Orta Okul 2025
What Does Your Community Need?
What Does Your Community Need? responds to the growing exclusion of marginalized communities from arts education in Berlin. The rise of far-right politics, shrinking cultural budgets, and a weakened civil society at the end of 2024 have made access to inclusive and culturally relevant education increasingly urgent.
What Does Your Community Need? supports community-rooted, participatory, and socially engaged artistic practices. The goal is to move away from institutionalized, Eurocentric models of arts education by asking: What do communities actually need? What spaces, tools, and knowledge systems are missing today—and how can we co-create them?
We are working with five facilitators to develop educational formats rooted in their communities. Through mentorship, training, and coordination support, we aim to foster artistic spaces that respond directly to local realities.
The program is still under-construction! The selected projects for 2025 are:
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Alice Kahei Yu • This seminar invites participants to explore how sound evokes memory, resilience, and displacement by collectively mapping sonic experiences through listening, storytelling, and archiving in a city shaped by migration and exile.
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Jennifer Frank • An artistic dance and encounter project with older people that understands the body as an archive of memories, losses, and joy of life. Together, we prepare a celebration of life – a space for remembrance, mourning, and joyful celebration!
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Kollektivbibliothek • Kollektivbibliothek will conduct a number of community-building workshops, activating the content of our collections together through a series of book cataloguing and art workshops.
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Oda Projesi • In this seminar “Herzlich Willkommen”, Oda Projesi will work with a Willkommensklassen with students, learning from air plants (Tillandsia) to strengthen and understand oneself as newcomers.
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un/learning group • Collective un/learning sessions with text, sound, and video material focused on care, healing, and burnout in the context of activism and political movements.
Also see:
Open Call (+++expired+++)
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Deadline: June 1, 2025
We’re looking for 5 facilitators to design and lead community-rooted, socially engaged, and culturally relevant art education programs in Berlin.
We specifically encourage community-based artists, art educators, cultural workers, activists using artistic methodologies, experts in areas such as diversity, anti-discrimination, and social justice within the arts and culture field.