2021,

diffrakt

zentrum für theoretische peripherie

2021,

2015

Crellestraße

22

Berlin

10827

diffrakt.space

Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin, Film screening, 2019

Storytellings (after Haraway), 2019

Foto: Gansen Moritz

The pandemic gave us a pause and became a forced hiatus. For us, it didn’t make sense to organize events or to move into the digital space during the last year. A willingness to think outside the box, to implement short-term funding, and to listen to the needs of the community. Not everyone requires long term investments; others would like to apply for EUR 500 to develop a project for next month. These quick, low-cost funding opportunities are not clearly available yet. When implementing initiatives, first think about the places and the people you are trying to serve. Requiring project spaces to have a program mapped out six months in advance, or ask for only German-language applications is not responding to the community.In the early years, we were not thinking so much about accessibility to our exhibitions and events in a physical sense of venues without elevators or events without translation, but also in a digital sense. For many years, our online magazine hadn’t been accessible for screen-readers for people with poor vision or the blind, or keyboard navigation for people with mobility issues, for example. Getting there was a journey, and I think we would now start from a more accessible place. I would want local politicians to make their funding applications more accessible, not only in terms of able-ism, but also in terms of all forms of discrimination, e.g. proof of citizenship, applications having to be written in German. I wish that they would give a universal basic income to everyone (not just citizens), open their borders, and make healthcare free, free for everyone.Answering this question seems to be the most difficult and an endless process for me because I have to ruminate on the past decade or so in which I have gone through Berlin as a female artist, a Korean artist, the founder and chief of an Asian contemporary art platform, and a mother. Since the very beginning, I have been interested in seeking a kind of universal identity, spanning the various backgrounds of Berlin-based contemporary artists in order to examine the question of identity as it is often perceived from the outside: according to gender, nationality, and cultural milieu. So I have created a space where the dichotomous logics about those issues could be discussed, proceeding with many projects. Above all, I had dreamt of creating a self-supporting space, based on an independent profit model. Recognizing limitations in workforce, culture, and the market of the art scene, however, I have experienced some moments of great suffering. But what has enabled me to endure those moments of suffering was not money but people, so that I would answer sincerely that a project space no longer means a physical space for me. It is a non-physical space, comprising people like artists, users and agents, or sometimes a network.