Former railway depot located in the Berlin Moabit neighbourhood, now an artist/research residency and production site that turns global discourses into local practices. Born out of the desire to experiment with and give shape to new forms of public art practices, ZK/U is a polymorphic space that functions as a research hub, a local community space and as a repository of ideas fuelling social change within the city of Berlin. Behind ZK/U lies the artist collective KUNSTrePUBLIK, whose decade-long work in the public scenes is marked by a strong orientation towards socially-conscious and locally-embedded projects. Since 2012, ZK/U community of artists and researchers have implemented initiatives that examines urban life by using art as an analytic lens, although always mantaining a direct and practical connection with physical spaces and local realities.
The ZK/U took shape in 2012 when the artist collective KUNSTrePUBLIK signed a 40-year lease on what had been a decaying and disused railway depot in the Berlin neighborhood of Moabit, a suburban area in the northern part of the city. However, the idea of giving life to such a center had already been there for six years. It was triggered by the joint participation of KUNSTrePUBLIC former independent artists in the special exhibition that Skulpturenpark Berlin Zentrum organized to commemorate the fifteen years after the German Unification. More specifically, the foundational goals of ZK/U were grounded in the critical and participatory approach that the artists applied back in the Skulpturenpark initiative. The proposal was, indeed, to assemble “living artworks” that could encourage an active reflection on the dynamics through which social forces exert their transformative power on the urban fabric, by reconfiguring, converting, or completely altering the meaning attached to public spaces. From such experience, the newly formed KUNSTrePUBLIK started to play with the thought of experimenting with new kinds of long-term, socially conscious, and locally embedded projects exploring the multifarious dynamics constituting the social experience of urban life, establishing innovative ways of engaging the public with art. These were the ideological pillars on which the ZK/U was built.
By using and promoting art as a catalyst for social change within urban spaces, the center aims to combine the creative power of the art world with the analytic strength of academic research to open up a third liminal space, standing at the crossroads between architecture, politics, cultural and social theory. Nevertheless, as their main declarations affirm, what distinguishes the ZK/U is the effort to produce forms of knowledge capable of bridging the global dimension of art communicative capacity and the uniqueness of the particular physical spaces into which art is projected. Thus, ZK/U can be conceived as a polymorphic and multivocal space, where ideas are pragmatically translated into tangible and down-to-earth realities, pursuable on the collective and public level. Critical thinking is nurtured in a proactive environment, that also attempts to envision potential, and feasible alternative scenarios rather than celebrating utopian ideals that often detach artists from lay consumers of arts. This is achieved as the center simultaneously operates as a research hub (hosting a glocal residency program for both artists and researchers engaged with the co-production of critical knowledge concerning urban practices), as an incubator of political ideas, and as a community space for the local neighborhood.
Acknowledging their “privileged” position as artists and intellectuals in a city that is increasingly under the pressure of neo-liberal forces and in the hold of gentrification dynamics, both KUNSTrePUBLIK and the ZK/U underline their crucial responsibility to publicly represent the collective voice and try to re-direct the course of political decision-making. It could be argued that the project of establishing the center embodies the application of different cultural counter-measure strategies and therefore different forms of political actions opposing current financial speculations over cultural activities. On the one hand, the ZK/U is located in a dysfunctional site, quite far away from the main cultural and artistic hotspots of Berlin, therefore an area that is less desirable and less exposed to gentrifying tendencies. On the other hand, the idea of setting up a place that hosts skillful, competent, and socially engaged cultural producers may function as a powerful base for the creation of a culture of resistance that opens up their specific resources to the utility of social realities. Such a culture of resistance breaks up traditional elitist boundaries that usually marginalize artists within their intellectual bubbles; rather, it aims at establishing cooperation and synergy with communities and neighborhoods, setting up an effective strategy through which political action can be organized.
Tesserae has been following with interest the story of this project since the founders were involved in the Skulpturenpark project as an important example of how creative action for public space can turn into a grassroots cultural insitution.
Further information can be found:
Einhoff, M,, Horst, P., Lohmann, M., Sachs, H., Seiple, D. 2010. Sculpture Park Berlin_Zentrum. Walther König Verlag: Germany.
