Floor 64

FLOOR 64 is a 23 min video that deals with the construction ruin of the Elbtower, its ghosts and fantasies, and my attempts to enter the site legally and illegally. The accompanying audio guide (10 min), preferably listened to on site, gives a more detailed story of these attempts. Long story short, I tried to get a shooting permission at the construction site through contacting SIGNA by different means: I visited their offices, wrote to them with support from the president of HFBK etc. As expected, there was nothing but rejections. One evening, as I went to film the facade of the building, I discovered a surprisingly easy spot to enter the construction site. Suddenly (and nervously) I could record the empty architecture on my own. I returned twice; each time ascending further up in the structure.

The video-work consists mainly of video/audio recordings from the construction site at night, as well as some from the SIGNA offices. The voice-over is a mixture of my experiences at the site, fictional dialogues, and fragments of the idealizing language used to advertise the Elbtower, designed to plant a desirable image of the building in the minds of possible customers. The main idea for the film was to stage these promises made by the marketing inside the current concrete structure, like unborn ghosts. One of the ”ghosts” is Robert de Niro, meant to be the star face of the Elbtower through his partnership in the Japanese restaurant-chain NOBU, intended to be located on the top floor of the building. His persona takes part in the film through audio excerpts from his movies. FLOOR 64 plays with different fetishizations of space, like the already mentioned vision of the luxurious pleasures of the building, as well as the aesthetic pleasure of abandoned places (so called ruin porn).

Brief History of the Elbtower

The construction work on the Elbtower has been paused since October 2023, because of the bankruptcy of SIGNA Holding who owned the project. By now (June 2024), only unsuccessful efforts have been made to find new investors. Because of this, there is a risk that the current structure will be torn down. The building is estimated to cost approximately 1 billion Euros to finish, and is too expensive to complete with public money. The main reason to build the Elbtower was to create the grand finale of the Hafencity, as a counterpart to the Elbphilharmonie. Since the beginning of the planning process, experts have been stating that there will be a problem in finding enough renttakers to fill up the thousands of square meters of office space in the Elbtower; this makes people question if there is an actual need for the building in the first place. The rest of the interior was intended to be used for luxurious hotels, restaurants, spas, and event venues etc. These are upper-class services that obviously will be used primarily by a wealthy fraction of the population. During spring 2024 there have been protests by local people, artists, and politicians who believe that we can use the unfinished concrete structure that we see today to build a space for social and cultural initiatives instead of the initial plan. One creative suggestion was to build a “birdtower” that will serve as residence for birds.