Author: anja

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A for Jewish

An artistic research at the Jewish Museum Berlin, 2017-2019.

The goal is to develop an exhibition format together with young people. In a dialogue with people from different backgrounds, experiences and points of view, the Jewish Museum Berlin is both investigated in an open, dialogical process and simultaneously included in the curatorial work of the museum in order to create a dialogue with them. The “Schattenmuseum” takes its lead from the structures, needs and goals of the museum, looks for alternative approaches and designs an experimental set-up. Content, formats and methods are developed and implemented creatively in cooperation with schoolchildren, residents and museum employees.

performative Interviewwerkstatt 2017
Klischees 2017
Schattenmuseum präsentieren 2018
Spiel des Lebens 2918
Spiel des Lebens 2018

First, ethnographic-aesthetic investigations in urban space (Measuring Jewish Berlin) as well as in archives and collections are carried out with the participants. At the same time, a blog is being created for workshops, campaigns, documentation and as a communication tool and project archive.

From mid-2017, sideviews have been involved in a collaborative exhibition at the Jewish Museum Berlin. Schattenmuseum / Growing – Jewish Life Today is a dynamic exhibition that focuses on the question: How can Jewish life today be portrayed vividly?

In the second step, workshops are conducted on the artistic realization of the research in various disciplines such as film, theatre, visual arts, model making, music, design and museum work.

On the basis of the resulting collection of materials, ideas and objects, a third workshop series will take place to realize the exhibition concept and architecture. Participants of the Schattenmuseum select exhibits together with the curators and the workshop results are processed through performance and installation. Various positions and stories on the topic “Growing – Jewish Life Today” as well as the process of dialogical discussion are depicted, brought to life and presented from November 2018 at the Ross Gallery in the Jewish Museum Berlin.

The exhibition “A for Jewish” poses questions, opens up space for dialogue and will continue to develop in a dialogical and dynamic way until the end of 2019: In workshops, participants can introduce perspectives and put down new layers of interpretation and design on the exhibition. Visitors are involved in activities, the performative design suspends any clear boundary between object and person, between narrator and story and invites you to participate in discussions, experiments, creative workshops, theatrical processes and film shoots. The participants of the shadow museum act as experts and present their specific forms of examination and presentation.

Begleitprogramm zu “A wie Jüdisch”/ JMB, Februar 2019

In September 2018, together with sideviews ten young people founded the Jugendgremium Schattenmuseum, in order to reflect on the work and to advise further museums and exhibition centres from their perspective. They also developed the accompanying program. 

Article by Léontine Meijer-van Mensch, Miriam Goldmann, Christiane Lindner and Fabian Schnedler: What happens when many people make an exhibition together? About the development process and focal points of the exhibition “A for Jewish”.

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Game Youth Committee Shadow Museum Museum Museum Shadow Museum Shadow Museum Game Refik Veseli School theatre profile Youth Committee Shadow Museum

Shadowmuseum

2018-today

Shadowmuseum (Schattenmuseum) can be regarded as an alternative approach to the concept of a museum and has grown out of several years of cooperation between sideviews, the Jewish Museum Berlin and a group of schoolchildren from Kreuzberg in Berlin. Schattenmuseum is a structure for developing proposals for museums on how to interact with communities, collections and educational opportunities. Content, methods and artistic formats are developed and implemented collaboratively with young people and adults. Schattenmuseum is based on the actual structures, needs and goals of the respective museum. An experimental field unfurls, accompanying an exhibition for example, in which questions are asked, a space for dialogue is created or an experimental arrangement is set up involving different groups of visitors and including their perspectives in the exhibition. Schattenmuseum has been developing as an experimental arrangement in the Berlinische Galerie since the beginning of 2019. Since mid-2020, Schattenmuseum has also been collaborating with the Berlin Biennale, the KW Institute for Contemporary Art and the House of World Cultures.

