Welcome to Free City!
Free City is an experimental exhibition exploring the concept of an ideal “free city” by transforming the hybrid infrastructure of StadtWerkstatt into a space that is accessible and inclusive. This serves as a counter-reaction to the growing inaccessibility and privatization of urban spaces.
The exhibition invites artists to co-curate activities over five days, pushing the boundaries of space and time beyond the traditional role of an exhibition venue. From ceremonies, concerts, performances, screenings and dinners to athletic activities, participants collaborate to reimagine how public infrastructure could or should function today. The program remains partially open, embracing the unpredictability inherent in its process.
Artist in Free City:
Max Blax, Magic Mind & Neuronal Noise
#performance artist #butoh dance
www.youtube.com/@PERFORMANCE_BURO
Max Blax. Native of the Urals, self-taught interdisciplinary artist, dancer and explorer of stage and atmosphere.
Drugstore Beetles
#post-funk #slo-fi #post-bieberism
Drugstore Beetles is a ladder to unemployment, and musical self-lion tamer/ sound-cartoonist. It enters a metaphysical safety barrier called a stage, and provokes its supernatural innards with a £30 keyboard from Argos - delivering morbidly alluring insights into the elephant of the soul. Re: the strength of this metaphor, singer-songwriters are more like self-snake charmers for this concept - and so here is a kind of anti-singer-songwriter if you’re willing to make a false-dichotomy out of that.
Maxim Brandt
#visual artist #site specific #painting
"In my art, poetry and visual expression merge as I incorporate everyday objects, each carrying personal or biographical meaning, to create a connection between the familiar and the unfamiliar. These objects inspire ideas that unfold on the canvas, often taking the form of natural or surreal landscapes, encouraging viewers to connect with their inner world while contemplating the impact of humanity on the environment. Ultimately, my work embodies a utopian vision of harmony between humanity and nature, where boundaries blur, inviting reflection on our relationship with the world around us."
Susan Buckow
#visual artist #site specific #installation
Susan Buckow is a visual artist and interdisciplinary designer. Her project uses expired event posters collected from the streets, embodying the concept of exchanging objects with the city—taking something and giving back for others to discover. This ongoing work includes daily strolls through her rapidly gentrifying neighborhood, where DIY cultural spaces coexist with towering, often-empty concrete developments. By repurposing materials promoting cultural events and political demonstrations, the project also reflects on the ongoing protests in Berlin against cuts to cultural funding, serving as a reminder of the city's vibrant yet precarious creative landscape.
Elizabeth Charnock
#visual artist #sculpture #ceramic
https://elizabethcharnock.com/
Elizabeth Charnock is a British artist living and working in Berlin. Her sculptural work in ceramics is architectural and precise. Informed by her interest in spatial relationships and urban planning ideologies, she creates scaled down fictional environments that explore the tension between familiarity and distance.
Selin Davasse
#performance artist
Selin Davasse (1992, Ankara) lives and works in Berlin. Her performances repurpose disparate literary and performative techniques to enact and enforce a speculative ethics of hospitality between a bestial feminine stranger and a heterogeneous public. Embodying various narrative selves with distinct syntactical, vocal and gestural characteristics, she transmutes systems of thought into intimate and playful utterances oscillating between speech and song, in a permeable and unpredictable relationship to the viewer. Recent presentation settings include Art Asia Now, Paris (2023); steirischer herbst, Graz (2023); Institute for Contemporary Arts, London (2023); Hangar Bicocca, Milan (2023); Art Encounters Biennial, Timișoara (2023); Kunsthalle Bratislava, Bratislava (2022); Wiener Festwochen, Vienna (2022); BJCEM - Biennale des Jeunes Créateurs de l’Europe et de la Méditerranée, Procida (2022); School of Waters, MEDITERRANEA19 Young Artists Biennale, San Marino (2021); Volksbühne, Berlin (2021); KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, (2021).
