KIEZWERKSTATT

Tag: action

  • KIEZWERKSTATT x Urbane Praxis – Open Office Dialogue

    KIEZWERKSTATT x Urbane Praxis – Open Office Dialogue

    Archive / Actions — 28 November 2025

    Undisciplined knowledge: tools for reclaiming collectivity1

    After our first action, where we tested our theoretical ideas first-hand, this was where we opened up the planning behind our events, with the questions we ask ourselves, the doubts, the contradictions we run into, to a room of people already interested in or working with participatory practices. 

    where this started

    We first crossed paths with Urbane Praxis e.V. at their inaugural Open Office Dialogue meeting, long before we envisaged being on the other side of the table. We got in touch and what began as an informal consultation grew into a longer collaboration: they followed us to the Straßenfest in Wedding, interviewed us for their zine series The Just City and invited us to run this workshop.

    For the day itself, we kept the framing simple: an afternoon of talking, thinking and making together. We wanted to keep it open and transparent rather than academic, stretching three words past their institutional definitions and into the ambiguity that participatory practice actually lives inside: multidisciplinarity, multilinguality, multisensoriality. Underneath all three sat the same questions: how do you multiply the possibilities for knowledge and for reclaiming space in an urban context? Can reclaiming space ever really remove its barriers, or do we first have to rethink what a barrier is, and who built it? If power relations can’t be dissolved, can they at least be made visible?

    what it had to do

    For us, the three words ‘multidisciplinarity’, ‘multilinguality’ and ‘multisensoriality’ had a more specific meaning: they represented three recurring arguments that we had with each other, both discussing the praxis in theory and while planning our action – and which had remained unresolved.

    • multidisciplinarity. the project runs on the two of us bringing different backgrounds into the same room. But bringing isn’t the same as using it well. Which of what we each carry actually matters here, and which is just habit?
    • multilingualism. how do you choose one working language for a group of strangers, and who gets quietly excluded by that choice? We’d never managed to decide this in the abstract. In practice, we let the room decide instead.
    • multisensoriality. how far do you go in making an experience feel special rather than banal, and at what point does “special” turn into its own kind of barrier?

    We wanted the workshop to be an open process to collaboratively explore these topics: we wanted to claim and share the time and space to delve into the meaning, the possibilities and the ambiguities behind each topic and consider how they could be approached from a new perspective.

    Building on the tarot deck imagery used for the ice-breaker, we created a new set of discussion cards, including question and blank cards. By the end of the day, each group had selected one to three cards representing what they would destroy, rebuild or invent within their topic, providing a small guide for future actions created by people other than ourselves.

    the room we built around it

    We designed the space to encourage movement. Active participation required movement, so we designed the room to facilitate this. Instead of assigning seats or corners, we divided Urbane Praxis’s office into two zones and allowed participants to move between them.
    Near the entrance is a welcome zone with stools and low tables borrowed from the office. These are loose enough to sit around and talk on before anything formal starts. Further in was a discussion zone with three fixed tables, one per topic. These tables were deliberately unmoving so that, rather than being directed by the room, people could direct themselves through it, choosing where to sit, how long to stay and when to move on to another topic. 

    We left our own board at home2. In its place, one long question ran the length of the wall – how can we turn concepts like multidisciplinarity, multilinguality, and multisensoriality into collective practices? – printed large enough to read from the welcoming zone as well as the discussion tables, and left up there the whole day. We pointed back to it more than once, less as decoration than as a way of reminding ourselves, mid-conversation, what we were actually there to work out. 

    Our own board usually does two jobs, not one. Beside recognition, it also gives the process a place to be seen, somewhere thinking-in-progress can sit rather than just get talked about and forgotten. Here we split that second job across two different surfaces instead: an office board, borrowed for the icebreaker, where each tarot card was pinned up the moment it was shared; and, once the day moved into discussion, the large sheets of paper spread across the three tables, one per topic, alongside pens, question cards, and blank cards waiting to be filled, later hung on the wall for the whole room to read. 

    how the day was meant to move

    We opened with introductions built around tarot cards rather than titles. Each person picked one to three cards that made them think of their Kiez, what they loved or feared or wished for in it, any experience at all, and told us what the card meant to them, no obligation to say what they did for work, where they studied, or where they were from.3 We hung each card on the board as it was shared.

