The Blog

Aug 06
4

FESTIVAL TOUR #1 – MARZAHN-HELLERSDORF

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The Project Space Festival is also a tour through the city. Artist Carola Rümper takes us on a stroll through her favourite spots in Marzahn-Hellersdorf, where the festival contribution of her project space mp43 – projekraum für das periphere opens on August 8th. A journey to frozen places, balcony cinemas and sausage editions.

Sojus Cinema
“The Sojus is a defunct cinema, which is situated right on Allee der Kosmonauten. It was commissioned by Erich Honecker and opened in 1981. Since 2007 there have been no screenings here, and the building has been left to rot. Unfortunately, I never made it to the cinema when it was still open. When you stand here and listen to the Russian sounding names like “Sojus” and “Allee der Kosmonauten”, you understand that what lies before you here is the past of the city of Berlin, frozen in time. What a shame that this place, like so many others, will disappear when it will be torn down at the end of 2018. Come and see it before it’s too late.”

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Aug 02
5

THE LITTLE FESTIVAL STARTER KIT

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The 4th iteration of the festival is bursting at the seams – how to keep track? With this bite-sized Festival Starter Kit of course!

31 summer days, over 80 artists, and countless locations spread throughout the city: a month jam-packed with art! This spring, a jury selected 27 spaces from over 50 applications, which the programme pulls together on the big festival stage of the independent Berlin art scene. Independent: for the festival, it means above all the diverse Berlin art venues existing outside the art market and public institutions, and away from the many commercial galleries or large private collections. The Project Space Festival 2018 is everything in between and beyond, somehow right in the middle – and a pretty good neighbour at that.

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Aug 01
4

THE COURAGE TO EXPERIMENT

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This year marks the 4th iteration of the Project Space Festival. In an interview with the PSF Blog, the festival’s director Marie-josé Ourtilane and assistant director Cora Hegewald speak about courage to experiment, journeying to the edges of the city, and the importance of the festival to Berlin’s cultural calendar.

After a break last year, the festival returns this August. What can visitors expect?
Marie-josé: It’s the fourth edition of the festival this year and, as in previous years, the festival can be seen as a journey through the world of Berlin’s project spaces. Visitors can get an idea of how the spaces work and think, and how they interact with the city, as well as learning more about the subjects and projects that they work on – it’s really an overview on the whole breadth of the scene. The participating spaces are mainly united by what they don’t want to be, that is: neither commercial, nor institutional. There’s plenty of courage to experiment aesthetically, and the spaces are a huge impulse for the city’s artistic landscape. That’s what we want to show to audiences.

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Sep 06
2

Decentralize! Self-organize! Commercialize? / Online and offline art

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Guest author: Marlene Ronstedt

The Berlin of the 1990s, with its occupied houses, temporary autonomous zones, and anarchistic playgrounds, bore close similarity to the open internet which emerged at the same time. Back then, the possibilities cyber space offered to geeks and nerds seemed to be infinite. Neither NSA surveillance nor commercialization had yet reached into the digital sphere.

This offline situation constituted – at least in Berlin – the ideal biotope for the art and techno scene to prosper. But it also meant that the city became increasingly interesting to investors and real estate agents, leading eventually to the gentrification of those very places. Read More

Sep 02
2

WHATAWEEK THREE: 15. – 21.08.16

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Project Space Festival Day 15: Radical Praxes

nationalmuseum is a large white space on the fourth level of an old factory. And yet it is also not a classic white cube, because the space’s aesthetic is, even if discretely, loaded with history. This is not a neutral place, and so ample space is opened for the generation of new ideas.
In the exhibition A Political Idiom, Radical Praxes fills the entire space not so much with a soberly installed objects as with a very specific intensity. Read More

Aug 31
3

Projecting Space

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Guest author: Benjamin T. Busch

I. Center and Periphery
Center and periphery are spatial concepts that, following Henri Lefebvre, resonate in three distinct yet interrelated registers: physical space, represented space, and representational space (1). Considering the periphery, or margin, as a necessary and constituent part of the center, without which the center could not exist, this text will discuss Lefebvre’s “spatial triad” in relation to the project space:

First, in spatial practice, or physical space, the material conditions of society come to the fore. Spatial practice is space that is perceived, constantly undergoing interpretation and transformation by society. Second, representations of space are formalized conceptions of space. Read More

Aug 25
2

RECOUP: Reflections accumulating before a performance

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Guest author: Bryndís Björnsdóttir

What if I told you – my (for now) presumed female reader – that currently there is an island in the north fighting for your right to gush fresh hot geothermal water on your bare breasts and airdry them in the midst of a public pool, just like saggy manboobs on any old Thursday?

