FOR THE LTT#5, THE TEAM IN BERLIN (Silke Bake, Kirsten Maar, Gisela Müller, Paz Ponce) were interested in ways of working collaboratively or even collectively. Therefore, the four women decided to design and organize this week together. Further, they wanted to focus exclusively on organizations and initiatives based in Berlin. They intended to explore the environment, the context in which they are working which had been acknowledges as a location, a neighbourhood, a district, a city or a professional field and their histories and concerns …
Day 1_Sept 6, 2021
Visit Uferstudios Wedding – at the Café Ana Conda am Ufer & in the courtyard
Since part of Tanzfabrik Berlin is located in the premises of the organisation Uferstudios and because Silke Bake and Paz Ponce are part of the collective neue häute e.V. that is also based there, the first day was dedicated to Uferstudios and their partners. Silke and Paz intended to explore Uferstudios’ history and ways of operating starting from and in the spaces that belong to the two youngest partners of Uferstudios: neue häute and the artist and cultural worker collective PSR (performance situation room).
Uferstudios for contemporary dance is a historically protected area with 17 spacious studios, several offices and workshops, run by Uferstudios GmbH. The idea behind the Uferstudios model is the synergetic combination of artistic production, education, and information. A wide range of artists work, practice and research here, including those who temporarily rent studios for rehearsals or events, students and lecturers from the HZT Berlin, artists and employees of the Tanzfabrik Berlin, the ada studio and Tanzbüro Berlin. Open formats strengthen the connection to the neighbourhood. Additionally, all institutions located on site offer regular events. The Uferstudios program as a location is formed by the profile and the respective focus of all partners based here. (www.uferstudios.com)
neue häute e.V. develops a cooperative interdisciplinary place in which a café-bar & LAB & residence studio are interwoven as places and as practices: choreographic-artistic work is localized; a wide variety of public spheres are created. Under the motto: sharing of infrastructure – sharing as infrastructure, all spaces in the house are run cooperatively. The ethos and work are centered around an open-door policy, a place to gather and be nourished, aiming to support independent production locally, from alternative models of consumption to self-organization, care & feminist politics and interdisciplinary collaborations focused on process-based practices and practice-based research.
PSR is an informal collective of Berlin based artists and cultural workers. All members of PSR have different practices concerning their aesthetics and means. What does connect them is an interest in choreographic procedures that activate social openings and engagement and an understanding of their work with people / networks / clusters / organisms / families outside the dance scene as a drive for one´s own artistic practice. In mid-2018, they came together, in the context of a Performance Situation Room, a module of the EU network Life Long Burning, to examine the topicality of the term “social choreography”, to re-examine it and to reformulate it in the practice to come. Since then, the collective meets regularly, grows further together and moulds concepts and working strategies in the tumult of daily life.
HZT – Hochschulübergreifendes Zentrum Tanz Berlin. The Inter-University Centre for Dance Berlin is a regionally and internationally oriented training centre for a creative and critical engagement with dance, choreography and performance. Its structural anchoring is unique: it is supported by the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK) and the Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts (HfS) – in cooperation with TanzRaumBerlin, a network of Berlin’s professional dance scene. The HZT offers three degree programs: BA Dance, Context, Choreography, MA Solo / Dance / Authorship, MA Choreography. A close connection between academic education and professional artistic practice characterizes the courses, which offer an experimental approach to study, combine practice-led artistic and research driven education, and practical career guidance.
Tanzfabrik Berlin, one of the four partners of the curating in context, is a centre for the development and mediation of contemporary dance. This includes the promotion and support of young and established artists, the combination of theory and practice as well as international exchanges. As a place for production, research, education, and a dance school, Tanzfabrik Berlin has been actively and internationally known for more than 40 years with its headquarters in Kreuzberg. Since 2010, Tanzfabrik Berlin has been expanding its platform with festivals, residence studios and offices.
(www.tanzfabrik-berlin.de)
ada Studio is a working space for young Berlin choreographers at Uferstudios for contemporary dance in Berlin-Wedding. It was founded in November 2006 as a production and performance space for contemporary dance and had its domicile in QuARTier 73 on Schönhauser Allee for almost five years. Since April 2011 it has been based in the Uferstudios/Studio 7 and offers Berlin based emerging choreographers and newcomers to the city both space for research, for the production of their pieces and the opportunity to present their work in various performance series and festivals.
