Project Space Festival 2016 - Q&A with Marie-josé Ourtilane and Heiko Pfreundt

31 project spaces were scheduled to open their doors with a new event, one for every day of the Festival, with each introducing their work and their individual concept of a project space. ArtRabbit spoke to PSF’s artistic directors Marie-josé Ourtilane and Heiko Pfreundt.

ArtRabbit: This was the third year in which the Project Space Festival has worked towards a definition of "project space" within Berlin's contemporary art scene. Why do you think this city lends itself so well to the world of independent art?

Project Space Festival: The best way to answer this is by taking a look at this year’s participating project spaces. Our tour, which took us through a diverse range of spaces over a period of 31 days, began on August 1st with Apartment Project in Neukölln and ends on August 31st at KuLe in Berlin Mitte. Both of these spaces have functioned not only as exhibition spaces but also as living and working spaces for nearly 20 years. Apartment Project is the first independent artist-initiative to have moved from its birthplace in Turkey to Berlin; their event’s title, WHO KNOWS WHERE WE ARE, refers to the way they deal with an uncertain relationship to location. This is something of a theme for many of the festival’s events - a relational way of dealing with place. This became one of the main themes of this year's Festival, making way for some very interesting approaches, in particular from project spaces with a nomadic self-understanding, such as Note On, Comedy Club or Galerie BRD, who have no permanent space and unlike Apartment Projects and KuLe tend to work with site-specific interventions.

From a historical perspective, Berlin's distinctive cultural climate developed out of a specific geopolitical situation that led to many "empty" spaces, low rents, as well as clubs and bars with no legally-imposed curfew. The Berlin Wall was considered by the majority of Berliners to be a symbol of division and a consequence of the war, and so in its wake the political strategy of the city became to strengthen and encourage art and culture. However in recent years the majority of project spaces have been closed or pushed out of the gentrified central area of the city and into its peripheries. In order to take measures against this displacement of contemporary culture, networks such as Haben und Brauchen ("To have and to need") or the Netzwerk freier Projekträume und -Initiativen ("Network of Independent Project Spaces and Initiatives") have been created in an effort to enable the city's increasingly dispersed and often nomadic project spaces to express an urban-political consciousness of artists who live here and their concerns and motivations.

Starting this year, the city of Berlin has begun to support its cultural institutions with funds raised from a "City Tax" levied on the tourist industry, meaning the Project Space Festival has received some public funding for the first time in its history. The Festival was started independently in 2013 by Berlin project space insitu, taking advantage of Berlin-based museums’ and galleries’ summer breaks to draw attention to the work happening in project spaces around the city.

AR The Project Space Festival’s schedule of 31 consecutive 24-hour events situates contemporary art firmly in the present moment. Do you think Project Space Berlin in particular thrives on this approach?

PSF: Berlin's Project Space Festival is unusually relaxed and balanced because each space has the opportunity to use one full day to structure its own programme. Within this framework, the festival’s events all have the charm of a snapshot, and that’s reflected in the various start times and lengths. For example, participants in the Kreuzberg Pavillon event – both visitors and artists – attended or contributed to the event on the understanding that the site would only be open for five minutes. On the other hand Frankfurt am Main's event had a starting time but no set endpoint. The works on display in Parkview came from fifteen different artists and were left in the public space after the event.

AR You've also selected some organisations from outside of Berlin to host events at this year’s Festival. Why is doing this important?

PSF: Yes. One space invited to Berlin this year was Cologne-based Bruch & Dallas, who confronted precisel this question in their event Layout; they translated their floorplan directly onto the free urban space next to the closed glass cube of Berlin's Neue Nationalgalerie. Similarly, TOKONOMA’s work Home Coming Parade, with artists from Kassel and Athens, tackled an increasing tendency that diverse project spaces supposedly have in appropriating the style of and being approached by larger museums, commercial galleries and biennales.

This year's Festival is also special due to the Center of Minimum Distance, formed out of the calculated geographic center of the addresses of project spaces who applied to take part in the Festival for 2016. The Festival opened at the physical Center of Minimum Distance, but it is also the site of an online investigation into Berlin-based project spaces continuing on our website.

AR Thank you for you time

Iman Osman is a student of animation and film, and a Londoner with a curiosity about French cinema and the melancholic tone of contemporary Japanese media.

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