Tresor at 30ish – the exhibition, the club, the legacy
Tresor then, Tresor now: how does the club’s 31-year history compare to its reality today?
‘Tresor, Berlin und die große Freiheit’ is a new exhibition charting the history of the famous Berlin club Tresor, framing it within Berlin techno’s ‘big bang’ in the early 90s. It tells the story of Tresor’s opening in 1991, its life to the present day, and its historical contexts such as the Soviet Union’s occupation of East Berlin and the fall of the Berlin Wall.
A year on from their 30th Anniversary – which saw to a mammoth 24-side vinyl box set with contributions by Speaker Music, Juan Atkins, Afrodeutsche, LSDXOXO, Torus and Terrence Dixon – Jude Iago James visits the utopic high-techno exhibition before a night out at the club itself, Tresor / Globus, on the same day. He had one question in mind – is it possible to still ‘feel’ Tresor’s original energy in 2022?
The ‘Ship of Theseus’ is an Ancient Greek thought experiment that ponders the identity of an object that has had all of its original components replaced.
On their journey back to Athens from Crete – after defeating the mythical Minotaur and escaping King Minos’ Labyrinth – heroic king Theseus and his band of Athenians are said to have replaced each individual plank that made up their homebound ship as it rotted. Since the journey was too long and treacherous to keep the ship intact, it was absolutely necessary to slowly replace each plank over time. This begged the question: since its every part was swapped out by the time it reached Athens, was the original ‘Ship of Theseus’ the same as it was when it left Crete?
Like many great European nightclubs that have been hit by closures and reopenings in recent decades, Tresor is inarguably one of the most major institutions to have had a notable ‘Ship of Theseus’ moment. Not only has it undergone financial problems, a forced closure and a subsequent relocation; it has also reestablished itself as an intercity clubbing brand (with the founding of the offshoot club Tresor.West in Dortmund), launched a not-for-profit arm, and recently suffered the death of one of its core founders, Regina Baer.
Nowadays, the Tresor club proper is located in an interior tract of the Mitte CHP Plant, a former power plant built in 1964. And in the same space, above ground, is Kraftwerk Berlin, a new towering exhibition space and sometimes venue in which the new Tresor 31 exhibition – Tresor, Berlin and the Great Freedom – is now found.
The Kraftwerk retains all the trappings of the original plant: an intimidatingly industrial interior, looming steel beams and concrete pillars, green-light-tinged fire exits dotted around dingy corners, ascending floors, rebar, heavenly floodlights. There’s a control room hidden off to the side, legitimately resembling an overblown, gritty-realist version of Homer Simpson’s safety inspection room at the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant – except it’s eight times the size. Even though it now houses a knowingly trendy exhibition, parts of the main hangar still reek of barrenness, reflecting its longtime abandonment before being taken over by Tresor founder and club mogul Dimitri Hegemann in 2006.
As we learn from this very exhibition in this very place, the original Tresor was not purpose-built for the sprawling industrial location it now occupies. It rather existed several districts away, oddly a couple of kilometres away from both Checkpoint Charlie and Hitler’s former underground bunker.
One of many sites belonging to the pre-War shopping giant Wertheim, the small and unassuming Tresor building once operated as a covert Stasi outpost. Then, just before the reunification of Germany, the site was left abandoned before being taken over in style by Hegemann along with friends Achim Kohlberger and Johnnie Stieler. Helming a similar night called Interfisch, their parent club UFO had gone under, triggering something of an abandoned warehouse space race. As this Wertheim store was located in the no-mans-land ‘border strip’ between East and West Berlin (the ‘Wall’ in many parts wasn’t just a wall, and contained stretches of land inside the border), it more than anywhere else was ripe for the taking.
Back then, in the tumult of pre-unification Berlin, abandoned spaces could essentially be ‘claimed’ by scavenging factions of people without much recourse. The legend goes that the trio scoured the treacherous spot with just a few cigarette lighters and their bare hands, noted the cracked-open safe deposit boxes behind a wall of gated metal bars, and spent months sledgehammering plaster walls and hand-scrubbing rust off the vault doors after which ‘Tresor’ was named.
On entry, my partner and I amble very slowly through the Kraftwerk, which demands our utmost attention, thanks to its sheer grandeur. It feels hard to believe this space could house any kind of music event. Its various levels seem to promise sheer back-breaking drops, while some of its concrete beams might as well defy the laws of physics.
