Take a tour of the PLATO building and learn about its history from those who remember it. The project was initiated by German theater director and educator Anja Scheffer.

Before the PLATO building became a gallery, it served as a slaughterhouse, and the surrounding streets bore traces of the activity, smells, and names associated with this trade. Jelitová Street—and what the old bricks still conceal—returns to this past life and honest craft through the people who remember it. Together with them, the project explores memories of this place: the sounds and work routines, the stories etched into the walls, what the old bricks still conceal, and what life was like around the building.

Initiated by German artist Anja Scheffer, the work takes the form of a performative guided tour, in which those with memories serve as the authors. Part elegy and part collective inquiry, it lets the building tell its own story and gives a voice to a place that was built for many purposes. The project was created during Anja Scheffer’s artist residency at PLATO.

Anja Scheffer is a Berlin-based artist working at the intersection of theater, video, visual art, and art mediation, most often in museum settings, where she develops participatory projects with communities in which the creative role is ceded to the participants. She is the founder and artistic director of the Berlin-based collective sideviews and has collaborated with institutions such as the House of World Cultures (HKW), the German Historical Museum, the Berlinische Galerie, and KW—Institute for Contemporary Art. At PLATO, she is developing her project “Jelitová Street and Other Stories of Old Bricks” (2025–26).