12 September 2026 |
There are few cities where the idea of a nightclub as a cultural institution feels as natural as it does in Berlin. This autumn, Silencio is testing that idea in a new setting. On 30th October, the Paris-born club will open a temporary home in the former Watergate on the banks of the Spree, staying until May 2027 as part of its 15th anniversary celebrations.
The Silencio Berlin pop-up forms part of REFERENCE FESTIVAL, founded by Mumi Haiati. The festival continues in Paris next month during Art Basel Paris week, with Maurizio Cattelan, Klaus Biesenbach, Florentina Holzinger and Dozie Kanu among those taking part.
Founded in Paris in 2011 by Arnaud Frisch, Silencio was conceived with David Lynch as something deliberately difficult to categorise: part nightclub, part cinema, part gallery, part meeting place. Over the years, its spaces have hosted everyone from Prince, Björk and Kendrick Lamar to Larry Clark, Carsten Höller and Michèle Lamy. Lana Del Rey gave her first Paris concert there. The impressive list of names, however, isn’t really the point. Silencio has always been interested in what happens when different creative worlds are allowed to occupy the same room.
Berlin offers an obvious, but far from straightforward, next chapter. The city’s club culture has long blurred the boundaries between nightlife, art, fashion and politics, while its independent spaces have become important sites for experimentation and community. Rather than attempting to reproduce the Paris club in Berlin, Silencio is approaching the project as something temporary and deliberately changeable.
Each weekend, a different collective will take over the former Watergate, shifting the atmosphere, audience and programme with it. Music will sit alongside performance, moving image and visual art, allowing the space to continually reinvent itself rather than settle into a fixed identity.
The choice of location is significant, too. Silencio’s temporary projects have previously travelled to New York and appeared around major cultural moments including the Venice Biennale, Cannes Film Festival and Art Basel Miami Beach. In Berlin, the architecture itself is being treated as part of the experiment.
Artist and architect Marc Leschelier is working with Berlin-based Studio Karhard on the intervention, with lighting by Studio Raito and a visual identity by Bureau Borsche. Leschelier’s practice often draws on the visual language of construction and heavy industry, creating a deliberately austere environment. At Silencio Berlin, that weight will sit in contrast to the temporary nature of the project — a structure that looks built to last, but isn’t.
For Frisch, this tension is central to the idea. “A club is a form that has to be reinvented, not preserved,” he says. “Berlin has understood that longer than anyone and is where that form has been taken furthest.”
That makes the Berlin project feel less like an expansion than an experiment: a Paris institution entering a city with its own deeply established ideas about what a club can be. If Silencio’s first fifteen years were about creating a space where disciplines could collide, its next chapter may be about seeing what happens when that philosophy is dropped into Berlin.
The pop-up will run through May 2027, forming part of a year of celebrations that will culminate in September with a book tracing Silencio’s first fifteen years.
Photography JOSEPH KADOW
