Digital tour through the building of the former headquarters of the state security of the GDR in Halle

The Werkleitz Festival 2021 move to ... will take place in the so-called cube of the former Stasi headquarters in Halle (Saale). A tragic location that served from 1971 to 1989 as the regional offices of the East German Ministry of State Security. During the confusion around the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, the building was occupied in order to prevent Stasi files from being destroyed. It was later used on a temporary basis by the Martin-Luther-Universität, before being taken over by the city of Halle’s tax department. Since 2016 the building has stood empty. The structure is a historical reservoir. Traces of later uses are as visible as the original architecture. One can intuit the building’s original purpose.Relics from East Germany are still present – functions of totalitarian surveillance – from control rooms where officials listened to wiretaps, to photo-mechanical reproduction equipment, to the names of halls that hark back to the founder of socialistic surveillance, F. E. Dzierżyński. The corporate design of the university’s student association and remnants of western fiscal bureaucracy are also still visible. The Werkleitz Festival move to ... utilises this architectural shell to host artistic perspectives on the present and near future in ten studios.