La Furia Del Carro
#videoart #music performance #live cinema
Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the marketplace, and cried incessantly: “I seek God! I seek God!”—As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? emigrated?—Thus they yelled and laughed.
The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. “Whither is God?” he cried; “I will tell you. We have killed him—you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Isn't night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.
CC.Gambeex
#Conceptual Art #Food Philosophy
Gambeex, Heiner Mühlenbrock, and Zunino’s Enigma explores the excesses of television through a raw, docu-drama lens. The film delves into casting dynamics, addressing racism, sexism, ego, and absurdity while blurring reality and fiction. Improvised over three days, its unfiltered dialogue and authentic performances expose human nature with striking psychological depth. The deliberately amateur style emphasizes spontaneity, capturing genuine emotions and unexpected slip-ups. This "fictional documentary alienated by truth" offers a bold, unprecedented take on television and humanity.
Victoria
#personal coach #transformative experiences #breathworker & ritualist
Victoria Etherington is a life coach, psychedelic integration guide, breathworker, and ritualist committed to helping individuals align with their inner truth and live fulfilling lives. Her journey, spanning five countries and leadership roles in tech, inspired her to reconnect with her core values through philosophy, psychology, and transformative practices like breathwork and plant medicine. Using a blend of coaching, embodied movement, meditation, and integration techniques, she creates safe spaces for self-exploration and meaningful transformation. Victoria’s work empowers clients to uncover their purpose and build lives rooted in joy and alignment.
Ae Hee Lee
#visual art #sculpture #installation
Ae Hee Lee lives and works in Berlin and Seoul
Ae Hee Lee’s work explores the interconnectedness of memory, identity, and the unconscious, capturing the fluid nature of both personal and collective experiences. Projects like Life Project reflect on the passage of time and social interactions, while Dream Records Project examines the interplay between dreams and memory. Her art challenges the boundaries between the conscious and unconscious, as well as reality and virtuality, offering a multifaceted perspective on human identity in both physical and digital realms.
Andrey Kharitonov
#photography #writer #painting
https://cargocollective.com/andreykharitonov
Andrey Kharitonov is a Russian-born artist who lives and works in Berlin. He graduated from the Faculty of Philosophy at St Petersburg State University. He works with various materials and media, such as painting, photography, installation, video, sound. In recent years, he has consistently focused on abstract painting. Andrey Kharitonov is a member of EDGE (https://edge-neuro.art/)
Sarah Lüdemann (Beauham)
#visual artist #storytelling #multimedia sculpture
Sarah Lüdemann (Beauham) investigates into (human) system structures, bodies and chimeras. She abstracts her findings into elements and choreographies for multi-media sculptures and text. Her studio is currently located at Künstlerhaus Bremen. Since 2017 she has been lecturing at Bremen University and the University of the Arts. Lüdemann (Beauham) studied Fine Art in Oslo and at Central Saint Martins, London (UK).
Pauline Maure
#storytelling #film #performance
Pauline Maure is a film and performance artist from Paris, France, with a background in philosophy. She is researching unusual forms of filmmaking and storytelling to create revived narratives and imagery. Maure creates anti-westerns, subverting the codes of the genre in a highly critical manner.
Andrea Mineo
#social design #public intervention #sculpture
www.mayerpavilion.com/andrea-mineo
Andrea’s work explores the dynamics of cooperation and negotiation between individuals in developed and marginalized contexts, offering a reinterpretation of the way in which resources are generated, distributed, or reclaimed.
Andrea’s projects extend the notion of infrastructure both as a socio-cultural construct and as a physical space that meet the needs of today’s communities, facilitates interaction and cultural exchange. Andrea’s practice often involves multidisciplinary collaborations, public interventions, film, text, and exhibition projects.