To Shadowmuseum´s Website

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Game Laboratory for intermediate spaces Laboratory for intermediate spaces Museum Museum Refik Veseli School theatre profile Shadow Museum Theatre Refik Veseli School theatre profile Theatre

VOIDS.UnlearnMuseum

VOIDS.MuseumVerLernen 2017

In the Jewish Museum Berlin, the debate about the crisis of the museum as an institution has been going on for some time. sideviews was invited to take this debate as a starting point for a performative project with prospective young visitors. After researching the museum architecture with VOIDS, VOIDS.MuseumVerLernen takes a step further: the museum as a whole is analyzed creatively (from curatorship to communication structures, from security to production) in order to understand which type of relationship the institution offers both to its community and to its visitors. 

Based on the statements that 8th grade pupils of the Refik Veseli School collected in audio interviews with employees, visitors and passers-by, the findings of this study was staged as a performance and symposium. 45 employees of the museum, including the director, came together for a discussion with thepupils about the opportunities and scope for involving young people in the development of a “museum for everyone”.

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Game Laboratory for intermediate spaces Laboratory for intermediate spaces Museum Museum Refik Veseli School theatre profile Shadow Museum Theatre Refik Veseli School theatre profile Theatre

Golem

Golem 2017

Taking the “Golem” exhibition in the Jewish Museum Berlin as a basis, this project broadens the spectrum of scope of the museum and its visitors. The Golem is a mythical creature from the Jewish Talmud that has fascinated Western cultures for centuries: human life created by man and capable of existing and manifesting itself in society.

The challenge was to recount this phenomenon by theatrical means without using the classical theatre form. Pupils were encouraged to construct a golem together based on their ideas and desires. Formally, they could use elements of theatrical language: the scene, the choir, the choreography, the stage design. The result was a specially developed theatre form, which itself was a golem, created from a shared imagination – a mixture of golem show and expert congress, interactive and improvised.

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Game Laboratory for intermediate spaces Laboratory for intermediate spaces Museum Museum Shadow Museum Theatre Refik Veseli School theatre profile Theatre Uncategorized

VOIDS.EmptySpaces

VOIDS.Leerstellen 2016

VOIDS proposes interactive formats for the museum concerning the architecture of the Libeskind building. A strategy is collectively developed establishing the perspective that an exhibition can also be an action in space. Accordingly, everything related to this action becomes an exhibition: the sounds, the contact with the visitors, one’s own images of the spaces.

The school pupils lead visitors through the Jewish Museum Berlin, discovering with them corners, floors and empty spaces playfully, sensually and poetically. They present the Jewish Museum with a new approach for visitors: a mixture of performance and interactive guidance, a staged museum experience by young people for young people and adults. The museum is not just a stage, but is transformed into an architectural journey.

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Game Game

Camping Marianne

Artists in Tents

Social experiment part 2

After the initial summer academy project, the idea of a campsite in the schoolyard was further developed as a social and artistic experiment: Camping Marianne, defined as a space for all forms of encounter. The camping team consisted of artists from various fields, including the architect collective raumlaborberlin and Kulturlabor e.V., a group that dealt with new forms of cooperation between education, art and science. This new version of Camping Marianne included artist residencies in which projects related to camping at school were developed. Participating in the three “Artists in Tents” were the curator Ruth Noack, the artist Seraphina Lenz and the institution StreetUniverCity Berlin. They expanded the relational perspective of the project. As the artistic director of “Camping Marianne”, sideviews supported the concept and the development of the project, curated the artists in tents and ultimately consolidated the artistic processes.

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Laboratory for intermediate spaces Laboratory for intermediate spaces Museum Museum Refik Veseli School theatre profile Theatre Refik Veseli School theatre profile Theatre

ComingTogether

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

This project was the second cooperation between the Refik Veseli School and the museum as a community space. The basic idea of ​​ComingTogether was the notion and praxis of a conflict. The thematic approach was based on the film documentary „Nahostkonflikt“ (Middle East Conflict), produced by students of the history workshop in cooperation with the Jewish Museum Berlin. Berliners from Palestinian and Israeli families were asked to contribute their theoretical and personal experiences regarding the Middle East conflict.

From these portrayals, a theatre production was developed together with a 9th class. The stage space became a large table where people with different political positions could take a seat. In a staged discussion, the topic of “conflicts” was negotiated and possible solutions were sought.