Tanzbüro Berlin initiates and supports projects that strengthen and integrate the Berlin dance scene. It offers artists concrete advice and maintains an ongoing dialogue with policy makers for optimizing working and funding structures of Berlins contemporary dance scene. It’s legal body is the association for contemporary dance (Zeitgenössicher Tanz Berlin e.V.), the advocacy group for all dancers and choreographers in Berlin. Tanzbüro Berlin closely collaborates with the Network TanzRaumBerlin.
Impossible Forest by Jared Gradinger, created from March 2016 on in the frame of the biennial programme Tanznacht Berlin, it grows on the asphalt yard of the Uferstudios. In collaboration with Nature and various humans, choreographer Jared Gradinger creates a participatory place for development, participation and transformation. Between dead trees and growing plants, the Impossible Forest forms a social choreography in which human and Nature meet and where attention can be directed towards the cycles of blossoming and decay.
Day 2_Sept 7, 2021
Visit the Floating University, Berlin-Kreuzberg
The Floating University, its origin and development were presented through the lens of Sabine Zahn, supported by Raul Walch. The choreographer and researcher Sabine Zahn is a member of the Floating e.V. and was addressed as a colleague, an artist within the field of contemporary dance, who acts for the group of curating-in-context as a key to learn about accesses to the city, to other artistic fields, and to the collective planning and programming of a location; a location as particular as the Floating University. Sabine produced an audio file, in which she collected voices, memories and comments of people who were involved in different phases of the floating university since its beginning. Equipped with headphones and rubber boots, each participant could walk independently through the area.
Main Question for the voices: How do you describe the process of how the program emerges within the rainwater retention basin since 2018?
Divided in the following sub-question as a score/ guideline:
→ How do formats, people and site come together to form a programme here?
→ Please think about a concrete example you know, or you witnessed. It is about your personal understanding, not a confirmed or generally agreed story. Of course, it’s not fictional, but the way you understand and describe it.
→ How does it form a piece of the puzzle within the wider context of how floating association/ or university operate?
The founding year of the Floating saw a diverse breadth of visitors involved to varying degrees with the activity on site, creating a unique ecosystem. The program consolidated a network of practitioners, who towards the end of 2018 decided to continue the experiment by transitioning from a ‘temporary’ project into an association: Floating e.V.
Floating e.V. is a self-organized space and group, where practitioners from a wide range of backgrounds meet to collaborate, co-create, and imaginatively work towards futures.
It is in solidarity with the history of the site and with the lineage of alternative narratives for urban development that the Floating e.V. situates its mission: to open, maintain and take care of this unique site while bringing non-disciplinary, radical, and collaborative programs to the public. In other words, it is a place to learn to engage, to embrace the complexity and navigate the entanglements of the world, to imagine and create different forms of living. Floating e.V. is organized in working groups that work on specific tasks and topics driven by interest and desires – or what we also like to call Fields of Knowledge and Action: from maintaining and developing the site to gardening, cultivating collaborations and taking care of neighbourhood connections.
Sabine Zahn, born in Dresden, living in Berlin investigates how choreographic strategies expand the way urbanity and urban space can be lived, expressed and transformed. Her practice as a choreographer includes establishing its own environment within a wider practical, discursive and artistic field of both urbanism, choreography and life. She creates public research projects and processes like Stadterweitern and publications as means of further practice. Transdisciplinary collaboration is a central issue, like with raumlaborberlin since more then 10 years.
(www.lovelabours.net)
(www.stadterweitern.de)
DAY 3_Sept 8, 2021
Who cares? at Uferstudios
Who cares? in its double meaning addresses the labour of critical care in the field of arts. We do this by exploring somatic practices and environmental thinking as well as by rethinking feminist politics and work-ethics. The workshop discusses the potentials of rehearsing connectivity, of politics of affectivity and of micropolitical interventions.
Shannon Cooney (Berlin): somatic practice and fluid resilience
The short session explores easy somatic exercises focusing on the awareness of our surroundings and the modalities of connectivity between the participants.
Shannon Cooney is a Canadian choreographer and dancer and dance educator, based in Berlin since 2006; she received a B.F.A honours/ dance at York University, Toronto in 1992. Since 1993 her choreography has been presented in Canada, Europe and in the U.K. She has worked with several choreographers including Benoît Lachambre, Kim Itoh, Peter Chin, Peggy Baker, and Louise Bedard. Shewas teaching for Meg Stuart/ Damaged Goods, Sasha Waltz and Guest’s, HZT Berlin, Tanzfabrik, P.A.R.T.S., ImPulsTanz, Tanzquartier Vienna, Weld Company and Cullberg Ballet. Her recent choreographic projects include: Fluid Resilience (2020) Fielding (2017), Taste of Freedom (2016).
