The aliens are back at the HKW: For the exhibition O Quilombismo, the Shadow Museum is staging a performative game in the HKW. From the perspective of aliens of the species Caelius Juvenilis, it juggles with different perspectives, takes biographies of artists, members of the Shadow Museum and their family archives, as well as from further interviews. The result is an interactive game in which visitors are invited to adopt different, new perspectives, to engage with “foreign” and fictitious biographies, and to move through the game in the process. Artistic framing is provided by a spoken chorus and interactive dialogues of the aliens, documenting the research results of the Shadow Museum as a collage of fragments from interviews, archival research, literary texts, contents of the Quilombismo exhibition, etc.
PERFORMANCE Aliens (in German language)
Making Of – How to become a good Alien (in German Language):
As part of the anniversary weekend of the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, the Schattenmuseum Youth Committee occupy three rooms of the project 37 Rooms REVISITED with Room 38-40, Back to ME and a new edition of our Game of Life.
For Kunst-Werke Berlin, the year 1992 was distinguished by the realization of the 37 Rooms exhibition. Taking place parallel to the opening of documenta IX in Kassel, it drew in at short notice a large number of Berlin-based artists, curators and critics who staged 37 Rooms along Auguststrasse.
Today, 37 Rooms can be regarded as a prototype for the Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art. On September 18 and 19, 2021 the concept of 37 rooms was reanimated in the neighbourhood, as visitors were led through the courtyards of the Scheunenviertel to Auguststrasse 69. Both days featured a program of performance and music, including interventions by Schattenmuseum Youth Committee collective, playfully confronting the (archive) structures and inception processes of a contemporary art institution.
Room 38-40
Room 38: KW Archives x Schattenmuseum Youth Committee: Room 38-40
Taking its spur from the KW archive and early projects, the Schattenmuseum Youth Committee infiltrates the KW by means of an interactive intervention, central to which is the photographic slide. Visitors are invited to develop and curate exhibition concepts for their own spaces, accompanied by the Schattenmuseum Youth Committee. Guided tours, experiments and performative workshops form the framework for an archive and slide workshop for all visitors.
Room 39: Schattenmuseum Youth Committee: Back to ME
Back to ME is an installation curated by the Schattenmuseum Youth Committee on the occasion of KW’s 30th anniversary. The young people open up an interactive space that invites visitors to engage with themselves. Here, the prejudices of others can be separated from the perception of self. The space offers an intimate atmosphere for self-reflection which, in turn, functions as a space for silent communication.
Room 40: Schattenmuseum Youth Committee: Game of Life
In the Game of Life, visitors use various event cards to go through a fictitious curriculum vitae dedicated to questions of identity, community, love, gender and migration. For the 30th anniversary, the Schattenmuseum Youth Committee presents an updated version of this game, originally created in 2018 as part of the exhibition A for Jewish as a cooperation between the Jewish Museum Berlin and the Schattenmuseum Youth Committee.
As part of the exhibition “Gezeichte Stadt”, the Berlinische Galerie invited the Shadow Museum Youth Committee and sideviews to submit a contribution to the Sketch-In Festival.
On October 3rd, passers-by were invited to sketch together with the youth committee at Kottbusser Tor / Zentrum Kreuzberg. The youth committee was interested in what is important to the people of Kotti. The process was filmed and broadcast live at the festival in the Berlinische Galerie.
There were also various collaborative drawing activities in the museum, on the forecourt and in the neighbourhood, always pursuing the questions: What can drawing be? What role does it play in urban space?
The concept for the festival was developed by Constanze Eckert in cooperation with the art mediators of the Berlinische Galerie.
“Hey Siri! What is a curator?” is a test lab investigating creative freedom between museum and school. For a month, 50 children and young people examined the Berlinische Galerie from their perspective, coming to terms creatively with the collection of the Berlinische Galerie via the questions, “ What would my museum look like?”, “What would I exhibit, how and for whom?” and “How can I approach a work of art in a fun way?”
As part of this field of experimentation, they designed installations, texts, museum models, videos and performances referring to the collection of the Berlinische Galerie which were implemented and enacted both there and in the school: as an interactive exhibition in which the processes and artistic treatments were brought together.
Eight museum designs from the perspective of children and young people meet a multitude of experiments concerning the artistic approach to pieces. The experiments were summarized in the SIRIBOX.
In August 2019, the Schattenmuseum Youth Committee and sideviews were invited to exhibit the SIRIBOX experiments in the Berlinische Galerie. The exhibition opened in December 2019. At the finissage of the exhibition, those interested could receive one of forty SIRIBOXES in exchange for an idea.
In 2020, the education department of the Berlin Biennale developed a toolkit for its mediation in a workshop with the Schattenmuseum Youth Committee, based on the SIRIBOX. Applications for the SIRIBOX are still being accepted: the best ideas on how to use the SIRIBOX are selected by the Schattenmuseum Youth Committee.
Between belief in progress and appropriation of the future
Where is Planet B? is a performative symposium in the Berlinische Galerie accompanying the exhibition “Fazit” by realities:united, a group that develops projects at the junction of art and architecture. On the occasion of the planned abandonment of nuclear and coal power in Germany, the large thermal power plants are to be modified – the steam from still active power plants will rise in the form of huge rings that can be seen from afar as a symbol of a transformation reverberating through the country.
The intervention Where is Planet B? poses critical questions about social changes and the role of art: From the perspective of Generation 200X. Special guests of the performative symposium are Jan and Tim Edler from realities:united and the curator Ruth Noack.
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.
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.
Summer camp as a communal form of freedom was something of an obsession in the first half of the last century. It reflected the longing for the utopia of an independent social construction beyond the hegemonic order. Which ideal images of a community and its common experience can we construct and make visible today? Based on this question, a campsite was organized in the schoolyard of the Nürtingen elementary school on Mariannenplatz in Kreuzberg, Berlin. In the sense of a “system of giving”, all participants were invited to bring in material objects and their own diverse knowledge. The focus was on what a school is, what can be learned and who owns the schoolyard. We created an adventure camp of collective inventions while cooking and playing sports together. During dinner debates we discussed how we can live together in a new and different system.
