Up to now, we in our society have tended to understand the topic of space in terms of an „absolutist“ view that emerged from Euclidean geometry, with the understanding of space as a container for things and people taking center stage. Especially from today's Western European perspective, strong deficits in the space-human relationship can be recognized, which date back to the time of the Weimar Republic and National Socialism. At that time, Hans Grimm in particular coined the term „people without space“ in his novel of the same name published in 1926.

In the post-war period, this triggered a taboo on the relationship between people and space in society that continues to this day. According to the German sociologist Martina Löw, the emergence of space is a social phenomenon and can only be understood as a processual phenomenon from the perspective of social development. While space used to be seen more as what surrounds us, as an interaction, a paradigm shift is taking place in the digital age and new technologies, with issues such as the pandemic, war, the refugee crisis, overpopulation and resources playing an important role in this context.

Against the background of various artistic approaches, the exploration of spatial design is also an exploration and recording of inner life. The central questions are: How does this translate into three-dimensional and digital space? And how does it flow back into it via our physical and sensory perception? And can we better understand ourselves through models that externalize our psyche as spatiality?

How can visual, material, practical and aesthetic frameworks enable us to jointly initiate a positive cross-cultural change of perspective and an all-encompassing redefinition of spatial external and internal worlds?

A central concern of this seminar is to pursue these questions and thoughts in depth and to bring about an artistic deepening of civil society events that is primarily rooted in people's living environments and oriented towards current needs.

Based on our different family backgrounds, cultural perspectives and social environment and the resulting different perceptions and perspectives, I would like to invite you to explore various historical places, social spaces and architectural atmospheres of the city of Berlin together through various excursions, walks and visits.

By collectively understanding and analyzing these different locations and layers of a metropolis, we can also learn to better understand ourselves as part of this urban society, which can play a particularly important role in our further artistic research processes.

We want to explore these deeper connections between the spatial, social, mental and spiritual states of Berlin and to investigate and understand the history and nature of architectural atmospheres through us humans as carriers, bridges and resonating bodies, and we also want to question them at a later point through and with our personal artistic practice.