Elke Krasny (Vienna): Ecologies of Curation in the Age of Mass Extinction: The Modern Museum: an Anthropocene Institution.
This presentation addresses conditions of possibility for ecologies of curation in the interdependencies of living and non-living beings, materials, resources, technologies, and infrastructures under the conditions of the Anthropocene. How can the meaning dimension of cura, caring and healing, stored in the term curator, be understood as an ethical and political responsibility? What does the legacy of the museum, whose genesis coincides with the beginning of the new geological period in Earth’s history, the Anthropocene, mean for curating today? How does emancipating and caring curating act in the face of man-made living conditions for human, non-human, animate and non-animate beings on planet Earth?
Elke Krasny, PhD, is Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. Her research as well as her curatorial work include critical practices in architecture, urbanism, curating, education and feminisms. Together with Angelika Fitz she edited: Critical Care. Architecture and Urbanism for a Broken Planet (MIT Press, 2019). Currently she works on a publication: Living with an Infected Planet. Covid-19 Feminism and the Global Frontline of Care (transcript, 2022).
Kasia Wolińska (Berlin): presentation of the group “working cultures”. The group evolved from the Round Table on Dance Issues in 2018. The group meets since some months discussing the conditions of performance production under the signs of neoliberal structures within the field of an expanding art market., which enforces commodification, professionalization, and self-exploitation within a paradoxical “economy of proximity” (Bojana Kunst 2009)
Kasia Wolińska is a choreographer, dancer, and writer born in Gdańsk, living in Berlin. Graduate of the Dance Department at Music Academy, Łódź, Cultural Anthropology Department at University of Łódź and Dance, Context, Choreography Program at HZT Berlin. She collaborated with, among others, Agata Siniarska, Anna Nowicka, Rosalind Crisp, Anton Vidokle, Gosia Wdowik, Rafał Dominik. In the years 2013-2018, she ran a performative project Hi Mary. Since 2018, she has been writing a blog on dance and politics www.danceisaweapon.com. Together with Faerieda Sandstrom she founded The Future Body At Work. She is a board member of ZTB e.V., the organization representing the interests of the free scene of dance in Berlin.
DAY 4_Sept 9, 2021
Visit nGbK, Berlin-Kreuzberg
Visit station urbaner kulturen, Berlin-Hellersdorf
nGbK: presentation of nGbK by Annette Maechtel
Annette Maechtel, managing director, introduces to the organisational model of nGbK, which has been developed since the late 60 in Berlin. Of special interest for the group is how the curatorship (Kuratorium) is organised through project groups and a voting system each year. The programme of nGbK is made by its members, who directly influence its thematic orientation, politics and experimental approaches, and who support the conceptualisation and production of new projects through different feedback and advice circles that walk alongside the new projects voted for at the house. A combination of old and new members form the KOA meetings, where the political agency of the institution within the culture landscape of the city is performed.
The neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst (nGbK), founded with a grass-roots structure in 1969, is today one of Germany’s most significant and largest art societies. The unique structure of the nGbK enables its members to directly influence its thematic orientation: exhibitions, interventions, research projects, event series and publications are developed in interdisciplinary project groups and supervised from the initial idea to the final implementation.
The decision on the programme of the nGbK is also made by its members. Each year, it is discussed and voted for in a collective process. In this manner, numerous projects have been realised, whose significance can hardly be overestimated in retrospect: The nGbK has established itself as an innovative venue for contemporary art and exhibition production which has left its mark on generations of curators, artists and creatives, and whose experimental exhibition concepts count as path breaking. They have provided important impetus and continue to engage with relevant socio-political topics. Themes such as racism, National Socialism and urban politics are negotiated time and again, with a further focus placed on (post)migrant, (post)colonial and gender issues. Topical discourses and debates are openly discussed and reflected upon in a timely manner. Art is understood as a form of action that has an impact on social processes.
