The Architecture of Needing is a durational outdoor public performance by Getsay, presented as part of 48 Stunden Neukölln 2026. Taking place across four hours with fourteen performers at Jonasstraße / Selkestraße, beside Körnerpark in Berlin-Neukölln, the work examines dependency as a physical, social, and political structure.

The performance opens with a public constellation. Fourteen performers are mapped through a structure based on Ursa Major and Ursa Minor, creating an initial image of separation, order, and relation. Each body appears to hold its own place. Yet the score makes self-sufficiency impossible. As time accumulates, balance shifts, fatigue appears, and the map begins to change.

At the center of the work is one rule: no one can fully support themselves forever. No performer can become permanently independent, and no performer can become the permanent support for another. A body leans. Another braces. Someone lowers toward the ground. Small gestures of assistance accumulate into larger systems of support, as bodies become walls, platforms, resting places, and shared structures.

In this work, care is not represented as an image of tenderness. It is built through physical labor, attention, negotiation, refusal, delay, and limit. Support arrives unevenly, or not at all. Refusal becomes part of the score. Exhaustion changes the group. The body becomes both burden and structure.

Grounded in The Care Manifesto: The Politics of Interdependence by The Care Collective, The Architecture of Needing rejects dependency as pathology. Need is not treated as a private defect, but as a condition of being alive. The performance asks who absorbs the weight of support, who becomes exhausted by carrying it, who is allowed to refuse, and who holds the person holding everyone else.

The audience may arrive, leave, and return at any time. The work does not require participation. Instead, it asks viewers to witness what happens when independence fails, when support begins to tire, and when a shared structure must keep forming even as it comes apart.