Artist Spaces in Berlin: Defining and Redefining a City through Contemporary Archaeology
The contemporary city of Berlin is known for its art and for its community of practising artists, along with its ‘weirdness, perpetual incompleteness, and outlandishness . . . and the liveliness inherent in these qualities’ (Schneider 2014: 7). One of Berlin’s primary energy currents comes from the role of artists and the creative verve that abounds in the city. Artists use and reuse the physical environment of the post-Berlin Wall city and the surrounding environs (the Wall was officially taken down in 1989, although parts of it still remain) in temporary and permanent project spaces. The buildings and project spaces artists occupy are entwined with the history of the city— a history manifest in the city’s form, aesthetics, and economics. A similar dialectic exists inside artist spaces; artists actively define and redefine studio spaces through their practices as their manners and methods are simultaneously defined, confined, and reflective of the restrictions and allowances that interiors provide. This chapter is a contemporary archaeological analysis of the physical elements of four artists’ studios and buildings, the placement of artist communities within the city, and an exploration of the meanings of space and community in broader context. We highlight the reuse of historically significant buildings and the materiality and physicality of artists’ spaces within a broader context of the political economy of creativity. The use of Berlin for creative practice reflects many of the problems associated with the ‘Creative City’ and so-called creative economy. The art practices inside studios are reflective of the political economy of the world of art. The placement, availability, and tenuousness of the buildings themselves attest to problems associated with the adoption of creative capital by neoliberal capitalist agendas. The archaeological project can be used to document the micro and the macro—the interior and the exterior—of the economically circumscribed worlds of the artist, documenting an important moment in the development of a global cultural hotspot. The chapter considers project spaces as both physical places and conceptual spaces among Berlin artists focusing on the geographic, ephemeral, and enduring spaces of artist studios. What do project spaces in Berlin look like? How do individual artists create their spaces? How does the physical space reflect artistic practices?