Alexander Klaubert, Francis Kussatz, Julia Lübbecke, Rahel grote Lambers, Weaving Back to Common Grounds at ACUD Galerie, Berlin.

Weaving Back to Common Grounds by Alexander Klaubert, Francis Kussatz, Julia Lübbecke, and Rahel grote Lambers, curated by otc collective, at ACUD Galerie, Berlin, 07/11/2025–07/12/2025.

Where does common ground begin? Beneath the soles of our feet, or in the flicker of a shared glance? Stepping into Weaving Back to Common Grounds, one word began to echo in our minds: negotiation. Not the contractual kind, but the kind whispered through gestures, hesitations, and trust. The otc collective has created something more than an exhibition, they’ve shaped a question that loops and interlaces through every work: how do we still find one another when the world keeps teaching us to drift apart?

The gallery doesn’t offer a single entrance into meaning, it unfolds like a weave, threads slipping in and out of coherence. Some works gather close; others keep their distance, quietly refusing resolution. We felt drawn not to a focal point, but to the relationships between the pieces. Each work seems to glance sideways at another, murmuring agreements, or perhaps disagreements. There is no didactic path here, only a rhythm of approach and withdrawal.

Materially, the show is tactile, threads, both metaphorical and literal, recur throughout. Some works feel like conversations paused and resumed, others like solitary reflections made public. The gestures are at once rigorous and vulnerable. The exhibition’s fabric, spatial, emotional, conceptual, is stitched together through interruptions and continuities. We sensed care in its structures, friction in its seams.

Some pieces emerge from documented exchanges and shared research. Others hold a radical independence (the kind that always captivates us), asserting their presence in quiet defiance or weary intimacy. These dynamics reveal not only collaboration, but also its emotional cost: the frictions, failures, and acts of faith that shape collective practice.

If anything, this exhibition invites us to ask not how communities come into being, but how they endure, thread by thread.