In the centre of Berlin two opposing political regimes – or at least their traces – collide. Alongside the building site where the Berlin Palace is being reconstructed – the surrounding fence plastered with mobile phone company ads – a group of people stand pointing their phones towards the former East German State Council Building. The modernist construction incorporates the Baroque portal of the Berlin Palace which was not demolished with the rest of the building in 1951. It was here that in 1918 Karl Liebknecht declared Germany a socialist republic. Today the building houses a private business school. A flâneur saunters through its rooms. Casting his eyes upon the new/old palace symbolic of a regime under which in the 19th century African colonies were reassigned and that will soon host Berlin’s ethnographic collections, he attempts to make sense of the mapping and partitioning of the world – not least in light of the sourcing of the component elements integral to our mobile devices.