2

Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König

The Resonant Museum

Berlin Conversations
on Mental Health

Edited by Diana Mammana& Margareta von Oswald

The Resonant Museum
Diana Mammana and Margareta von Oswald

15

What Can We Do Together
That We Couldn’t Do Alone?
Danielle Olsen

29

The Museum as a Living Organism
Stephanie Rosenthal

33

Stretching, Disturbing, Expanding the Museum
Diana Mammana and Margareta von Oswald
in conversation with Beatrice von Bismarck

37

The Resonance Room47

Berlin Conversations on Mental HealthAccessafter the song
Approach
Assistance
At Work
Being Moved
Belonging
Care
Common GroundContact
Discriminations
For Each Other
Legislation
LeisureMovement
Norms
Optimisation
Perfectionism
Present
Relations
Simply There
SpacesStressSystem Relevance
The Intervening Mind
Touch
TrickeryUtopiaAppendix

79
84
88
90
91
92
95
100
109
110
122
133
134
138
139
146
151
153
156
162
165
168
172
176
184
187
189
193
198

The
Resonant
Museum12

13

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15

Diana Mammana and Margareta von Oswald
Gropius Bau, 15 October 2022. During the panel discussion “Claims for a Neighbourhood Policy”, one
question emerges as the focus of interest: how canmuseums make themselves useful for society? Whatcan museums contribute to good neighbourship?
Mazda Adli, a psychiatrist at the university hospital
Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, is adamant: every
institution – whether a theatre, a museum or a cultural
centre – has a public health mission and an important role to play in mental health. They are places ofencounter and exchange, where social isolation can becounteracted. Anna Yeboah, coordinator of the project“Dekoloniale – Memory Culture in the City”, interjects.
Speaking from the perspective of the Black community, she states that a museum can be many things, but
it is most certainly not conducive to mental health. If
she were to take her younger siblings to the German
Museum of Technology or the Humboldt Forum, then acrisis discussion would most certainly ensue. The children wouldn’t be feeling the best afterwards. Further
comments follow from the audience: the exhibition ishigh-threshold and elitist, and there’s a need to speak
about classism.
The discussion was part of the event programme accompanying the exhibition YOYI! Care, Repair, Heal (September
2022 to January 2023). In the context of the exhibition, theResonance Room was developed. It was a cooperation project between the Gropius Bau and Mindscapes, Wellcome’sinternational cultural programme about mental health. The
Resonance Room was dedicated to exploring the topic ofmental health in Berlin and is the starting point for thisThe Resonant Museum

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publication. In the following we will present our curatorial
approach and discuss how the museum can become asocially relevant place capable of effecting change.
Every narrated, present history in a museum excludes
another. As Aleida and Jan Assmann write in relation toprocesses of canonisation, the museum also operates withclear lines of demarcation: what “inevitably” emerges is a“dialectic between what comes in and what stays out” (1987,
11). Whose history is told in the museum? Who feels comfortable, at ease there? Who goes there? Amongst whom
does the museum trigger a sense of disquiet (Kazeem etal. 2009)?
What may seem dumb and funny to some may be violent for others. What may seem deviant is someone’s
lived reality. What is unknown to one person is anotherperson’s canon (Tinius & von Oswald 2022, 19–20).
Whether one feels comfortable in a museum or not depends
on the person using it. Through their architecture, the strategies behind their collections and their exhibition concepts,
museums mirror and configure the ways a society understands the past, the present and the future. As places where
authority reigns, they contribute to the specific perceptionsof science, art and culture, and mould national and local
identity. They are considered “truth machines” (Mörsch
2009, 10) and thus stand for objectivity, for the beautiful
and the valuable, and they determine what is worth preserving. At the same time, museums are places of disputeand negotiation. They create friction and tension and, intheir positioning, mirror issues of how to approach identities, memory and history, as well as inclusion and exclusion in society. The question as to the role museums could
play in society has been prevalent since the 1970s at the

