This document in front of you is the result of a conversation over lunch, which took place in the early days of Corona in Berlin. Back then, we were simply wondering: in a time in which people are, either by policy or good faith, forced to restrict their spatial radius of interaction to a bare minimum, how do we actually deal with food? Not only in the sense of what we choose to eat conceptually, but how we choose it, literally. Where do we get it, how do we prepare it, and what does something essential like food mean to ...

The Sommerbad in Volkspark Humboldthain feels like home to me. Rain or shine, I’ve spent hours in this public pool. It’s not a light-hearted summer fling. It’s true love to a point where I run past during off-season—which is the majority of the year—to peek through the fence and check on the pallid basins, the withering slide and the leafless trees waiting for the visitors to return. By summer the facility will be as neat as always—a true working class idyll with bright blue water, lush green trees and quaint flat-roofed structures. If it wasn’t for the ridiculously strict regulations, ...

There is a sound that exists nowhere else but at an outdoor pool: the gurgling and the splashing of the water, the squeaking and the screaming of the bathers, only drowned out by the announcements of the pool attendants. In the summer of 2018, this background noise, which increases with the number of people seeking cooling from the summer sun, resembled more of a background roar. Thousands of swimmers and non-swimmers seemed to scream at each other. Because these weeks were especially hot, even more so in Berlin. We enjoyed the lethargy caused by the blazing sun. It reminded us ...

It was May 2019 when I received a call from Nele that the pool decided to open two weeks earlier. I had just come back from Italy and literally made it from the airport to Tropez for an emergency meeting. We set up a team and started to build and plan AMOUR. One point on our to-do-list was to move the one million kilogram heavy fridge from the kitchen to the basement. This was the kind of furniture you’d see in action movies during getaway scenes through the kitchen: full metal, industrial chic. Scott, our craftsman, and I seemed to ...