Spring Longing in Berlin’s Winter: Aubrey Theobald and an Emotional Archive at Scope BLN

Scope BLN in the Wedding district greets us with an unusual whisper of spring. Aubrey Theobald’s solo exhibition titled “TOUCH, SPRING / BERÜHRUNG, FRÜHLING” presents the fragmented, delayed, and constructed nature of spring right in the middle of winter as a project of “emotional resilience.”

That raw beauty which Zadie Smith once described as “a shade of green for every kind of light celebration” is transformed in Theobald’s hands into pale yellow light, the scent of daisies, and the melancholic timbre of the cello.

From Waste to Ritual: Soft Bureaucracy and Romanticism

The exhibition space is filled with waste collected from local streets, personal materials, dried flowers, remnants of past relationships, and half-visible prints. Yet this is not a “cabinet of curiosities” (Wunderkammer); it feels more like a living organism that conveys a sense of wholeness and childlike melancholy.

Theobald creates striking contrasts in her works:

• Industrial and Poetic Coatings: The artist encases delicate memories, found objects, and plants in durable materials such as car lacquer, resin, and beeswax. This is a hopeful act that oscillates between protecting fragility and imprisoning it.
• Soft Bureaucracy (Handstraußregelung): Drawing on small bureaucratic rules such as Berlin’s city regulation allowing “the picking of a handful of wild herbs,” she transforms them into personal rituals and a gentle critique of soft bureaucracy.

Sound and Collaboration: The Echo of the Cello

Trained as a cellist, Theobald does not perform her own music in this project for the first time in her career. Instead, she invited Martin Edigi and Wojtek Prażuch to respond to an emotional note she wrote about spring. Recorded without knowledge of each other’s contributions, these responses create an “inner conversation” in the exhibition space—one in which the sounds lean on, support, and turn solitude into physical closeness.

Additionally, within the framework of their “Support Systems” collective with Jesse Ly, they question how we can support one another through heavy emotions such as grief, loss, and distance—through the metaphor of a “rose” and a “memory of holding on together.”

In the Artist’s Own Words: “A Street Corner Waiting to Warm Up”

Aubrey Theobald describes her exhibition as follows:

“My works create the effect of a street corner longing to warm up, overgrown with wild herbs. The co-existence (co-poesis) of industrial materials with the smell of mould, broken fragments, and hyper-sentimentality. This is a rusted memory of waiting, warming, and repetition.”

In the grey January days of Berlin, this daisy-scented, yellow-lit “spring rehearsal” at the heart of Wedding offers an elegant resistance against the harshness of winter.