    From there, we introduced the project and the three topics, using prompts still shaped by the same tarot logic – possibility, ambiguity, imagination – to carry the icebreaker’s spirit into the more theoretical part of the day.
    Participants moved to whichever table pulled them, worked through the discussion at their own pace with timers only to keep everyone loosely oriented, and closed by hanging their sheet and laying down their cards. After a break for snacks and looking at what was on the walls, the groups came back together to read each other’s cards — informally, intuitively, without needing to have sat at that table themselves.

    what we leaned on, what we risked

    Based on our observations from previous actions, we designed the icebreaker to provide a balance in a room of strangers: enough open space for each person to have their own voice, but also something to grab onto so that this openness is not left unused. The tarot cards were that something: a familiar tool that we repurposed here as a handhold. We also knew that not everyone wants to stand up in front of people they don’t know and talk about themselves, especially within a fixed structure of name, pronouns, work and where you’re from. This is why we asked a single question that pulled everyone straight into our topic – the Kiez – and allowed each person to decide how much of themselves to reveal.

    There are two things we risked, and both can be traced back to the same source: opening up a conversation that would usually stay between the two of us. At first, designing an action for practitioners4 felt strange, almost contradictory: at the Straßenfest, we had worked hard to unprofessionalise ourselves, and now we were building something for people who might interpret every choice as a professional one. However, we chose to treat it as an opportunity to further open up our process rather than as a peer review, which helped. In the end, the room was filled with a diverse group of people, including practitioners (some of whom had even run Open Office Dialogues of their own), individuals from the fields of planning and culture, as well as others who were simply curious about art, participation, or the multifaceted world we had been exploring. Choosing to participate in the discussion meant staying open to new ideas and hearing things we hadn’t thought of, though it wasn’t always easy to resist guiding the conversation back to our preconceived answers. We’re glad we resisted.

    what the day actually did

    Fewer people came than we’d planned for, and a few arrived late. We didn’t force either into the shape of the plan: latecomers were folded in wherever the room was, told what they’d missed, and, if they wanted, picked their tarot card during the break instead of at the start.

    We’d expected something closer to an even split across the three tables. Instead, multidisciplinarity pulled the biggest, most invested group, and they stayed there the whole time, wandering further into their own tangents than we’d scoped for. Rather than redirect them back to the table’s original question, we let them keep going.5 A smaller group moved between multisensoriality and multilinguality instead.

    Language settled itself the way it had at Straßenfest: we asked, the room chose English, and we stayed ready to switch to German if it had gone the other way. It didn’t.

    By the end, each table had produced its own small deck – question cards paired with the group’s own destroy/rebuild/invent cards – and the sheets underneath them held the scribbled, communal thinking that got them there.

    check out the foto documentation of the workshop!

    1. our subtitle for the day, and also the title Urbane Praxis used in their public listing for the Open Office Dialogues series. ↩︎
    2. see the Straßenfest entry: that board was built for mobility across outdoor actions, which made it the wrong tool for a small, already-furnished office. ↩︎
    3. an abstract, identity-free way in, deliberately. For a few hours, we wanted to build our own small world rather than the usual first-meeting one built out of job titles and hometowns. ↩︎
    4. this action was designed to address the audience of Urbane Praxis e.V., which consists mainly of people involved in the fields of culture, urban design, politics, and planning.
      In the end, a diverse audience with mixed professional and personal experience of the creative and cultural world and participatory formats showed up. ↩︎
    5. the same instinct as resisting the pull to steer the discussion earlier in the day: another instance of letting the plan bend rather than forcing it through, worth folding into that eventual entry on improvisation vs. structure across our actions. ↩︎

  • KIEZWERKSTATT x Wedding Straßenfest

    KIEZWERKSTATT x Wedding Straßenfest

    Archive / Actions — 5 July 2025

    This was our first action: a Straßenfest in our own neighborhood, and the first time an idea we’d only talked about became something other people could actually walk into.

    where this started

    We started our project by circling theory: how do we move culture away from the museum? How do we turn passive looking, passive learning, into something that activates making? How do we let someone’s own voice carry the same weight as “the greats” – the thinkers, artists, experts behind glass?

    Then a Straßenfest in the neighborhood opened a call for contributions, and joining it gave us a concrete occasion to test what had, until then, only existed as questions. We came up with a topic, resistance in Wedding, and with it, a way to explore the connection between past memory and present everyday life: the feelings, perceptions, and small moments that don’t usually make it into anyone’s official account of a place. 

    Standing in front of an actual event to plan, the questions changed shape. They collapsed into something sharper: how do we start a conversation people actually want to be part of, and clear the obstacles out of the way of that happening?

    what it had to do

    Miro board — the early criteria sketch: recognisability, scalability, mobility, static/foundations

    Before we built anything, we mapped out what a space of action for this practice would even need to hold: recognisable, wherever it turned up. Scalable, open, interactive, adaptable and modular. We also sketched various versions of a heavier, grounded alternative and set it aside; the practice needed to travel, not root itself – and we needed something efficient, rather than heavily designed, something raw.