The exhibition is mediated through a trove of special audio headsets. Each punter wears a pair of headphones with a special augmented-reality (AR) zoner dangling from it, allowing segments of audio to play back at certain times, depending on the location of the wearer. The headpieces are black, sleek, ominous future artefacts of a future of which we hardly feel worthy. When facing a short film projected under a concrete ceiling and suspended by metal struts – such as ‘Die leere Mitte’, Hito Steyerl’s short film lamenting the failure of urban planning in Berlin’s city centres – we hear the muddy oontzing of techno against human narration and inhuman factory noise. When walking about the more liminal parts of the space, we hear something like a ‘chopped-and-screwed’ techno tune and the occasionally ghostly vocals of what might be a Stasi officer. When scaling a replica of the original Tresor interior – made to look like something between an Ancient Roman volcanic ruin and a building site – we hear gabber amidst the sound of crumbling bricks, and the musings of a taxi driver remarking on his inability to navigate the former East Berlin.
Parts of the exhibition move outward from Tresor’s history proper, and often appear in juxtaposition to it. Sandwiched between a long display case of flyers, paper scraps and polaroid photographs, John Akomfrah’s acclaimed Afrofuturist documentary ‘The Last Angel Of History’ plays back in its entirety. Arthur Jafa’s ‘APEX’ also features, pitting stills of black music figureheads against spectacular future-scientific images: microscopic tardigrades; the Millennium Falcon; a magnificent blue whale, mid-breach out of water. As we later learn, Jeff Mills famously packed in his involvement with Underground Resistance in 1991, and shortly afterwards became a resident at Tresor. There is a due resistance to the historic ‘whitewashing of techo’ implied in this use of wondrous futurist imagery from black creators.
Later, off to the side, Mark Prendergast’s ‘Manuel’ occupies the CHP control room, depicting the sensory experiences one might encounter while out clubbing, through the eyes of an unnamed man. The frame fish-eyes and pans around him, while he seems to panic and flinch, all while ominous sounds respond to the camera’s unpredictable, quantum pace. It’s by far the exhibition’s eeriest moment. The film is captured in the same spot in which the viewer stands, instilling in us a sense of empathic loneliness. We’re surrounded on all sides by symbols of central electric power, resting on drab-green, old-industrial metal panes: giant buttons, knobs, faders. They’re not intended for the DAW or for the Pioneer mixer, but for the operation of a power plant. The protagonist in ‘Manuel’ seems electrosensitive, and the sound design is as if to get at some primal technophobia. Of course, the industrial revolution that paved the way to the digital tech that props up today’s wild parties is the same upheaval that facilitated the Second World War.
But what of the experience of Tresor nowadays? What of then and now? Few club-goers today can claim to have visited Tresor in 1990. But the exhibition is so comprehensive (it’s even got a reconstruction of the club made of sandstone, by the artist Anna de Vries) one really does get a sense of Tresor as it was, and this invites a comparison to the present day.
Tresor proper is located in the same factory building, but it’s physically and ideologically deep below the sprawling grandeur implied by the exhibition. Later, on a whim, we find ourselves back inside the very same industrial complex we’d been tractor-beamed into several hours earlier.
A forking queue of people winds round the power plant’s front walkway. After a rudimentary bag check, an usher ushers us to the side, and insists we allow our phone cameras to be obscured by stickers, so as to prevent us from keeping visual evidence of the club’s interior and to maintain its ‘air of mystery’, its culture of cool. We oblige, and I resign myself to recounting my experience of the club from memory.
Unlike the slow, large and looming pace of the exhibition, Tresor proper moves at speed. We bowled deliriously and wide-eyed down a long hallway of flashing strobe lights, oddly timed to match running pace, as if to follow every punter down the hall. Alabyrinthine maze of cages soon followed, with railings, backroomy walls, and steps up. Bars, cloakrooms and booths, all tucked away, unassuming and cloaked in black paint. Yellow and black hazard tape; numbered booths of dubious function; tight fits. This Tresor, open since 2007, maintains the original’s downstairs ‘Tresor’ floor and upstairs ‘Globus’ floor. It’s even got a full-scale replica of the original ‘cage’ DJ booth, a trait mimicked by many international knockoff clubs like Beaverworks. Tonight, downstairs opts for hard techno pummel, while upstairs works in broken beat, dancehall, batida, chug…
We made our way to the heavenly Globus, bobbing happily in its the front-right space. It was a sudden and pleasantly jarring experience to move from the cerebral, telescreened lashings of John Akomfrah, Kodwo Eshun, and Bahar Noorizadeh, into the cold-blooded immediacy of a floor packed with fashionable Europeans.