Were it not my last name revealing the country I was born in (as you may call me “Ms.-the-daughter-of-her-father”), I could trick you in thinking that I am here making a universal claim, rather than a provocation with a hint of cynicism typical to the cold and dark north. Though – as with many tongue-in-cheek utterances – behind this one lies a feeling of urgency: a longing for feminism to find a strategic path for real transformations. Read More

Aug 23
2

Befragen, Austarieren, Ausprobieren: Interview mit NBR & Alex Head

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Neue Berliner Räume setzt sich im öffentlichen Raum sowie “White-Cube”- und privaten Räumen seit seiner Gründung 2011 konsequent mit dem vorhandenen Ort auseinander. Als bewusst nomadischer Projektraum, der aber fest in Berlin verankert ist, haben sie eine intime Beziehung zu dem Raum einer sich zunehmend gentrifiziertenden Stadt. Die kuratorische Gruppe, bestehend aus Valerie Senden, Sylvia Sadzinski und Manuel Wischnewski, zusammen mit dem Künstler Alex Head, werden gefragt:

PSF: Ihr habt Ausstellungsprojekte im Tieranatomischen Theater, in einem, kurz vor der Renovierung stehenden, Haus in der Lützowsraße, im öffentlichen Raum des Tempelhofer Felds, im Kunsthaus Dahlem und auf dem Dachboden des alten Postfuhramts Berlin organisiert. Was waren eure Beweggründe, von Anfang an eine nomadische Plattform (ohne festen Raum) zu gründen? Read More

Aug 19
3

WHATAWEEK TWO: 08. – 14.08.16

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Project Space Festival Day 8: mp43
Between the stark concrete housing blocks and weedy open spaces of Hellersdorf, a model example of East German housing infrastructure built on the peripheries of Berlin in the 1980s, capitalism still often feels like an intruder. Instead, “shopfront” spaces facing the shadowy concrete promenades of this area and its neighbor, Marzahn, are of late often occupied by community-oriented studios and art spaces, as is the case for mp43.
Carola Rümper and Marnie Müller, the “two-stroke engine” behind mp43, gave their one-day event the unassuming title Topflappen (oven cloth) for the simple reason that this is an object everyone and anybody can identify with. Read More
Aug 17
3

KONTINUITÄTEN & BRÜCHE: Interview mit alpha nova & galerie futura

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Die Geschichte der galerie futura beschreibt eine, sich seit Mitte der 1980er Jahre entwickelnde, Entstehung ihres Futuristan. In unserem Interview berichten Katharina Koch und Dorothea Nold, wie sich Erfolg mit produktivem Scheitern verbinden lässt und welche Rolle Projekträume damit in der Öffentlichkeit einnehmen.

PSF: Futura wurde 1986 in der Folge der Reaktorkatastrophe von Tschernobyl gegründet. Wer waren die Gründerinnen? Was war deren Anlass?

Katharina Koch und Dorothea Nold: Die Gründerinnen des Projektes FUTURA in Zehlendorf waren Frauen – meist aus dem akademischen Umfeld – die sich aus ihrem Engagement für die Frauenfriedensbewegung her seit Jahren kannten. Die Frauenfriedensbewegung um Eva Quistorp in Berlin charakterisiert von Beginn an ihr internationales Selbstverständnis – in Berlin insbesondere ihr enges Netzwerk mit Frauen aus der DDR-Widerstandsbewegung um Bärbel Bohley. Der Reaktorunfall in Tschernobyl bot durch sein existentielles Bedrohungsszenario den endgültigen Anstoß, einen eigenen Ort der Begegnung und Vernetzung von und für Frauen zu gründen. Read More