Sven MARQUARDT
Words: Tom Faber
Photos: Luc Braquet
Meet SVEN MARQUARDT, the photographer
and doorman who can make or break your night.
( 1 ) The name Berghain is a portmanteau of the two city quarters that flank the south and north sides of the building, Kreuzberg (formerly in West Berlin) and Friedrichshain (formerly in East Berlin). The literal meaning of the German word Berghain is “mountain grove."
( 2 ) Marquardt's brother, Olivier, is a DJ. In 1995, he started his own parties, called Jauchomatic, giving Marquardt his first job as a doorman.
( 3 ) To be a punk in East Berlin was dangerous. Punks were labeled “asocial" by the authorities and often disappeared into the prisons of the Stasi, the East German secret police.
( 4 ) Helga Paris was best known for her portraits of life in East Berlin in the early 1970s. She found her photographic motifs in everyday life: apartment buildings, break rooms and factory halls, or on the streets and in train stations.
If you didn’t already know that Sven Marquardt was the living embodiment of Berlin’s underground club scene, you could probably work it out just by looking at him. One gray morning, he strolls slowly into the courtyard of the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in the city’s Mitte neighborhood, thickset and deliberate, wearing an ankle-length black denim skirt, an ochre hoodie scrawled with anarchist graffiti and a bank heist’s worth of jewelry and piercings.
( 1 ) The name Berghain is a portmanteau of the two city quarters that flank the south and north sides of the building, Kreuzberg (formerly in West Berlin) and Friedrichshain (formerly in East Berlin). The literal meaning of the German word Berghain is “mountain grove."
( 2 ) Marquardt's brother, Olivier, is a DJ. In 1995, he started his own parties, called Jauchomatic, giving Marquardt his first job as a doorman.
( 3 ) To be a punk in East Berlin was dangerous. Punks were labeled “asocial" by the authorities and often disappeared into the prisons of the Stasi, the East German secret police.
( 4 ) Helga Paris was best known for her portraits of life in East Berlin in the early 1970s. She found her photographic motifs in everyday life: apartment buildings, break rooms and factory halls, or on the streets and in train stations.
