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About

For one week, from the 13th until the 17th of August, Centrum will additionally advertise objects on the Facebook group Free Your Stuff Berlin. They are free to anyone who would like them. In return we only ask that you bring with you something you no longer want. This could be anything at all – there is no requirement to match the value of the object you want from us. We will document the transactions to keep track of the changing collection. On Saturday, the 18th of August we will hold a party for Centrum’s neighbours and community, including anyone who has swapped their stuff with us. 

Berlin owes much of its unique charm and character to its vast ecology of recycling and exchange with countless flea markets, thrift and second-hand shops, or the simple cardboard box in a stairwell or on a street corner with its content free to take away for any passerby. This is in stark contrast to ‘Western’ culture’s emphasis on competition, production and growth which has profoundly permeated art cultures and the way art is taught. As part of a resistance to this ideology we would like to use the project space as a place of exchange and connection rather than display. For once, rather than produce objects to exhibit in a traditional way, which would add to the surplus of stuff in the world, we would like to make use of the objects we already have at our disposal. 

For Artemis Crowley’s project, Centrum will become a device to connect to a not-yet-existing community of people who want our stuff. This involves risk on our part and the discomfort which comes with not knowing what will happen. While it might seem a paradox to use Facebook as a platform, Crowley chose the Free Your Stuff Berlin group because of the values it endorses. In contrast to Facebook’s usual function, i.e. to siphon off people into like-minded social communities, Free Your Stuff Berlin connects people from different backgrounds and parts of the city with the potential to subvert the platform’s profit-driven and consumption-based ethos and undermine its ever-growing influence in politics and the media.

We believe it is important to build local connections and work at a small scale. The growth imperative and artist-as-celebrity culture suggests artists and art must be big, bold and branded. Instead, following Crowley’s imperative we would like to connect to the small-scale and modest, to emphasise its relevance right now and its importance in a valued life and a balanced world. At a time when we are stripping the world of resources it feels important to take as much responsibility as possible for our daily actions which involve the production and consumption of non-renewable resources. This project might help bring awareness to and revalue the stuff we own and use. Rather than ‘creativity’ – a fetishized concept – it will be about connection and celebrating how we can share and recycle our stuff.