The GDR, as a chapter of German history, has been swimming in a variety of documented facts for more than three decades, but it has also been drowned in different versions of what happened: historians, professors, politicians and other specialists, each speaking from their field of knowledge about this delicate subject, have offered their perspectives. However, this necessary process has often been surrounded by a set of fair and unfair judgments about the Berlin Wall and what happened related to this during those years.
But the „West“, as it’s clear, could also be assessed concerning these same issues. In the background of this dynamic the question arises: Who is narrating on behalf of whom exactly?
Foto sideviewsFoto sideviews
The project BREAKING POINTS.Fragments was developed by sideviews with contemporary witnesses from Marzahn-Hellersdorf in cooperation with HKW (House of the World Cultures). It addresses the historical issues raised by the exhibition project Echoes of the Brother Land in a process that attempts to listen to and give a voice to those who experienced the facts of divided Germany and their experiences of events in the “East” in relation to immigration, labour and racism in society. However, BREAKING POINTS.Fragments refuses any form of judgement to listen to the voices of those who experienced the facts. It gives power back to the protagonists in a theatrical-therapeutic gesture: what has been repressed inevitably returns.
Foto sideviewsFoto Jamila GroteFoto Hannelore EckertFoto Jamila Grote
Artistic director/director: Anja Scheffer
Films: Daniel Harder
Editing: Cornelis Harder
Costume design: Daria Kornysheva
Production Management: Anna Bartels, Anja Scheffer
Shaping Patterns was a transnational project that addressed the added value of art in education for sustainable development.
On the one hand, the cooperation between the fields of primary education and art was to be professionally accompanied, promoted and qualified in order to develop new approaches and key competencies in education for sustainable development – for human, social, economic and ecological sustainability. On the other hand, children were supported to question the world of tomorrow through their own artistic and experimental approaches and to relate them to their findings.
Shaping Patterns aimed to develop collective artistic interventions that engage a public audience while focusing on the theme of sustainable development.
The project partners are from Denmark, the Czech Republic, Germany, Greece and the Netherlands and all rooted in the arts. They place particular emphasis on involving and engaging children, families, kindergartens and schools, and have extensive experience working with the education sector, including early childhood and primary education.
From the perspective of sustainable development education, the Shaping Patterns project aimed to develop concrete methods and tools that can support elementary school teachers* and arts institutions in developing learning environments for questioning, imagining and creating new ideas for tomorrow’s world, because arts and culture can play a central role in the development of new patterns, ways of thinking and attitudes.
Within the framework of the EU funding ERASMUS+, Shaping Patterns was implemented from October 2022 to October 2024 with six partners from Viborg, Aalborg, Athens, Ostrava, Rotterdam and Berlin.
As a result of Shaping Patterns, an app has been created that contains challenges through which children and adults can artistically and playfully contribute to supporting the healing of our planet.
Seven European partners from Denmark, Sweden, Hungary, Germany, and the Netherlands have joined the GLOBAL ROOTS project to explore the connection between art, culture, creativity, and education for sustainability in primary schools. Through shared experiences, they have developed the Global Roots platform, offering new ideas for educational practice.
Supported by Erasmus+ (EU), the Stadtapotheke has established contacts with various partners, exchanging and reflecting on strategies. Together, they are developing a tool to compile and analyze their experiences. This collaboration highlights similarities and differences in approaches, promoting project ideas and partnerships between artists and schools. The cooperation fosters new ways for children to address issues of active global citizenship and sustainability.
SIRBOX Mini is the digital derivative of SIRIBOX*.
Users can interact through play with concealed aspects and content in works of art, exhibitions, urban spaces and other settings.
SIRIBOX Mini was developed as part of Open Secret** by the Schattenmuseum Youth Committee in an examination of the programme and history of the KW gallery in Berlin and produced as an app. Users can add their own experiments to the app and store them in situ.
*The SIRIBOX was a 2019 collaborative creation between the Schattenmuseum Youth Committee and 456 class pupils of the Nürtingen elementary school and their teacher Wiebke Janzen in cooperation with sideviews e. V. and the Berlinische Galerie.
Kottbusser Tor in Kreuzberg 36 – for some a district to give a wide berth but, for many others, a place of acceptance where culture, religion and individuality converge. The exhibition “K36 – Kotti at a second glance” shows the urban space from the perspective of young people and presents various approaches to vanquishing prejudices and getting to know ‘Kotti’. Last year, the Shadow Museum Youth Committee conducted urban research around Kotti, putting it under real scrutiny; the exhibition is like a second, closer look.
The project developed for the Berlinische Galerie was another part of the Shadow Museum ‘s programme. Kottbusser Tor in Kreuzberg, a challenging and stigmatised urban space, became a focus for the Shadow Museum Youth Panel which, through its on-site research, proposed an anthropological change of perspective. In the public eye, Kottbusser Tor is associated with images and discourses of social disorder. However, most residents and passers-by experience this urban space as one of permanent negotiation toward a mutual respect – a hidden social reality made apparent by the intensive dialogue between the Shadow Museum and the residents.
The result was 7 collectively developed videos, hundreds of photos that were processed into a 5x5m wall collage and a memory wall by means of which visitors could approach Kotti in an interactive way.
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.
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.