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Laboratory for intermediate spaces Laboratory for intermediate spaces Museum Museum Refik Veseli School theatre profile Theatre Refik Veseli School theatre profile Theatre

The Arrival

As part of the five-year program “Cultural Agents for Creative Schools” established at the Refik Veseli School in Kreuzberg, Berlin, this project looked at the interface between the students, their own form of theatre and the museum as both a field of work and storage location for memory and identity. The starting point for this staging of space and action were two three-hour workshops in the Jewish Museum Berlin, attended by the class. The students then developed a theatrical, interactive tour of the school’s stage space, which was developed as part of the theatre project and opened to visitors at the end. The basis was the graphic novel “The Arrival” by Shaun Tan (published in German as “Ein neues Land”). A specially developed form of theatre was created in the classrooms, in which themes such as immigration, exile and foreignness were enacted collaboratively.

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Laboratory for intermediate spaces Laboratory for intermediate spaces Museum Museum Refik Veseli School theatre profile Shadow Museum Theatre Refik Veseli School theatre profile Theatre

Laboratory for intermediate spaces

Museum and School?, 2016-2017

Museum AND school? The Laboratory for intermediate spaces is an artistic experimental arrangement between the Jewish Museum Berlin and the Refik Veseli School in Berlin-Kreuzberg, designed and implemented by sideviews:

In five productions, the pupils examined the interface between them and the museum as a field of work and a storage location for memory and identity. The young people devised theatrically interactive tours and their own theatrical forms on themes such as flight and exile. For example, the stage became a large table at which people with different political positions could sit, and ideas and practical experience of a conflict based on the Middle East conflict were negotiated. The five productions were made apparent in different forms of presentation, e.g. an exhibition, a performative-choral tour, a walk-through theatre space, a museum in the school, etc.  The Schattenmuseum came into being as a consequence of this research.

Ein neues Land 2016
ZusammenTreffen 2016
VOIDS.Leerstellen 2016
Golem 2017
VOIDS.MuseumVerLernen 2017

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Game Game Theatre Theatre

Operation Lemgo

Two months of school development through art

What do you do if a school no longer works? When classes can hardly be taught anymore, teachers are frustrated, parents are dissatisfied and the atmosphere is tense? When students complain that they hardly learn anything, that they don’t feel they have a voice and that attacks are the order of the day? And if a great deal of the lessons are canceled due to illness?

sideviews was invited to set up an interdisciplinary project in order to intercept the substitution classes and to react flexibly in organizational terms to the constant changes. A large temporary workshop was opened over two months, accommodating different classes daily. The elementary school children examined their school culture by means of a variety of artistic methods. Seven artists from sideviews accompanied them, offering workshops as part of an open laboratory: theatrical improvisation, film, documentation, boxing, songwriting, rap, stage and costume design, model building, participatory spatial development, performance, fine arts, photography and dance choreography. 

Themes were elaborated and further developed according to the needs of the children, beginning with the establishment of rules and a culture of discussion, through the exploration of sensitive points in everyday school life, to the development of a culture of communication and welcome. Eventually, common project goals were developed by means of discussions, interviews, performances, invitations and performative elements. 

Participation, self-efficacy training and daily practice of empathy and a culture of debate promoted a democratic understanding in order to initiate changes step by step. The themes distilled pervaded all workshops in that they could then be processed on an artistic level and made tangible. Processes were continuously documented and made visible to the school public. The students were supported in small groups and were able to create a vision of their school based on their interests and needs. They dealt playfully and artistically with their culture of welcome. With possible uses and reinterpretations of classrooms. With rules, techniques and concentration through boxing. With their different languages. With self-presentation, improvisation, songwriting and poetry. With theatre scenes about everyday school life, as well as their presentation and evaluation. With dance and movement work as an artistic intervention and with rap.

The result was a pop-up café that also served as an “open house for artistic presentations”. Even pupils not involved in the project were able to show on stage what they could do. The café was set up in such a way that it could continue to be self-organized.