Internship for Neukolln based arts collective for their first festival ‘Agora Collects’.

Agora is a network that creatively facilitates the exchange, development and encounter of ideas, skills and resources amongst people and projects.

About Agora: This network is a cultural hub where educational, artistic, and entrepreneurial values are cultivated and exchanged. Housed in a restored Altbau in the heart of Berlin, Agora hosts people and projects from various backgrounds giving them the space, infrastructure and accessory, allowing their ideas to succeed.

With bright office spaces, large art studios, silent zones and a bustling cafe, Agora provides a complex that can be transformed and curated for a range of uses and purposes, depending on its members necessities.

Agora Collects Festival

Agora Collects is a three day long event
that compiles makers, artists, scientists, designers, philosophers, activists, social entrepreneurs and explores experiential ways to visit Agora’s multiple spaces.

A weekend-long event based on the notions of collaboration and crossovers that proritizes formats of interaction, in the fields of arts, technology, entrepeneurship, food and innovation. Here is a link to the full programme http://agoracollective.org/agoracollects/programme/

Highlights include

The Waiting Room

D. Agullo, D. Paranyushkin, C Layes & P. Stamer.

Interactive performance piece

A waiting room, tables, chairs, reception. Forms, applications, questionnaires. You take a place, waiting for your turn. Your name is called and you are led to a different space. Behind the door is your interview partner. It may be an interviewer, your best friend, a trader, a dancer, an actor, maybe even yourself – you never know what to expect.

The Waiting Room opens space for encounters between strangers and it plays with the social rules of curiosity and interest, everyday behaviour and communication. You always come back to where you started: the waiting room, which itself becomes the space for mixing up the impressions and suspending the patterns.

Skywater

Fernanda Trevellin

Installation

Fenanda Trevellin opens Sky water a permanent water collecting system which filters rain into drinkable water, will sustain Agoras new window farm and is a beautful living installation in Kurz Von Eden Cafe.

The Kubrick Effect

Jonas Wendellin, Hans Henning Korb, Rodrigo Maltez Novaes, and AEAEAEAE

Kubrick Moment will occupy the second floor space during Agora Collects. A collaboration between four artists, Kubrick Moment present a layered, narrative-based installation, the results of which will then evolve into an exhibition piece.

Hopf Collective

Céline Pelce and Vicky Fischer

Parisian Food installation!

The French duo present Food Apparatus—a food experience set in a performance and laboratory style framework.

This installation is set like a laboratory space, where cooking process will be exposed and activated to create a participative experience for the public. It invi­tes reading food transformation, via the fermentation phenomenon. This process is the work of mysterious forces, which aren’t domesticate, and emphasises the cycle of life. Using several visual process (videos, sounds, actions, objects and tools), we will present five fermentation principles, generating a menu.

Process

Lead up to the festival.

Programme meeting

Review meeting for organisors of Agora Collects. Team were Taina, Marcela, Kaiki, Pedro, Chris, Vicky, Marie and Morgane.

Items discussed were

• Artist Liason
• Promotion, website/listings/press
• Technical requirements
• Logistics, clearing the floors, moving out the Co-workers for installations
• Cafe/refreshments/Hopf food installation
• Neighbour problems, music annoyance.. outside cinema will now be inside!

Kurz Von Eden…

is the beautiful Cafe space with open windows out to the garden serving organic food and German beverages. Also acts as the main meeting space for artists and co-workers. The cafe hosts small exhibitions, parties and cultural events. They have a late bar licence but music must stop at 12pm outside due to the neighbourhood location.

Here you can see Marie, Taina and Marcela hard at work… email city.

Beautiful garden, tunes pumping out of the window, today the Chef Marco left. There was a heap of quality food to eat all day long, a smorgasboard of fancy (and i mean fancy) cakes to snack on.

Agora LOVES pallets. Owner Pedro went on a pallet course where he was shown all the creative ways you can use pallets for tables/beds/desks whatever! We are making tables for the garden area… check out the hard work of Faizal and Sonya.

Market Space

As part of the Festival we turned the Agora Atelier into an Artist Marketspace that looked just like a normal house. The marketplace showcased local Berlin artists and independent outlets such as TillAirPlants, tHERAPY and Dimitry with recycled fashion hung on tree trunk hangars by Sasha.

The art works were hung all  around the house and there was tea and cake served throughout the event.

Here you can see some of the tree trunk hangers and reclaimed wood lamps dotted around the space.

Cocktails and Synths

Like cocktails? Like Synths? this participatory art session was fantastic, the top floor of Agora was turned into a Synth jam factory, with 4 different workspaces where audience members could visit a table, put on headphones and join in a live jam with old German Analogue synths! So Berlin…

The Performative Curatorial Studio

Part of the festival involved a programme of talks and debates, one of which invited curators from across berlin to participate in a full day workshop focussing on the performative aspects of curation.  The curators began the morning with a discussion and talk about their present work and experiences, in the afternoon, guest speakers and the audience were invited to join the group and a performance developed throughout the day.  The project used ‘The Narrative Machine’ as a metaphor with 40 different wooden shapes that were moved throughout the day to create different spatial designs and choreography through their morphing form. Other talks were from Dimitri Hegemann talking about Forgotten Spaces and we had a debate around the importance of culture in organisations with Berlin start up managers.

The Kubrick Moment

A collaboration between 3 graduate artists from Universitat Der Kunste

Hopf Collective, Paris

Garden Events

Agora People