war, East Berlin, German reunification and today’s promises of digitalization and green transformation.
Hanōmannō eventually becomes stranded at the historical Hasselwerder Villa, today known as NOVILLA. Here, Hanōmannō acts as an imaginary witness to the transformations of the building and its surroundings: from the home of Richard and Elsbeth Lehmann, through their persecution and dispossession under National Socialism, the building’s subsequent institutional uses, and its present life as an international space for artistic and social encounters.
From this journey emerges a speculative future. In Schöneweide in 2076, Hanōmannō founds the Allgemeine Empathische Gesellschaft, a fictional reappearance and transformation of AEG. Instead of producing technologies that obscure their origins, the company develops household devices that attempt to acknowledge their entanglements with colonial histories, resource extraction, exploited labour, ecological damage and the emotional conditions of contemporary life.
At the centre of the installation is Hanōmannō’s office: the Abteilung für Misstrauen, Migration und Melancholie (Department of Suspicion, Migration and Melancholy). Constructed as a participatory karaoke sound sculpture, the office invites visitors to perform Curiga Percaya (Trust and Suspicion), an original song reflecting on mistrust, polarization and social fragmentation. The booth operates simultaneously as a workplace, entertainment apparatus, fictional bureaucracy and temporary social space in which suspicion, migration and melancholy can be sung collectively.
The installation is accompanied by the artist publication Allgemeine Empathische Gesellschaft: Catalogue Edition 2076/7. Presented as a future company catalogue, it introduces speculative household technologies created for a society living through the accumulated effects of polycrisis. Through imagined materials and unconventional functions, its products respond to mistrust, displacement, isolation, ecological breakdown and the emotional consequences of technological life.
Borrowing the visual languages of historical industrial advertising, technical illustration and corporate innovation, the catalogue moves between sincere proposition and satire. It asks what an electronic object—and the company manufacturing it—might become if required to acknowledge the histories, labour, extracted resources and damage contained within its own existence.
Through Hanōmannō’s journey, the karaoke office booth, the song Curiga Percaya and the catalogue from 2076, Südost Serenade transforms the circuit between Southeast Asia and Southeast Berlin into an artistic proposition. It asks how another future might be imagined once the ecstatic promise of progress is confronted by everything it has extracted, displaced and left behind.
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