Rites of spring: exhibition and performance

Mar 24

Rites of Spring: A Maison Douce Exhibition + Performance
Presented by MORGEN CONTEMPORARY ART SALON, ANGELIKA WATZL & CHRISTINE MIETZE HAUG
March 20th-22nd 2026 | Berlin.

*Lotte Hauss in trance, channelling spirits during the live performance.*

Berlin Mitte, an empty apartment too elegant to be innocent and too raw to become a proper gallery. For four days, the rooms held paintings, objects, voices, and a special kind of attention. Something old moved through the space. The latest exhibition showed new collaborative works by Maison Douce and a new painting series by Lotte Hauss. At the heart of “Rites of Spring” was a simple and merciless truth:

The future belongs to those who dare to remember without seeking to redeem.
For the Rites of Spring signify more than a seasonal renewal. They mark a different beginning.
A beginning that does not come from outside, but takes place within us.
A new beginning that takes place within each and every one of us—whenever we are ready to no longer repress our past, but to embrace it. The future arises only where the past is remembered and integrated into the life of the present.
Where experiences, losses, insights, and voices are not cut off, but carried forward.
For a future that cuts itself off from everything that came before it becomes empty.
If we want a future that is not soulless, we must build upon what has brought us into being.
Not to go back. But to move forward.

*A cabinet filled with artworks (e.g. a needle-felted portrait of Jeanne d’Arc, felted skull-portraits and a table altar), next to the big “Medusa” Flag.*

The exhibition began on Thursday with an intimate dinner, held for a small circle of guests. From Friday to Sunday, the exhibition opened for the public. Saturday became the axis around which the whole event turned: an immersive ritual-performance shaped by music, improvisation, spoken text, invocation, and audience participation.

That night, spring was not treated as decoration, nor as optimism, nor as season. It appeared as ordeal. As passage. As a force that asks what must be buried, what must be remembered, and what must finally be brought into form.

Within the ritual, Lotte channeled the spirit of spring — or whatever being still speaks through thaw, grief, and renewal — and gave voice to messages on passage, transformation, and the cost of beginning again. The audience entered a shared act centered on a hand-spun string, a gesture echoing the Norns and their threads of past, present, and future: not fate as abstraction, but fate as something touched, tangled, and made.

What happened in that apartment was not an escape from history. It was a brief descent into it. A refusal to build the future on amnesia.

*A ritualistic washing of the artwork “Bat Decisions”, gilded baseball bats. In the background you see the artwork “Mutterleib” and the banner “Sophia”.*

*Marc T. Suess hosting the ritual and reading the sermon for the “Rites of Spring”..*

We are deeply grateful to everyone who made this gathering possible: Angelika Watzel of Morgan Contemporary and Christine Mietze Haug, and our performance collaborators Victoria Hempel, Paula Haus, Daniel Wieczór, and Lev Radagan. And a very special thanks to Harikrisshnan Narayana Swamy, whose extraordinary photographic eye preserved the atmosphere, the fracture, the tenderness, and the fire of those days.