The Blog

August is over and the festival has come to a close. For those who didn’t get a chance to see everything, festival intern Elvira Garcia opens her personal festival diary to take a look back on a month packed with art and a city full of impressions.

Apartment Project – 02.08.2018
Between the first and third performance of this evening at Apartment Project, the audience gathers quietly in the room, facing the electronic duo FezayaFirar – sitting behind their computer, synthesizers and other devices. As they begin to perform, a pointer starts to move across the wall behind them, leaving a white trail: The Turkish artist Ceren Oykut sits in front of the musicians, drawing in communication with FezayaFirar’s improvisation. Her drawings are projected live: White lines advance across the black surface with the same fluidity as the sounds impregnating the room. Oykut’s drawings never start from an empty surface, and through adding and erasing, she transforms figures seamlessly. The joint improvisation of the artists and disciplines invites the audience to draw connections between the three performing minds, between lines and sound. The performance has the visitors guessing whether the pen strokes follow or disobey the musical rhythms. This spontaneity is stimulating, and makes me search sounds in the drawings and images in the sounds. FezayaFirar’s and Ceren Oykut’s performance transforms this exercise of connection into a pleasurable synesthetic illusion.

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Those who went to this year’s festival will have surely met Franz Lohrengel. The retired art teacher has been living in Berlin as a photographer and artist since 2002, and has seen over half of the events during the 2018 festival – always with a sense of curiosity, and his camera ready at hand. But what stays in mind when you’ve seen almost everything? A short look back with one of the festival’s busiest visitors.

How did you become aware of the festival?
As an artist and photographer, I have known some project spaces for years. I also use the Internet and printed programmes, and look out for posters in the city, like the ones that were around for the festival this year. As a curious observer, I am mostly around in Mitte, and therefore slightly spoiled. That’s also why I’m constantly looking for special moments that somehow mirror the zeitgeist.

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Four years ago, Marie Graftieaux, Nora Mayr, and Lauren Reid founded Project Space Festival Berlin. Here, they are giving an insight into what motivated them, and what they hope the festival’s future might bring.

“When we started the festival in 2014, it was mainly because we wanted to have closer contact with the other spaces in the city. By that time, we had already had our own space insitu for a year, and felt that there was too little connection with our colleagues. It’s often the case that your own space takes up a lot of time and energy – and that’s on top of your day job. There’s just not enough time to see the exhibitions and events of the others. So our desire was to help building a stronger network, and a closeness between the people running all these spaces. Our objective was that the spaces would feel a little less like lone warriors, and instead recognised as part of an important group of cultural producers.

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Each festival has its longstanding participants, but there are also new additions to be discovered – like the spaces FK-Kollektiv and Farbvision in this year’s programme. What does it feel like to be a newcomer? Why the festival is an important pat on the back – an interview with Stephanie Ballantine and Paul McDevitt.

This is your first year in the festival for your respective spaces: What’s been your experience as newcomers?
Stephanie: It’s been great! I went to as many events as I could and I really love seeing the other spaces. It’s so interesting to see what the others are doing and you can tell that some of them are a few years ahead of what everyone else is doing. We’ve been kind of outside the whole scene before with FK-Kollektiv and therefore it has been nice to be more a part of it. It’s also brought in new audiences, which is such a nice experience.

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The Project Space Festival is also a tour through the city. Hannes Gruber takes us to some of his favourite spots in Berlin-Mitte, where the festival contribution of his nomadic project space, meantime projects, starts on August 30th. A stroll through Mitte, past some independent spaces that have been closed – and others, saved.

Park area beside the former Deutsche Post
“I came to Berlin in 1999 and have pretty much stayed in this area here ever since. The small park area next to the old post building on Torstraße always seemed interesting to me. There was a sculpture, a flight of steps – everything run down, of course, and full of graffiti and rubbish. I can’t remember seeing anyone really spend quality time there. Later, there was a Zwischennutzung there for some time, with public viewing events and such. Now, they are building apartments there. It’s not really that the park is such a big loss; it wasn’t among the crown jewels of the area to begin with. And yet, the whole development is interesting, isn’t it? How a public area becomes private property, with which a lot of money is being made. And there’s so much history in this one little piece of land. Looking at it, it was probably the site of a bombing in WWII. Then it came to reflect the traces of East Berlin’s hardship and, later, the poverty of a post-reunification Berlin, a city that had more pressing matters to attend to than taking care of a small park. I don’t really look back on those places with a feeling of nostalgia. But, I do want to remember what attracted me to them. And that little park was a space in the city that left something open. I liked that.”

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As a board member of the Network of Berlin Independent Project Spaces and Initiatives, Chris Benedict has been championing Berlin’s independent art scene for many years. An interview about the grey areas, picking a fight with politics, and whether Berlin’s project spaces have a future.