(www.ngbk.de)
Annette Maechtel holds a doctorate in art history and is a curator. She has been the executive director of the nGbK since March 2020 and a member of the Initiative Urbane Praxis im Rat der Künste since September 2020. Her previous exhibition and research projects dealt with Berlin as a political and discursive space. In 2020 she published „Das Temporäre politisch denken. Raumproduktion im Berlin der frühen 1990er Jahre“ by b_books.
station urbaner kulturen: introduction and guidance by Adam Page
Adam Page, artist, and representative of the project group “station urbaner culture” will guide the group to a satellite venue of the institution in the eastern district of Hellersdorf, a workplace for collaborations between artists and residents. Questions of how the curatorial can revert back to the local join the network concerns with the work they have been realising in this place.
station urbaner kulturen is a decentralised location of the neuen Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst (‘new society for fine arts’, nGbK) in the large housing estate of Berlin-Hellersdorf. With a program of discursive events, exhibitions, and interventions in public space, artists and residents work together on the development of the district. Since 2014, the initiators have realised over 100 events in Hellersdorf, brought in local, national, and international artists and collaborated with numerous partners in the district and across Berlin. They have established binding relationships with residents and local partners in the areas of education, inclusion, childcare and youth work, culture, nature conservation, sport, urban development, and others.
(www.ngbk.de/en/station-urbaner-kulturen)
(www.urbanepraxis.berlin/portfolio_page/station-urbaner-kulturen/?lang=en)
Adam Page is an artist. He has been working with Eva Hertzsch since 1997 in the fields of art, communication, participation, networking and urban space. Since 2014, together with other members of the neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst Berlin, they have been running the station urbaner kulturen in the large housing complex of Berlin-Hellersdorf, an event location and exhibition space that consolidates the relationships between artists and residents. From 2014 to 2019, Page was a member of the Advisory Committee on Art in the Urban Space of the Berlin Senate Administration.
DAY 5_Sept 10, 2021
Visit Galerie Wedding – Raum für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Berlin-Wedding
The artistic director Solvej Helweg Ovesen and her colleague Malte Pieper receive the group on the Rathausplatz next to the Gallery – equipped with pillows, soft drinks and print materials informing about the work of Galerie Wedding. During the last 1,5 years, various circumstances and interests have led to the fact that the work of the gallery has moved to a large extent to the urban outdoor space.
A: As part of the pandemic plan of the social welfare office, Galerie Wedding has been transformed into a waiting room, front desk and consultation area since March 13, 2020 till November 15, 2021.
B: Further indoor spaces were not or only limited aloud to use due to the pandemic.
C: The interest by the direction in the district and its habitants.
Solveig Helweg Ovesen introduced the group to her approach towards curating, collaborating, learning and being a host, as well as running a space in a specific context.
Galerie Wedding – Raum für zeitgenössische Kunst is a municipal gallery in Berlin Mitte. It is located in the middle of an urban and multicultural district in a historic expressionist building. Just as the building was already part of a utopian concept of society, Galerie Wedding follows the claim to be a place for contemporary forms of artistic expression and forward-looking socio-political models.
In 2021, under the artistic direction of Solvej Helweg Ovesen, Galerie Wedding presents the exhibition series Existing Otherwise | Anders Existieren, or XO for short. Existing Otherwise, in the context of Galerie Wedding, means thinking about how the current crisis can be used as an opportunity to think about new forms of cultural work, networking, ecology, and civil as well as political engagement, and to help shape the relevant structures and ways of life in society. In 2021, the municipal gallery translates this position into action and aesthetic experiences with the program Existing Otherwise | Existing Differently (XO). In doing so, Galerie Wedding, as the initiator, is working together with artist Isabel Lewis from the Berlin Institute for Embodied Creative Practices, Wedding, Berlin, curator Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu and the artist Ibrahim Mahama, founder of the Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art (SCCA) in Tamale, Ghana.
Previously in 2019/20, the theme of Soft Solidarity (SoS) set the framework for the program at Galerie Wedding. The curatorial team, consisting of Nataša Ilić and Solvej Helweg Ovesen, took up current positions of artists* living in Berlin and connected them with anthropological, socio-political, but also very everyday questions. SoS explored the deep crises of solidarity and addressed the need to respond to people’s needs.
Solvej Helweg Ovesen, born in Denmark, is a curator and cultural scientist. From 2004-2006 she worked as a curator at the Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kuratorenwerkstatt, in Kassel. She has curated exhibitions in Germany and abroad, including at n.b.k., Haus am Waldsee, Berlin, and at the Fotofestival Mannheim Heidelberg and Ludwigshafen. She is the founder and artistic director of the “Great Meeting” at the Nordic Embassies in Berlin and has been the artistic director of Galerie Wedding, Berlin, together with Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung since 2015.