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latest. Is the museum a forum or a temple (Cameron 1971)?
Is it about representation, contemplation, education? Participating, sharing, co-creating? Consumption? The relevance of these questions has become abundantly clear inrecent years in the conflict-ridden debates taking place
within the International Council of Museums on how todefine the museum (see, for example, Etges & Dean 2022).
In the German-speaking context – often inspired by British and North-American debates and practices – curators,
mediators and researchers such as Angela Janelli, Angeli
Sachs, Carmen Mörsch, Christine Gerbich, Natalie Bayer,
Nora Landkammer, Nora Sternfeld, Sharon Macdonald andSusan Kamel, along with numerous allies, have called forthe museum to be understood as a place of negotiationand participation, a place where conflicts can be playedout, debated and heard, and indeed made visible. Museums are called on to become socially relevant, democratic
places capable of effecting change, which allow, demandand foster co-creation, and open up to processes of learning and unlearning (Landkammer 2019, Sternfeld 2018). The
fact that these demands and debates have been going on
for decades shows that, although museums adapt, they arealso resistant to change. The challenge to define the mission of the museum is an ever-present in museum histories.
The Gropius Bau is confronted with these questions
not least because of its history as a museum. Today, theGropius Bau calls itself an exhibition hall above all dueto the absence of collections. It nonetheless exemplarilyreflects the changing tasks of museums: as places of imperial collection and science, as production sites of collective
identity, as centres of learning and service-oriented consumer temples. The self-understanding and roles of museums change, overlap and intersect. Until the curator andart historian Stephanie Rosenthal initiated an exclusively

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artistic programmatic orientation in 2018, in whose context
the projects presented in this book were realised, since its
opening in 1881 as the Kunstgewerbemuseum – the Museumof Decorative Arts – the building has hosted very different
institutions (Beier & Koschnick 1986, Kampmann & Weström 1999). After the Museum of Decorative Arts moved out
in 1921, the building was used until 1945 by the Museum ofPrehistory and Early History, the East Asian art collectionof the Völkerkundemuseum and the art library. Between
1933 and 1945 the Gropius Bau found itself in the midst of
the “organisational centre of the National Socialist politics
of persecution and murder” (Tempel 2019, 95). The Schoolof Applied Arts, accessible through a bridge from theMuseum of Decorative Arts, was occupied by the Gestapo,
the secret police force of the German state, in 1933. After
years of desolation, which gave hobby archaeologists ample
opportunity to excavate the remainders of buried museum
collections (Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz 2020), renovation work on the Gropius Bau began in 1978. Until 1989
the building, positioned on the Cold War frontier directly
next to the Berlin Wall, served as a temporary home for the
Berlinische Galerie Museum of Modern Art, the Werkbund
Archive – Museum of Things and the Jewish Departmentof the former Berlin Museum. Since 2001 the house, now
under the custody of the Berliner Festspiele, hosts temporary exhibitions covering a wide range of themes, fromarchaeology and cultural history through to modern andcontemporary art.
Museums exist in resonance with society. With the proposal to understand the museum as a resonant space, wewould like to initiate a rethink about the mission and thus
the interrelated working practice therein. Pivotal for us inunderstanding the museum as a resonant place is that an
impulse can be formulated which produces an echo con-

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trollable only to a limited extent. Resonance allows vibration and relationship. According to the sociologist Hartmut
Rosa, resonance is characteristic of a mode of enteringinto-­relationship. Resonance does not aim to be in unison.
On the contrary: negotiating and engaging with differenceis the very prerequisite for resonance. Only through encountering the “genuinely Other as other” and interacting with it
can transformation take place (Rosa 2019, 21, italics in theoriginal). To enter into relationship – into resonance – means
to be in motion, to be open to difference and various formsof knowledge and experiences. The resonant museum thus
approaches the world, and in doing so goes beyond itself.
Resonance therefore also means a willingness to get
involved in encounters. And this is what curatorial work
can respond to. A core task of curatorial work is to mediate
between the inside and the outside of the museum and tohelp shape the museum’s degree of porosity and permeability (Sachs 2017). Drawing on Beatrice von Bismarck’s
understanding, curatorial practice can be thought of as
ensuing from relationships (2021). These relationships bring
into contact different actors, both human and non-human.
Curators initiate, establish and administer these relationships. Curatorial work thus organises constellations ofrelationships and makes the generated knowledge public.
The role of the curator is one that is not rigidly codified
and defined but versatile. It is productive in intermediate
positions. Within institutional logics this mode of curatorial work often causes confusion, so it has to be explainedand defended. In a curatorial field pervaded by hierarchies,
forsaking well-practised roles often causes uncertainties.
A prerequisite for this working practice is an appreciationof being-in-between.
The form of our curatorial work emerged out of twocontexts: firstly, the research placement at the Centre