This year marks the first collaboration between the festival and the Netzwerk freier Berliner Projekträume und –initiativen (Network of Berlin Independent Project Spaces and Initiatives). How did this come about?
We had been thinking about a possible partnership for a while. There was always the question of whether to leave the two separate, or to team up in a collaborative effort. Some within the network, including myself, were of the opinion that it would make sense to collaborate, as we do have the same interests at the end of the day. And so we spoke with the festival director, Marie-josé, and then it was pretty quickly clear that we’d get along just fine.

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The Project Space Festival is also a tour through the city. Jaro Straub takes us to his favourite spots in Siemensstadt, where his project space SCHARAUN is the site of the festival on August 21st. Coffee with a view, and a secret sculpture garden in the forest: the discoveries of Siemensstadt.

Ring Bäckerei
“The perfect starting point to explore the architecture around Siemensstadt is the Ring Bäckerei, coined after the Ring Estate, one of Berlin’s showcase projects for modern housing from the 20s and 30s. The name of the estate goes back to the architecture association Der Ring, whose members Otto Bartning, Walter Gropius, Hugo Häring, and Hans Scharoun were heavily involved in the planning of the area.

The bakery opens at five in the morning, with a large coffee costing one euro – pretty much without competition in the area. On top of that, you’ve got a splendid view from the terrace over all the recently renovated buildings by Gropius and Häring.”

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Berlin’s project space scene is constantly changing and shifting. We talk to Benjamin Busch, whose TIER.space just opened recently, and to Loré Lixenberg, who lost her space La Plaque Tournante last year. An interview about the wonder of finding a space, Berlin’s labyrinthine bureaucracy, and refusing to give up.

Benjamin, you opened TIER.space together with Lorenzo Sandoval earlier this year. How did the decision to open the space come about?
Benjamin: Lorenzo and I were talking about finding a space in the neighbourhood in Neukölln for quite some time. And then it kind of happened miraculously that I received an invitation to apply for this subsidised space, offered by the Berlin Senate’s Arbeitsraumprogramm. The whole system behind that seems a bit labyrinthine to me – you’d actually need a diagram to explain it. But the bureaucracy is essentially what created the space and allowed us to move into it, so you can’t be too critical. It’s officially rented by the GSE Gesellschaft für StadtEntwicklung, and then it’s sublet to us. We pay one third of the rent, and the Senate pays the other two thirds. There was a jury process, and it actually all went pretty fast. A week after we applied, we found out that we had gotten the space, and two weeks later, on May 2nd, we signed the contract.

Loré: We applied for the same space, you beat us to that! (laughs). But what a great scheme!
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The Project Space Festival is also a tour through the city. Curator and journalist Jan Kage takes us on a stroll through Kreuzberg, where the festival contribution of his project space SCHAU FENSTER opens on August 15th. How is it to live in Kunstraum Kreuzberg – and where can discoveries still be made? A day in Kreuzberg.

Kunstraum Kreuzberg
“Coming to Berlin in 1997 from the Rhineland region, the band Ton Steine Scherben were gods for me: “Der Mariannenplatz war blau, so viele Bullen waren da.“ (eng: “There were so many cops, Mariannenplatz was blue.”) For a teenager looking at Berlin in a rather romantic way, Mariannenplatz, with its iconic Bethanien building, was an incredibly charged place.

I first came across the Kunstraum Kreuzberg in Bethanien fifteen years ago, when Adrian Nabi curated the important exhibition Backjumps – The Live Issue there. That was when urban art – or ‘street art’ as it was called back then – was still fresh, before everyone was copying Banksy, or Swoon. In 2012, I curated an exhibition there myself, a retrospective to mark the ninth anniversary of my party series PARTY ARTY: seven weeks, and over fifty artists. To reflect the eclectic breadth of the artistic positions, I even built my own apartment into the exhibition, complete with bed, kitchen table, fridge and my drum kit – even my girlfriend moved in with me there. Friends stopped by, we drank, ate, jammed… I really lived there. That’s why I have quite a personal relationship to the place.

Municipal galleries often have the reputation of being a bit stuffy. Not the Kunstraum. Thanks to people like its director Stéphane Bauer, it has stayed close to its roots, without becoming outdated.”

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As in previous years, the participating spaces of the festival have been selected by a jury. But what about those that didn’t make the cut? An interview with April Gertler and Adrian Schiesser about their project space Sonntag, getting calls from the festival director, and the beautiful feeling of still being part of it all, somehow.

You’re in your sixth year with Sonntag. You’ve worked with over 60 artists, travelled internationally, and this year, you are also the recipient of the Project Space Award. Even so, did it still matter to you that you didn’t get selected by the jury for the Project Space Festival?

April: We’ve sort of been part of the festival since the beginning. Actually, Marie-josé Ourtilane, the director, was quite upset that we weren’t participating this year. She called to tell me upfront because she didn’t want us to just read it in an email. But it was okay for us, I guess because it came hot on the heels of winning the award. I think it’s important in general to be recognised by your peers, and we do feel like that is the case. When we told everyone that we had gotten the award, so many people replied and said: “You really deserve this.” That was a great feeling and it’s important to focus on that.
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