I keep a drawer full of broken things in my Prenzlauer Berg studio. Shards of GDR porcelain from flea markets. Pieces of the Wall no bigger than a thumbnail. Half a blueprint from a building that was never finished. Fragments that refuse to be whole, that insist on their incompleteness as a kind of integrity. Berlin taught me to collect like this—to stop waiting for things to resolve.

Before Berlin, I believed in finished projects. Clean deliverables. The satisfying click of completion. My design education worshipped totality: every element in its place, every problem solved, every rough edge sanded into submission. Then I arrived here, to a city that’s been under construction for thirty years, where “temporary” is the only permanent state, where even the government buildings look like they’re still deciding what they want to be when they grow up.

The first winter nearly broke me. Not the cold—the incompleteness. Streets that ended in rubble. Conversations that trailed into silence. Buildings with missing teeth where war or neglect had taken bites. My apartment had outlets that led nowhere, a door that opened to brick, pipes visible like the city had forgotten to put on its skin. I wanted to fix everything. I wanted closure, coherence, a story with a proper ending.

But Berlin doesn’t finish its sentences. It speaks in fragments, in ellipses, in the space between what was and what might be. Tempelhof Airport: a massive terminal frozen mid-gesture, runways converted to kite-flying fields and community gardens, potential held in suspension. The Stadtschloss reconstruction: a baroque facade wrapped around modernist controversy, history and replica indistinguishable, the whole building a question mark about authenticity. Even the wall itself persists as fragments—not destroyed but dispersed, scattered into a thousand tourist keychains and gallery pieces, its absence more present than presence ever was.

There’s something radically honest about a city that refuses to pretend it’s healed. The empty lots aren’t mistakes—they’re memory made spatial, breathing room for ghosts. The unfinished facades aren’t failures of planning but acknowledgments that some things can’t be made whole again. Berlin wears its incompleteness like wisdom, like the opposite of shame.

I started noticing how people here carry the same quality. My neighbor, a seventy-year-old sculptor who fled Dresden in ’86, who speaks about East and West in present tense because the division never quite left her body. The Syrian family downstairs piecing together a life from two languages, three continents, bureaucratic limbo. The club kids at Berghain disappearing into bass and fog, seeking completion in dissolution, wholeness through fragmentation. Everyone here is mid-process, permanently in translation.

The creative scene thrives on this. Berlin’s art doesn’t wait for funding, permission, the right moment. It erupts in squats and U-Bahn tunnels, on construction site fences and abandoned lots. I’ve learned to show unfinished work, to invite people into the studio while projects are still raw and uncertain. There’s no point waiting for perfection in a city that has elevated the provisional into an aesthetic. The most vital exhibitions I’ve seen were in spaces that might not exist next month. The best conversations happened in bars that were already being evicted.

This incompleteness seeps into your bones, restructures your relationship with time. You stop saving things for later because later might mean displacement, demolition, a rent increase that pushes you three neighborhoods east. You learn to inhabit the provisional fully, to make the temporary sacred. Every gathering becomes a small ceremony of presence because presence is all we actually have.

But incompleteness isn’t the same as carelessness. Berlin’s fragments are held with fierce attention. The stolpersteine—those small brass memorial stones set into sidewalks—mark absence with such precision. Each one a fragment of a life, a name, a deportation date. The city could have built grand monuments to its murdered, but instead chose this: scattered, intimate, underfoot reminders that incompleteness can be a form of witness. You can’t walk through Berlin without literally stumbling over history’s gaps.

I’ve started thinking of the city as a kind of assemblage, in the artistic sense—elements gathered not to create unity but to hold multiplicity. Soviet apartment blocks beside Gründerzeit elegance. Turkish markets flowing into hipster cafés. Synagogues being rebuilt while mosques rise for the first time. Nothing quite fits, and that misfit is the point. Berlin doesn’t ask its fragments to become a seamless whole. It asks them to coexist, to speak their incompleteness in chorus.

My practice has changed. I work now with negative space, with gaps I don’t try to fill. I’ve made a series of city portraits using only what’s missing—vacant lots mapped as meditation spaces, demolished buildings rendered as light. The absence becomes the subject. People tell me it feels very Berlin. I think they mean it feels true.

Because here’s what the city whispers if you listen past the techno and the construction noise: completion is a fiction. The fantasy of wholeness—personal, political, architectural—is just another story we tell to avoid sitting with what is. Berlin got bombed into fragments, sawed in half, abandoned by history and then suddenly thrust into its center. It could have tried to put itself back exactly as it was. Instead, it said: what if we work with the break? What if incompleteness isn’t something to overcome but something to inhabit?

There’s a Japanese concept, ma, that describes the space between things—not emptiness but pregnant pause, vital interval. Berlin is built from ma. The gaps in the wall. The silence where buildings used to stand. The years between lives, between regimes, between the self you were and the self you’re becoming. The city teaches you to live in that space, to make that space livable.

Some nights I walk to the East Side Gallery and stand before those painted remnants, colors fading, plaster crumbling, the wall dissolving into air and time. Tourists photograph themselves jumping in front of Brezhnev and Honecker’s kiss. I photograph the cracks, the places where the concrete is returning to dust. Both are ways of witnessing incompleteness. Both are forms of love.

I no longer keep a to-do list. I keep a list of fragments: half-thoughts that might become something, might not. Sketches that lead nowhere. Conversations that ended mid-breath. Berlin taught me this isn’t failure—it’s form. Life doesn’t wait for you to be ready, whole, complete. Life is happening in the ruins, the gaps, the spaces under construction that might always be under construction.

The light is changing now, that particular Berlin blue that means evening. My studio is full of unfinished projects. The city outside is full of unfinished everything. And I am learning, slowly, to call this enough.