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.
ZU ALT FÜR DIE ZUKUNFT
(TOO OLD FOR THE FUTURE)
Facilitated by Jennifer Frank, conducted in German.
Zu Alt für die Zukunft is an intergenerational dance program, created with inpatient elderly participants in a Berlin-Spandau hospital, that challenges the Western narrative of progress by exploring aging, illness, and menopause as vital parts of life, using dance to express dignity beyond language and drawing on cultures that value elders and stories from often invisible aging communities.
Kollektivbibliothek & Plakatearchiv
Facilitated by Kollektivbibliothek, conducted in English & Spanish.
Kollektivbibliothek, a self-managed open library with a collection focusing on social and political movements hosts a series of community-building activities, bringing their collections to life through collaborative book cataloguing and art-making sessions. The workshops focus on preserving the memory of the city of Berlin as for facing the challenges of the global city.
HERZLICH WILLKOMMEN
(A WARM WELCOME)
Facilitated by Oda Projesi, conducted in German, Turkish, English, French.
Oda Projesi's program is inspired by the adaptive strategies of rootless air plants, in collaboration with Berlin’s Wilkommenklassen, to explore the emotional and cultural complexities of migration through artistic and embodied practices, challenging integration narratives and highlighting the transformative potential of transnational moments for children and communities alike.
un/learning Sessions
Facilitated by Kollektivbibliothek, conducted in English & Spanish.
un/learning group is a counter-pedagogy collective and alliance of activists, artists, and social and cultural workers committed to critically un/learning violent, oppressive, and colonial structures. As a part of their program, they lead collective un/learning sessions featuring text, sound, and video materials focused on care, healing, and burnout in the context of activism and political movements
Beyond Vibration
Facilitated by Alice Kahei Yu, conducted in English.
This program invites participants to explore how sound evokes memory, resilience, and displacement. Through collective sonic mapping, we will engage in listening, storytelling, and archiving within the context of a city shaped by migration and exile. Together, we will reflect on how our sonic landscapes are shaped not only by personal memory but also by political forces such as class, race, gender, and state violence.
Also see:
Open Call (+++expired+++)
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.
Orta Okul 2024 Program
In 2024, Orta Okul focused on The Urgent Needs of Berlin, exploring the city's pressing issues and developing a seminar program designed for diverse groups. Our aim was to engage those often excluded from the arts and culture scene due to linguistic, social, or class barriers, as well as to connect with art educators and activists.
We organized five seminars in different languages. While this page is in English, you can click on each seminar to access more details in its original language.
This program was realized with the support of Urbane Praxis Berlin.