2017,

WerkStadt Berlin e. V.

2017,

2008

Emser Straße

124

Berlin

12051

werkstadt.berlin

Tony Bowen, Intersection, 2020, Foto: Lucas Amoriello

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.It’s hard to look back on the last ten years and not get distracted by Co-Vid and the massive interruption that has caused in all aspects of life. But generally, Berlin is getting more expensive, no news there: There are less store fronts perhaps to rent for a project space than there used to be. Facebook is no longer used as an announcement tool. Do young people still flock to Berlin?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.