Temporary Being

written by curator of project, Kriss Sagan:

Anna moved to Berlin in 2013 with a bunch of backpacks and a bicycle with her boyfriend at the time. Her interest led her to Neue Schule für Fotografie, where she connected to the local art scene while preserving her unique documentary vision. During the years in Berlin, Anna was moving back and forth between her two homes, Berlin and Budapest, which resulted in a documentary photography project, called Temporary Being, where she initiated a conversation with her closest friends about the Berliner experience and the meaning of ‘home’.

Started off as a school assignment, Temporary Being offers a soft, yet intense perception of Berlin, through the perspectives of her closest friends, the non-Berliner Berliners. Foreigners, who arrived from different corners of the world gathering in the German capital. Anna began to explore her friends’ experience of living abroad, while manifesting her very own link and impression of these people through a mixture of photography and interviews.

Where are you from? What is this place and why did you come here? How do our origins influence our Berliner experience? Do we feel at home here? Are we able to feel ourselves at home in this place, which is known as a temporary destination? What does make Berlin a home for you?

8 friends, 8 interviews, 8 perspectives, 8 months of the grey sky per year. Welcome to Anna’s Berlin. The first part of the ‘Temporary Being’ project, where she shares her endless love for her friends and her mixed feelings about Berlin.

POST_COVID comment from Anna Vera Lengyel, person behind the project:

Covid-19 locked us into our "homes" and I would like to continue this project with online interviews, videos and photos to further explore what's home now, where do we find it, is it physical or rather a mental state? Are we still comfortable with going home, being at home or it newly transferred into something frustrating and final, how do we preserve the sacredness of home when some of us exploited their physical home's all potential during lock-downs and spent way too much time "there".. Furthermore, the original project was naturally interested in the cosmopolitan lifestyle, will it be available in the close future or expats risk more than before when leaving their birthplace?

Project is only complete with interview excerpts.

© Anna Vera Lengyel - Image from the Temporary Being photography project
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To be honest I have mixed feelings about this because mainly after the 2nd year I spent here I’ve been feeling more at home in Berlin, but only to the level one can feel at home in Berlin.

© Anna Vera Lengyel - Image from the Temporary Being photography project
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For some reason I think people are more open and understanding or they become more empathetic towards certain things. I think for instance, that Berlin is the perfect place to grow out from homophobia or racism, the city is able to educate or lead you out from it.

© Anna Vera Lengyel - Image from the Temporary Being photography project
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then you see the true Berlin, the people who really live here, who were born here, when you get to know the sort of suburbs, outskirts (although we cannot even call Weisensee a suburb) it’s then when you realise that Berlin is not the place that you thought it is when you were on your way here...

© Anna Vera Lengyel - Image from the Temporary Being photography project
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Berliners are not to be shocked easily, although at the same time that doesn’t make them superficial, they do see things but they don’t react very often. You can be very free but it can also make you feel disconnected from people and make you feel very anonymous.

© Anna Vera Lengyel - Anna: What would you name as the best and worst thing about Berlin?
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Anna: What would you name as the best and worst thing about Berlin?

© Anna Vera Lengyel - Anna: Why is it that “only” Berlin makes this life possible?
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Anna: Why is it that “only” Berlin makes this life possible?

© Anna Vera Lengyel - Image from the Temporary Being photography project
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I think there’s more of a focus on different subcultural ways of living, like different progressive ways of living and that kind of had me interested.

© Anna Vera Lengyel - Image from the Temporary Being photography project
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Because we have a really close and good friend circle here and I think what makes it home is also the time we spent here, so that we know a lot of things, a lot of neighbourhoods, lot of corners, mostly though the friend circle.

© Anna Vera Lengyel - Image from the Temporary Being photography project
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Anna: What does that mean? B: here... so, one is in a kind of transit here... passing through. I’m at home here in a way that I’m sure I won’t get old here.

© Anna Vera Lengyel - Anna: Do you feel home in Berlin? T: ABSOLUTELY
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Anna: Do you feel home in Berlin? T: ABSOLUTELY

© Anna Vera Lengyel - Image from the Temporary Being photography project
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Anna: So, do you think that there’s a thing like the Berliner mentality? That there’s a thing about this place people share, which makes this place special? H: True in a way. I mean Berlin is a weird place. I call it “the city of lost souls”. Berlin is a place where in case you don’t have a driven mentality you can easily get distracted and lose your way.

© Anna Vera Lengyel - Still, this is the thing that I hate the most: not being able to communicate with kids or with old people.
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Still, this is the thing that I hate the most: not being able to communicate with kids or with old people.

© Anna Vera Lengyel - Image from the Temporary Being photography project
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to kind of a Berliner one, which is like: I’ll never be the craziest or the weirdest, so I don’t have to worry about it and I think kind of everyone else thinks that, too.

© Anna Vera Lengyel - Image from the Temporary Being photography project
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… when you start to calm down or you’re just losing interest in this whole then you start to see Berlin by itself, how it is for real, and I think it’s not that different from home at the end

© Anna Vera Lengyel - Image from the Temporary Being photography project
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there’s more of the sense of recycling and reusing other than throwing it away and maybe that culture is born out of the difficulties that they faced in the past with the war and that everything has its value and something shouldn’t be just tossed away just because it’s broken, it should be looked into and get fixed

© Anna Vera Lengyel - Image from the Temporary Being photography project
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I love how people change from winter to summer, I love to see that after the super-super-super hard winter you see people enjoying the first ray of sun.

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