neue Gesellschaft
für bildende Kunst

With contributions from AK School of the Future, Sabine Bitter & Helmut Weber and Marille Schule, among others.

Using the program title "Utopian", the work group station urbaner kulturen focuses in 2023 on the question of how we can think about the day after tomorrow in the face of the crises and dystopias of today.

To start the year, the station urbaner kulturen/nGbK Hellersdorf will be transformed into a work and presentation space focusing on the theme "School of the Future”. A working initiative is exploring concepts here for the future of education in Hellersdorf and discussing terminology like educational utopias, equality, environmental schools, experimental schools, neighbourhood schools, university schools, “Schulbauoffensive” and "Schools Must Change". The station urbaner kulturen/nGbK Hellersdorf is hosting this debate and giving it artistic input.

With the station urbaner kulturen, the nGbK has developed close relationships with local initiatives and residents in Hellersdorf since 2014, and has repeatedly impacted on public and social space on the housing estate through artwork. Over the course of time, it has become clear that working on the theme of education is integral to achieving sustainable cultural development in the neighborhood.

The “School of the Future” initiative consists of residents, artists, educators, urbanists and academics. It has been meeting at the station urbaner kulturen since autumn 2022 and works with the educational institutions Alice Salomon Hochschule, Konrad-Wachsmann-Schule and the University of Potsdam, among others. Further partners include the founding members of the Marille Schule Berlin.

This working process will be complimented by three large photo panels by the artists Sabine Bitter & Helmut Weber (Vancouver/Vienna). These photographic “diagrams” have been specially conceived for the workspace and show campuses, learning spaces, libraries, pavilions, schools and modernist university architecture, taken mainly from the artists' own archive. They focus on education as a societal infrastructure, a formal language and as an architecture in social use.

These pictorial ensembles of educational and learning spaces afford a critical review of representational policies and projections of an apparently outdated, yet still influential, educational modernity. They pose questions about what we learn from these spaces today, what can be unlearned, and how a future school can be imagined and produced differently.

The planning process for an outdoor ”Classroom of the Future" for the neighbouring green land called Place Internationale on Maxie-Wander-Strasse is also taking place in station urbaner kulturen/nGbK Hellersdorf. For this purpose, a former Dresdner Bank trade fair pavilion built in 1971 by Heinz Scheid (ABB Architekten) will be renovated and erected with local school pupils from May 2023.