Threshold by Mårten Lange

"The majority of the images are from Berlin, but after the pandemic I've travelled quite a bit and these rooms are from many different cities. Shanghai, Reykjavik, Paris, Rome and many more. But without any geographical clues, the collection melts into one city, or perhaps even one single building.

We all deal with emptiness at some point. The feeling of loss when being forced to give something up. Or the thrill of pulling up the roots and leaving for a fresh start, saying "this time it's different". Well, maybe it is."

Marten Lange took the first image for this book back in 2016, on an artist residency at osservatorio mobile nord est in Castelfranco Veneto, Italy. The town was going through a kind of postindustrial transformation and there were a lot of vacant spaces, so it felt appropriate to photograph them. Then he didn't think about empty rooms for a long time, until two years later when he was living in Berlin and started seeing the rooms everywhere again.

The work became more focused during the pandemic in 2020, when a ghostly emptiness enveloped the city due to the lockdowns. He stopped using the metro and instead travelled everywhere by bike, seeing much more of the streets. He started going on long bike expeditions, looking for empty rooms.