Berlin Carousel: The Academy as a Living Artistic Practice
Anke Hervol

Berlin Carousel is conceived of as an empirical exploration of the structure of the 330-year-old society of artists and defines itself as artistic research and practice: a temporary, open platform serves as an organisational basis and provides a temporal framework for concurrent transdisciplinary artistic work. The diverse and heterogeneous selection of artistic activities – productions, workshops, performances, concerts, writing labs and discursive formats – converges in a non-linear score by Arnold Dreyblatt. As an underlying organisational structure, the score puts all of the participating artists and artistic contributions on an equal footing. 

The composed structure, which determines the times, areas and categories of use over the course of the project, enables a flexible and spontaneous response to the evolving and open process, with predefined activities occasionally overlapping, colliding and interacting with each other. These kinds of unpredictable intersections, spontaneous and flexible reactions, collaborations and discoveries are expressly encouraged.

Since the 1990s, Dreyblatt has used overlapping time sequences to structure performative installation projects and make artistic processes visible. In doing so, he references John Cage’s Theater Event No. 1 (1952), as well as Lawrence Halprin’s use of the score as a means of encouraging “spontaneity and interaction” without “achieving a predetermined result” (The RSVP Cycles: Creative Processes in the Human Environment, 1970).

For Berlin Carousel, raumlaborberlin designed an ensemble of venues, furniture, platforms and functional spaces that transforms Halle 3 on Hanseatenweg into a new flexible place of production. Here, the boundaries of artistic categories can be crossed and expanded in an exploration of the transformative potential of the site. Berlin Carousel redefines the society of artists as a locus of active artistic practice and brings out its potential as an interdisciplinary, intergenerational and collaborative platform for innovation and experimental projects.

Anke Hervol is secretary of the Fine Arts Section of the Akademie der Künste.