Dear friends and colleagues,
this is an invitation to the “shared office #3”on the 13th,14th and 15th of April at
HAU3 Berlin.
The shared office project sets up spaces for individual writing and common concentration in the occasion of upcoming application deadlines in Berlin. This time's occasion is the HKF deadline on the 15th of April for which we found space and kind support from Hebbel am Ufer.
You are very welcome to join if you are writing an application for HKF but also if you are doing your emails, write your reports or make your budgets and simply need a place to share your presence!
Shared office
With the shared office project, we want to change if not the economic conditions of our work then at least the social ones. We want to find a form of solidarity that does not deny different practices, perspectives and ambitions and yet finds a place where we can be together, give each other concentration in silent late night sessions, sit next to each other sweating on deadlines and be the context for each other's ideas. We would like to provide a concentrated space that allows for the verbal or non-verbal exchange, potential cigarette talks, coffee zips and the simple courage that appears when being together. Believing that we could be a scene in many more occasions than when meeting at each other's shows, we want to invite you to share the crucial moment of (application) writing with us. The shared office strives for being solidary in a pre-dominant competitive relation and for a little more fun while working hard.
Practicalities
The office will be open on the 13th, 14th and 15th of April between 10am and 6pm.
It is located in HAU 3, Tempelhofer Ufer 10, 10 963 Berlin
We will provide a quiet and concentrated working area with tables and chairs, wifi, coffee machine, water boiler, some blankets for cold feet and some ice for hot minds.
We hope to see you there!
How do we work it*
Support
Hebbel am Ufer
Tanzbüro Berlin
Uferstudios/Life Long Burning Project
*How Do We Work it is a new initiative of Berlin choreographers to meet, speak and reflect current working conditions in contemporary art in Berlin and internationally. We continued meeting after being once invited to the workshop “how do we work it” in the frame of the Life Long Burning Project. Rather than a group, How Do We Work is a platform for anybody who is interested to share experiences, knowledge and ideas
Background
Dance and choreography have become to a great extent conceptual, administrative and managerial practices in the past years. With the concept of the dancer as maker against the background of precarious working conditions, writing one's emails, working out budgets, conceiving project plans, conceptualizing working methods and – last but not least – preparing applications at the kitchen table became part of almost everyone´s artistic practice in the field. An extended understanding of what dance or a dance maker is/could be and the discursive quality of this practice, strangely tends to individualize the work of dancers and choreographers. A large part of the working process is no longer taking place in a common rehearsal space in the theater but at the aforementioned kitchen table. Freelance project management and the pressure for the individual maker that goes along with it greatly affects a number of aspects in life and work that we care about: personal confidence, working atmospheres, artistic risk-taking, the exchange of ideas, the reflection on artistic practices and the support of others.The shared office is meant as a step to modify both, the working conditions as well as the mood.
Beyond the very practical or daily life effects, the loneliness of the kitchen table also reinforces parameters in artistic production that we thought to have a critical eye on: individual authorship and the competition with ideas and knowledge. Not denying the de facto economic and artistic competition which we are in and which we cannot simply put away with good will, we nevertheless want to support an understanding of artistic production that strives for collaboration and contextual working. We want to become a scene that gives context to each others works and creates a social, political and artistic discurse together .
After two previous times in September 2014 at Uferstudios and in March 2015 at Sophiensaele, the shared office project now goes into its third round. Turn it.