SpaceKraft – Interventionen in (Zwischen-) Räumen

In March 2020, the world went into an unprecedented lockdown. Due to social distancing restrictions and the temporary closure of schools and public spaces, children and young people experienced for the first time massive cuts in their freedom of movement and public social life. The pandemic has highlighted the importance of public spaces and non-commercial outdoor activities, and the urgency for unusual solutions for creating spaces for encounter and participation and the ways we stay in touch with one another, now and in the future. Since the beginning of the project in August 2020, SpaceKraft has been working with students (grades 7–9 from the Hemingway School Berlin) artistically engaged in appropriating spaces, discovering them for themselves, and actively designing them according to their needs, creating spaces for encounter and participation. For the project, selected every day places were visited, analysed and connected with places that have (not yet) played a central role in their everyday lives: the school, the streets, the museum.

Drawing on experimental methods from art, design and architecture, SpaceKraft follows “learning-by-doing” principles and focuses on collaborative working models, sustainability and urban regeneration. Through hands-on space appropriation, students are empowered to gain skills for life. In 2020–2021, forty five degrees together with the students developed, designed and built alternative spatial modules that were used for actions and encounters. One of them was a mobile and modular working bench.

In the school year 2021–2022, SpaceKraft linked the craft work in the workshop with the school garden and collaboratively designed and built the second intervention; an outdoor learning space, as a co-habitat. A space without a roof or walls, but between plants and insects, the inhabitants of the school garden. A space accessible to all for learning and sharing. Together, 30 stools were built to provide modular and flexible seating.

Over the course of the 2022–2023 school year, connections to the neighborhood, KW, and Berlin Mitte were explored with SpaceKraft. The designed architectural modules follow the ideas of re-use and recycling to create a contact surface between the individual urban spaces and their people. Material cycles were experienced practically, materials were reused, existing structures were rebuilt, developed further and from this a “mobile house” was created. The mobile house changes the position of the students in the urban space, they become makers, cooks, resters and, above all, invitees into their house. The mobile house was activated in the school, in the neighborhood, in the park and at KW.

SpaceKraft is a cooperation between forty five degrees, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Hemingway-Schule Berlin-Mitte and Stiftung SPI. A project funded by the Berlin Project Fund Kulturelle Bildung.