A guest’s view by Antonia Weisz, town clerk for Junipark:
Form and Style
On this early evening in JUNIPARK it’s all about living utopias beyond the realms of fear. Children dream. “WELTweit…Unterwegs” (worldwide on the move) is the name of a musical installation performance with pupils in the 4th, 5th and 6th grades of Nürtingen elementary school, Kreuzberg, Berlin under the direction of Anja Scheffer, Dascha Kornysheva and DJ B.Side. Parents, teachers, neighbours and schoolmates have come to the performance – the grandstand is full. Dressed to the nines, the girls in elegant gowns, the boys in suits and ties they delineate utopian residential installations, undeterred by the fact that Berlin is a city of disappearing niches. Why not conquer the sky and build an air dome that doesn’t demand recourse to a land registry office? They even have an answer to the quote “Berlin is a metropolis in transition”. They invented a house that can walk – from one place to another, to where it’s safe, dry and sunny. And don’t complain that living space has become scarce and too expensive. They’d rather sing to us how to deal with it:
“You don’t need a high school diploma or a good figure, just tarps, nails and a piece of string. The cord is stretched, the tarpaulin’s up. The tent is ready, it’s no trick. Now it’s ready, your mobile tent, now you can live where you like.”
Volunteers from the audience are invited to demonstrate that many people can fit in their dancing tent. With irony, chutzpah and the courage to question themselves and everything else, they are completely serious about it. Right in there. They showcase their construction manual as a top speed monologue. They make reference to materials that determine not only the form but also the spirit of their work: They revitalize objects, reinvigorate fabrics that already had a past life, advocate the use of curtains for their constructions, as then everyone can come in – rather than doors that can always lock someone in or out. Extremely enthusiastic about design, to which they propose the taking of initiative in their own right in a critical examination of their financial options. They all work under the motto: Speedy construction in pocket money format.
As they say in their song:
Come and be creative with us, for the world is not only negative, we search like detectives for a space, and build houses for almost nothing, pockets stuffed with rip-ties, and an eye on the design. Like the phoenix from the ashes emerges a house for happiness.
In any event, one thing is clear: personal commitment cannot be bought. A playground and a dream of life. And they really get down to business at the ensuing congress, entitled: Detect vacant lots and use them professionally. The meeting is made up of high-ranking specialists: a cleaning specialist who likes to tidy up, an expert for people with a fear of heights, an improvisation expert in polystyrene construction, a professor specializing in building in balloons and Zeppelins because the sky is still free. Even a caretaker who used to be an architect is invited. He chases away moles to create spaces underground. On the side, he now runs a mole spaetzle restaurant in Munich. Urgh, that sounds at once both disgusting and tasty. Anyhow, this evening I encounter sorely needed experts. Not so much because their house building ideas could actually be implemented, but because they make us dream:
Life can be that simple. That does you good. And the choir sings it to us once more:
Children must not disappear, no, we’re settling here,
overcoming all borders, just doing it ourselves.
At the end, the audience is called upon to develop their own visions and not to sort every thought into right or wrong immediately. Ironically, a show house catalogue is provided as a creative aid. In addition, built into the scaffolding, there are two more show houses to view. To give us adults a helping hand. That makes me confident. The young Berliners have fantasies and we, the audience, are thrilled. I see faces filled with hope. And yes, it’s true: the world is not only negative, even in these politically worrying times around the world. Imagination is good for everyone.
Is the world reality or is the world just what we imagine? 60 children from the Nürtingen elementary school in Berlin-Kreuzberg spent more than a year looking for possible answers. In this urban ethnographic experiment, students examined the social diversity in their environment on the basis of video interviews. They were confronted with a wide variety of topics: asylum seekers, politics, drug dealers, immigration and government.
Using dramatic methods and video documentation, the research was made visible and tangible. The information on a wide variety of life plans and identities acquired in the interview workshop was then staged: in a three-week game, acting, directing, storytelling, costume design, visual arts and music were the motor that set a major negotiation process in motion. It turned out that identities and realities can be reconstructed. And that the rituals, self-images and attitudes can be changed, as can the world.
The theatre profile of the Refik-Veseli-School came into being between 2013 and 2019 as part of the cultural agents program for creative schools. Three theatre productions were developed each year over the three year period in cooperation with sideviews: with a 7th grade class over four weeks and with 8th and 9th grade classes over two weeks respectively. The students composed both the content and also their own form of theatre. Profiling started in 2013 with the pilot, “Why is it so hard to talk about love?”. Each topic was formulated in exchange with the teachers and worked out and developed together with the students, e.g. dealing with the name of the school.
The Labor für ZwischenRäume (laboratory for intermediate spaces) was created in 2016: sideviews, the Refik Veseli School theatre profile and the Jewish Museum Berlin (JMB) investigated the cooperation between school and museum. In different approaches, themes of the JMB, e.g. Golem, The Arrival and the Liebeskind architecture were explored through theatre, performance, choir, and installation and these processes were presented in an exhibition, a performance & choral tour, a walk-through stage space, a museum in the school, etc. A total of 17 productions were created as part of the theatre profile. The process is an example of the opportunity for cultural development within a school environment.
Why is it so difficult to talk about love?FIND REFIK!FutureWishDream NEW TOWN – FragmentsTeenie-Leaks or It’s not our fault that you don’t understand usA new Land ARRIVING.ComingTogetherVOIDS.EmptySpacesGOLEMPROTEST!Museum.PlayingThe Circle of lifeIn German Lands 2018Tree Pennies in Detroitt
