SpaceKraft

Interventions within (inter-)spaces

Duration: August 2020 – ongoing

Since the beginning of the project in August 2020, SpaceKraft has been dealing with how we can get in touch with each other now, but also in the future, and create spaces for encounter and participation.  

Selected spaces in Berlin Mitte are visited by students and connected with places that do not (yet) play a central role in their everyday lives: School, streets, parks, museums, places of memory. What characterizes spaces that protect, invite or exclude? Where are they located? What feelings do we associate with them? Can these spaces blend or disguise? How can we occupy and even (co-)design new spaces with our stories in the future?

Drawing on experimental methods from art, design and architecture, SpaceKraft follows “learning-by-doing” principles and focuses on collaborative working models, sustainability and urban regeneration. Through hands-on space appropriation, students are empowered to gain skills for life. 

In 2020–2021, students (grades 7–9 from the Hemingway School Berlin) artistically engaged in appropriating spaces, discovering them for themselves, and actively designing them according to their needs with a self-built mobile workbench. Through SpaceKraft, building culture is tested and experienced. 

2021–2022

In the school year 2021–2022, SpaceKraft linked the craft work in the workshop with the school garden and collaboratively designed, built and co-designed an outdoor classroom as a co-habitat. A space without a roof or walls, but between plants and insects, the inhabitants of the school garden. A space accessible to all for learning and sharing. Together, 30 stools were built to provide modular and flexible seating.

2022–2023

Over the course of the 2022–2023 school year, connections to the neighborhood, KW, and Berlin Mitte were explored with SpaceKraft. The designed architectural modules follow the ideas of re-use and recycling to create a contact surface between the individual urban spaces and their people. Material cycles were experienced practically, materials were reused, existing structures were rebuilt, developed further and from this a “mobile house” was created. The mobile house changes the position of the students in the urban space, they become makers, cooks, resters and, above all, invitees into their house. The mobile house was activated in the school, in the neighborhood, in the park and at KW. 

A cooperation between KW Institute for Contemporary Art, forty five degrees, Hemingway-Schule Berlin-Mitte and Stiftung SPI. 

Artistic direction: Alkistis Thomidou, Lena Wegmann.