An image from earlier in the day flashed in our minds: A similar front dancefloor, bathed in blue light. A woman, ensconced by a semicircle of bodies surrounding a DJ booth, dancing frenziedly, her torso twisting from side to side. We soon recalled its origin: a passing shot from Rebecca Salvadori’s Tresor Tapes, a video piece trawling Tresor’s archives of film shot in the club.
Had Tresor not moved, the spot in which we were standing could have very well been the same spot in which this rabid raver once raved. But in retrospect, could we have felt the same torso-twisting abandon as her? Arguably not. The original Tresor was accessible only via abandoned land, a journey that required one to pass Checkpoint Charlie on the way. The new Tresor, by contrast, resides in elegant Mitte, known for its restored pre-war buildings and lush avenues. The immediate psychogeography of Tresor numero uno was key. Its location, like a lighthouse among East German wreckage, inspired its ravers to light up like formerly overpowered bulbs. It’s just not the same in Mitte. And with the club occupying a giant power plant – a fact we’re aware of even while only dancing in a small part of it – there comes a sense of newfound grandeur, at the potential expense of special, gemlike, sparky energy. So, by direct contrast to the woman in the video, the mood of Globus was more restrained.
Even so, no-one was stood in the corner. Phones, as mentioned, were stickered up. Even with some reticence, if you’re going to go clubbing at Tresor even today, you do it properly, not least out of a timely sense of respect. While the lineup felt functional, with international rather than just local talent playing – CCL, Ploy, Batu, Ancient Methods – what more could be expected of a club that has always operated on an international scale? After all, German reunification was a global win, not simply a national one. As Kouslin and Logan’s ‘Bad’ resounded – another dark UK trap-garage import – it sunk in. The mood in Tresor was as versatile as it was always meant to be, if not more.
Later, as the crud-filled interims between Ancient Methods’ kick drums resounded, we were to zone out, gazes facing forward into the oncoming blue strobes. The entire day seemed to move from exhibition to dance, head to body. A figurative ‘scan-down’ meditation.
So, to conclude our comparison, and our overall thoughts on Tresor 31: knowingly or not, 90s Tresor was an opportunists’ snaffling-up of pounceable warehouse space. The efforts required to crack open the ‘tresor’ back then were minimal. It took a small team of six; hammers, brushes. It was the end of the Cold War. The bureaucracy required to launch and acquire legal permits for the space was minimal, a fact which starkly opposes the endless paperwork needed to throw even a one-off rave in Berlin today. And let’s not shy away from the obvious; there’s something of a whiff of venture capitalism to the name ‘Tresor’, which translates from the German word for ‘vault’. Its founders essentially founders-keepersed a giant bank safe, bought it low and sold it high.
My partner and I were instinctively critical of parts of the narrative in ‘The Sun Has No Shadow’. One subtitle, for example, venerated an entirely different music scene, with a completely different musical history, in a different ‘club culture capital’. Against a frenetic shot of gun-fingering hands and bustled heads, read the text “I made the decision to move to London because of FOLD”, referring to the prominent East London club active today. In our view, FOLD neglects to share the same liberatory gravitas as Tresor, and we wondered what the purpose of its mention was besides emerging from brownfield space.
Overall, though, what we learn from this dualistic experience is that the original Tresor was not just a club, but a symbol of relief for Berliners, or anyone caught in the Iron Curtain’s double-bind. It could either be read as a wonder or as a shame that Tresor had to move, but what sustains Tresor is its story. Then, as we learn, the tenacity of those involved was a secondary but no less vital glue. Michael Andrawis’ Tresor: The Vault and the Electric Frontier documents this. Hegemann spent two years with the Tresor brand in ‘exile’ before scoring the Kraftwerk, and blessing the factory with the aid of some Tibetan monks. He was that tenacious. Not least, he was that tenacious for a fantastic reason: the collective ‘phew’ that follows liberation happens also to be a great sounding call for a party.
Even the fact that the club still exists in Berlin is proof that many of Tresor’s original planks still carry its cargo, unrotted. But said planks are varnished in a euphoric history – and this history is especially important to preserve. So the original Tresor sails on.
Jude Iago James