FEINART Lecture Series | Building Common Places
A conversation with Christoph Schäfer and Dan Peterman
What characterises activist and socially engaged art projects that last for several decades? What happens to these when they become institutionalised? And how do these projects change when they take community development into their hands over several decades? What role do artists play in this? What knowledge do they bring with them? These are precisely the questions that will be discussed with Dan Peterman and Christoph Schäfer.
Peterman co-founded the "Experimental Station" in a former recycling yard in Chicago in 2002. This was transformed it into an open, innovative, ecologically and artistically oriented centre which develops educational programmes with and for the local community. Christoph Schäfer, in turn, is one of the co-founders of "Park Fiction" in Hamburg, an art project entangled deeply with the everyday structures and urban politics of St. Pauli in Hamburg. 25 years ago, Park Fiction succeeded in transforming the energy of the squatter movement into a radical planning process for a public park, thus paving the way for the "Right to the City" movement in Hamburg from 2009 onwards. Since then, Park Fiction has developed into a nucleus from which various practices have emerged that are commoning urban planning processes, working with the creativity of the many.
Both artists will present briefly their long-term projects and then discuss the above-mentioned questions with each other and with us.