    From those criteria, the brief got concrete. It had to go up anywhere, with no fixed site to rely on. It had to come down again just as easily, fold away, survive being reused across actions we hadn’t planned yet. It needed a surface, somewhere to hold both the process and whatever came out of it, together. And since we imagined this living across scattered public spaces rather than one address, it needed to be recognizable wherever it landed.

    Sketch — the board’s structure/geometry, from the same planning session

    That’s how we arrived at the board. Freestanding, light enough to carry alone, quick to assemble and just as quick to pack away. Our name sits on it in red: big enough to read from across a busy street festival, small enough to still feel handmade.1

    the room we built around it

    We decided to set our space as a living room around the board: a carpet, a sofa, chairs, cushions, a coffee table with drinks. Less a stand, more somewhere you’d actually want to sit down, a small pocket of slowness inside the noise of a street festival, close enough to the crowd to be found, calm enough to invite someone to stop moving.

    Sketch: the full setup, with carpet, sofa, board, map together

    Together with a printed neighborhood map, the board and the room around it became the center of gravity for the day: a place where a personal memory could become something shared and visible, without anyone needing to perform it in front of a group.

    what we leaned on, what we risked 

    The question we’d already landed on became the goal we set for the day’s structure ourselves: how do you make joining a conversation easy, low-stakes, without obstacles in the way?
    That meant no formal invitation to speak, no single moment where everyone had to perform for the group. Instead, the day split into two moments that could be entered at any point: the map, where a story became a shared mark rather than a spotlight; then a making station, where the curated material could turn into something made with your hands instead of said out loud. Neither part asked for commitment upfront. You could sit, watch, add one pin, or spend an hour building a zine, the structure held all of those as equally valid ways in.

    our plan for the day

    The day itself was planned in two parts. First, the map: people gathered around it and talked about places connected to resistance in and around Wedding — open, too, to other Kieze, as comparison or just as another story set beside it. We opened with our own examples, then let the floor take over2; as someone shared something, we pinned a red pin onto the map together, and afterwards found one word as a group to sit beside it, turning a private memory into something the whole group had touched, without asking anyone to explain more than they wanted to.

    From there, people moved to a making station, choosing between building a zine, alone or with others, or writing and drawing a postcard, working from material we’d curated in advance: historic photographs of protests in Wedding, mixed with diverse more recent images of the neighborhood as it is now, with present realities, curiosities, struggles.

    what the day actually did

    We hadn’t expected the living room setting itself to play such a big part, either. Almost everyone who sat down ended up talking — exchanging a small postcard, sharing a story or experiencing a moment that we hadn’t planned for. And we made room for those who only stopped out of curiosity, passing by: no full sit-down required. 

    The making station ended up more open than planned, in the best way. People took it in every direction: someone stayed long enough to make four different pieces; someone spent the whole time on one elaborate one; someone wrote a single line on a postcard and left it at that; someone didn’t make anything, just sat and talked, or commented on what others were building. 

    The map conversation had to end earlier than planned; the festival around us was too loud to hold that kind of listening for long. Rather than force it, we let the space stay open instead. By the end, the making station had been taken over entirely by kids, who started in without needing any explanation and ended up pinning their own pieces onto the board themselves. Messy, and happy about it. 

    1. the board didn’t stay a one-off and it’s since travelled with us into later actions in public space, holding up the same job it was built for. ↩︎
    2. language was its own standing decision here, not just a one-time call. we wanted the conversation open, but worried openness itself could become a barrier. A formal translation setup would have doubled the length of the day and put anyone needing it visibly on the spot. So we decided in the moment instead: english as a default, german welcome, translating informally as it came up. Likely to recur the same way in future actions. ↩︎

  • KIEZWERKSTATT x Make-up Straßenfest

    KIEZWERKSTATT x Make-up Straßenfest

    Kiezpostcards: Collective Greetings from Berlin Nord

    Part of Kiezwerkstatt, in collaboration with Make-Up Space, at the Papierstraße Straßenfest.

    Join us at our postcard-making station: a place to sit, relax, and reflect. Write, draw, or create a mini-collage about togetherness and collectivity in your neighborhood, then add your postcard to our board to help build a living archive of what it feels like to live in Berlin Nord today.

    Does your Kiez speak to you? Do you want to speak back?

    Drop by anytime and stay as long as you like. All materials provided — no experience needed. Open to all languages; moderated in German, English, and more.

    Saturday, May 9th, 14:00–18:00

    Papierstraße 11, 13409 Berlin

    Find out more about Make-Up Space!