So long, SUPERMARKT!
Yes, SUPERMARKT in capital letters. Because it wasn’t just some grocery store around the corner. For thirteen years, it was my second home, my school, my workplace, the place in which I grew up.
I’m not good at saying goodbye. At parties, I’m the one who slips out unnoticed, and when something truly matters to me, letting go becomes almost impossible. But now it’s time to finally say farewell to the project that has been closest to my heart. After turning this story over in my head for more than two years, it needs to go out into the fresh air. So… here we go.
It took me forever to write this text. Before actually typing anything, I kept rearranging words in my mind, never managing to put them onto paper. I couldn’t even bring myself to update the website. Until recently, it still listed our Kreuzberg address and the last event announcements from February 2023.
Deep down, I was ashamed. Ashamed of stopping. Ashamed of no longer holding on. Ashamed of failing to give SUPERMARKT the farewell it deserved.
Why am I so bad at letting go? Looking back, I think it’s because I couldn’t accept what was happening. And because I had no idea how to say goodbye to something that shaped me (and my family) so profoundly. SUPERMARKT, in all caps.
The adventure began in 2010. Together with Zsolt and David, my partners in crime, we discovered an abandoned cluster of buildings on Brunnenstraße in Berlin-Wedding. We fell in love with it instantly. It took almost a year until we could rent the former Maier’s Supermarket and four additional commercial units, turning them into coworking studios and an event space.
None of us had savings or family money to rely on. We built everything from the income we generated through our creative work. To make things even more adventurous, Zsolt and I became parents right at the beginning of SUPERMARKT: our daughter grew up literally in the middle of an event team. With her tiny walker, she took her first steps on the old supermarket floor.
SUPERMARKT gave me the most exciting and exhausting years of my life. I was program director, café co-owner, moderator, and mother. All rolled into one. And I loved it. We realised every idea in those rooms, no matter how wild: exhibitions, deadline sprints, concerts, dinners, conferences, DIY masterclasses, booksprints, money talks, fashion shows, shop-in-shops — you name it.
For many years, this went on. And then COVID-19 arrived. That was the turning point. On March 12, 2020, when I had to cancel our first event (“let’s flatten the curve”), I felt, for the first time, relief at the thought of staying home that evening. And on many evenings after that. The spaces of SUPERMARKT, which had moved to Mehringplatz in Kreuzberg by then, stood empty. And deep inside, I felt empty, too.
Truthfully, the time to say goodbye had already come. But I continued running the program digitally for another three years. I wrote about how that worked for Berliner Gazette back then. In 2022, our lease at Mehringplatz was not renewed, and there wasn’t enough energy or perspective left to continue. In 2023, we delivered our final official SUPERMARKT project. Inside, I already knew I couldn’t go on. I urgently needed a break. And so SUPERMARKT found a quiet end. No farewell party. No social media post. The last verse simply faded out, and I had nothing more to add.
For two years, the grief lingered in my body. I had identified with this project so deeply that I couldn’t let it go. When we packed up Mehringplatz and moved into a simple office with countless boxes, it felt as if a part of me had disappeared into those boxes as well. We never had an exit strategy for SUPERMARKT, and I wasn’t prepared for the emptiness that followed: that strange in-between space that opens when something ends and nothing new has begun yet. The silence before the old begins to compost.
Then, this summer, something unexpected happened: I logged into the SUPERMARKT website and began updating it. Reading through all the old texts and blog posts, I smiled. I felt pride and a flood of nostalgia. Something inside me started flowing again. One day later, I stumbled upon a social media post by Manuela Bosch, where she shared her experience with stopping, unwinding, composting. It was a revelation. Her words expressed exactly what I was feeling. “Yes, it’s allowed — to do it and to speak about it. We [social entrepreneurs, facilitators, cultural workers, …] are allowed to!”
Reading it, I felt enormous relief. Those were the words I had been searching for. Yes! I’m allowed to do this too. I can not only start projects with a big bang, I can also admit when the energy is no longer there - and let them go. Even when I don’t yet have the right words for it, because I am still in the middle of a transition myself. I finally understood that SUPERMARKT was not just a place. It was a way of being. A state, a stance. Its essence still lives in me. It has become the engine behind my current work: enabling creativity, thinking outside the box, bringing people together, being a host, taking risks.
Thank you, Manuela, for daring to share your announcement. I agree deeply that we should congratulate each other and offer encouragement when we unwind something and step into a new life phase. It takes enormous courage to stop. Sometimes far more courage than starting something new. Especially because stopping is often such a lonely process. One where hardly any positive energy comes from the outside.
Only now, years later, do I fully understand the actual SUPERMARKT feeling: the mindset, the promise that almost anything is possible when you imagine it together. What remains are the encounters, the people, the projects. The connections and shared reference points that extend far beyond any specific place. My biggest learning: don’t think small, don’t make myself small, cultivate imagination. Believe that far more is possible than we often assume.
In this spirit: thank you to everyone who made the SUPERMARKT adventure possible! We should turn the website into a beautiful archive of thirteen years of conferences and workshops on digital culture and the alternative economy in Berlin. But that’s a story for another time…