Hemingway-Schule

The Hemingway-Schule is located just a few minutes’ walk from KW. This long-standing cooperation has taken various forms over the years, including workshops, weekly classes (AGs), outdoor and indoor projects, as well as collaborations with the New Way youth club, which is housed in the same building.

SpaceKraft (2020–2023)

SpaceKraft was a cooperation project that took place from 2020 to 2023. From the outset, it explored how we connect with one another—both in the present and in the future—and how we can create spaces for encounter and participation. As part of the project, students visited selected spaces in Berlin-Mitte and connected them with places that did not (yet) play a central role in their everyday lives: schools, streets, parks, museums, and sites of memory. Together, they explored questions such as: What defines a space that protects, invites, or excludes? Where are these spaces located? What feelings do we associate with them? Can they blend or disguise? And how can we occupy and even co-design new spaces with our own stories in the future? Drawing on experimental methods from art, design, and architecture, SpaceKraft followed a “learning-by-doing” approach, emphasizing collaborative working models, sustainability, and urban regeneration. Through hands-on acts of space appropriation, students were empowered to gain essential skills for life.

Mobile Workbench

In 2020–2021, students from grades 7–9 at the Hemingway-Schule Berlin engaged artistically with the appropriation of spaces—discovering them for themselves and redesigning them according to their own needs. Equipped with a self-built mobile workbench, they tested and experienced building culture firsthand through SpaceKraft.

*Space-Kraft*, 2022; photo: Valerie Schmidt.

Outdoor Classroom

In the following school year (2021–2022), SpaceKraft linked craftwork in the workshop with the school garden, collaboratively designing and building an outdoor classroom as a shared habitat. This classroom—without a roof or walls—was created amidst the plants and insects that inhabit the garden, offering an open space accessible to everyone for learning and exchange. As part of the project, 30 stools were constructed to provide modular and flexible seating. Originally conceived during the pandemic, the idea of the outdoor classroom has remained, continuing to serve as a place to gather, learn, and share.

Mobile House

In its final year (2022–2023), SpaceKraft expanded its focus to the neighborhood, KW, and Berlin-Mitte. Architectural modules were designed according to principles of re-use and recycling, creating points of contact between urban spaces and the people who inhabit them. Material cycles were put into practice: materials were repurposed, existing structures were rebuilt and further developed, and from this process, a “mobile house” emerged.

The mobile house shifted the students’ position within the urban environment—they became makers, cooks, resters, and, above all, hosts who invited others into their house. Activated in the school, the neighborhood, the park, and at KW, the mobile house served as a space of encounter and exchange.

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

Artistic direction:

Alkistis Thomidou, Lena Wegmann.

Reach out to become a collaboration partner!

Contact

Alexia Manzano
am@kw-berlin.de

The project was funded 2021–2022 by the Berliner Projektfonds kulturelle Bildung.