panzer kaserne
This building dressed men for war. Eighty years later, I filled it with something it was never designed to hold.
Panzer Kaserne in Bernau was built to clothe a machine. Under the Nazi Wehrmacht, 1,300 workers manufactured and repaired military uniforms inside its walls. The Soviets took it over in 1945 and turned it into a tank division headquarters — thousands of soldiers garrisoned in a complex built entirely around the logistics of power. It was abandoned in 1993 and left to decay.
This is what I brought into those walls instead: men in kimonos, barefoot, almost naked. Not performing strength. Not performing anything. The softness is not accidental — it is the argument. A space designed to produce and contain military masculinity, now holding something it was never built for. Power and vulnerability coexisting in the same room where one was once manufactured for war.
The building remembers what it was built for. The images don’t care.
CREDITS
Photography & Creative Direction — Stela Alusi
Location — Panzer Kaserne, Bernau bei Berlin