Lara Nelke
#spatial design #visual art #site specific
Lara Nelke is an artist and spatial designer based in Berlin. In her artistic practice, she works with infrastructures of the Anthropocene and places of gathering and relaxation. Especially in urban space, she investigates and intervenes in invisible power structures that shape the everyday. Using performance, site-specific installations, and mediating objects, she creates miniatures of speculative places to dream of an alternative present. She is researching how capitalism affects the body, the power of non-productivity and third spaces.
Paulette Penje
#performance art #video art #public intervention
She thinks with her body, using movement, improvisation, and the discomfort of embodiment to create spaces and stories that question freedom. Her imagination and body are her tools, navigating a constant balance between completion and dissolution. As a video and performance artist, she explores time-based media through sculptural, painterly, and poetic processes. Her works amplify existence!
Milena Pysareva
#performanceartist #choreography #screenwriting
Milena creates scripts and brings them to life through dance, cinema, and real-time improvisation, exploring themes of absurdity, determinism, and the theater of cruelty. Her work is imbued with a raw, visceral energy, often delving into the realms of eros and art-house expression, where beauty and discomfort intertwine.
PrismOcean
#free dance #ambient #performance
@dirkmarkham and @alfred_ladylike
https://www.digitalinberlin.de/prismocean/
PrismOcean is an improvised sound-body collaborative performance by butoh-inspired dancer Lesley Suzanne Dean (US) and ambient musician Dirk Markham (UK), incorporating emotional free-dance and live experimental dronescapes. Dean’s pursuit of yoga and struggle with chronic illness flow into the dancer’s intense style of physical theater, which expresses frustration with the limitations of her body as an instrument, turning it inside out in order to escape and transcend it. Navigating the projected geometry of the music, the movements explore among other themes the desire, attainment, and letting go of control. The vessel for Dean’s exploration of space comes in the form of spontaneous compositions by the Scottish electronic sound artist Markham. Electro-acoustic guitar loops are sampled and processed in real-time generating other-worldly sonic sculptures. These have a transcendental quality and while being ambient in nature, also provide the pulse for the PrismOcean performance as a whole.
SAREFO
#electronic #avant-pop
https://soundcloud.com/user-952223060
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l577hAjBWWI
https://www.instagram.com/sarefo__/
Minstrel and visionary, whose psychotropic performance can encompass tweaked-out cyber-rock, free-wheeling improvisation through synth exotics and hyper punk. Solo project of a latvian born artist and musician Alexey Loginov known as a member of Berlin based band Indiscreet Jewels.
Sophie Seita
#visual art #poetry #experimental writing #sound art
Sophie Seita is a London-based artist and researcher whose practice spans language, performance, sound, video, textiles, drawing, and installation. Her work explores queer abstraction and relationality, examining the politics of language and aesthetic form through deep listening, opacity, and playfulness. Recent exhibitions, artist talks, and performances include venues such as Mimosa House, Matt's Gallery, Café Oto, and Nottingham Contemporary, alongside international spaces like FAC (Athens), Kunsthalle Darmstadt and Index in Stockholm. Seita collaborates across disciplines, notably with musician Naomi Woo, and engages in intersectional queer projects like The Hildegard von Bingen Society for Gardening Companions. She teaches in the Art Department at Goldsmiths, University of London, and has received grants from Arts Council England and the Canada Council, with residencies at Akademie der Künste Berlin Berlin and Brown University.
Chan Seth
#visual artist #community builder #creative responsibility
Seth grew up in the cosmopolitan city of Dubai, where converging cultures led to a fascination with pluralism. Javanese Batik, Peruvian Shipibo patterns, and Tibetan Sand Mandalas have all influenced the artist’s vision of expanding consciousness through creativity.
To that end, Seth has hosted workshops that integrate art therapy, music therapy, and yoga in partnership with organizations such as Dubai Culture, Abu Dhabi Culture and Tourism, SIKKA Art Fair, Aisha Al Abbar Gallery, and Nasab KOA Canvas. He has also held talks at Heriot Watt University, Dubai and Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar that challenge future generations to take creative responsibility.
Francesca Tambussi
https://francescatambussi.com/