2018,

die raum

2018, 2015,

2011

Oderberger Straße

56

Berlin

10435

dieraum.net

João Modé, Land, 2014, Foto: Jan Windszus

Even though COVEN doesn’t have our own project space (although we are thinking about getting a studio …), we make space, mainly for our queer community in Berlin and online. We make space to come together, meet each other, talk about stuff, and laugh. We try to pay as many queers as we can to make art with us. To think about art, to question art. Art for us has always been about creating community and offer alternatives to worn-out narratives. We like art for its world-making capacity.Funding and access to funding is a key element in sustaining project spaces. There are many funding tools that project spaces can use to cover the costs of labor, materials, and rent. But the options are competitive and usually involve a lot of effort and paperwork. In our opinion, there needs to be a change in the funding system that includes simplifying the application process and shortening the waiting time between submission and announcement of the result. Only like this can the project space keep the momentum and focus on artistic and curatorial projects.The art scene, spaces, artists, and initiators in the past ten years (being a continuum of what has gone before) in a nutshell, can be seen to have changed from individual authorships to more collective ones. They act in opposition to the anonymized corporate structures, in particular the giant housing conglomerates (these destructive collective edifices that have the same legal rights as a sentient individual human being) that threaten to dissemble the unique fabric of the city of Berlin that provided a fertile ground in which these initiatives could rise, connect, and thrive. So the project room scene provides a positive counter-weight to these destructive development processes as a living, breathing, collaborative, and inclusive network. I hope that this fabulous project room network does not drown in the indifference of mainstream political thinking in the city of Berlin.