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for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage(CARMAH), and secondly, the institutional position of theResonance Room in the Gropius Bau. In developing theResonance Room, we tried out various approaches in ourefforts to understand mental health in terms of its relationship to society. The goal was to conceive the museum as atool for social change (Sandell 1998, Simon 2014) and to ask
how it can make itself “useful” (Lynch 2021, 14). The starting
point for this research taking place in a museum was co­operation with research institutions and protagonists from
culture, activism, politics and health in Berlin.
The sociologist Hella von Unger describes participatory research as “research approaches which investigate
and influence social reality collaboratively” (2014). This
dual objective to comprehend and change reflects ourown understanding of museums, which – through constellations of things, spaces and people – identify and represent
realities, while influencing reality through their action. Ourmode of working has its locale in anthropology and thus
reveals connections to ethnographic research methods.
Participative and ethnographic research practices share
the aim of generating, in trust-based relationships, knowledge that is anchored in everyday life; at the same time, as
the anthropologist Kirin Narayan describes ethnographic
work, this means that those involved are “perpetually pulled
beyond the limits of one’s own taken-for-granted world” (inMcGranahan 2014). What interests us in ethnographic work
is how we can turn towards the conditions and experiencesof life as it is in fact lived, and how we can commit “to trying
to see and experience life-worlds from the point of view of
those who live them” and, just as crucially, from “within thecontext of which they are part” (Macdonald 2013, 9).

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Like curatorial work, ethnographic research is confronted by the challenges and issues entwined with visibility, authorship and negotiating representation. Questions ofinterpretative prevalence are pivotal, which in anthropology
have a tradition, in its engagement with marginalised knowledge. As Bernadette Lynch has put it, “museums are essentially an exercise in ethics” (2021, 7). The quality of work
becomes apparent in the degree of trust in the networkof relationships and requires a focus on the process morethan the result: with whom and how are relationships established? With how much sensibility are they introduced andfostered? How are relationships negotiated in the processof knowledge production and how are the translation processes carried out? Participative research is an “explicitly
value-oriented undertaking” (von Unger 2014, 1). Different
interest groups shape the research questions and hypo­theses and, as part of the exhibition, are integrated into themuseal and scientific narrative. Conversely, participative
research enables social participation – a situation that is tobe brought about in museums mostly through the work of
mediation.
Participative research reinforces an understanding of
mediation as a knowledge-producing, involving practice.
The topics broached are made compatible for different
realities of life, and become part of them. Relationship webs
which had yet to exist are created. And it is first throughthese that a socially relevant effect can be generated: forothers make the museum, come to the museum, identify
the museum as their place. Through the principle of involvement in the process of knowledge production, mediation
work becomes curatorial work (Mörsch 2009). The task of
mediation is thus not to comment on the curatorial work or
to operate by targeting a specific group as the advocate for

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an audience but rather, as part of curatorial processes, toproduce, form and extend discourses and contents.
To operate in resonance – in contact with the outside – therefore means to challenge forms of expertise.
Including diverse experiences calls into question whichknowledge is to be viewed as legitimate and how conceptsof knowledge can be extended. Who is accorded visibility
and how this is done puts to the test how participation isunderstood and implemented. As we propose it, the modeof curatorial work thus demands a mode for dealing withthe (un)foreseeable echo. Responsibility is delegated – orrelinquished. This means: being open to misunderstandingor even incomprehension, to disagreements and contradictions, and thus to the process per se, and in turn accepting
it as part of curatorial work. And not least acknowledging
that the material results in the exhibition are, to a certain
degree, unplannable (Coutinho 2017, 71).
The need for museums to open up is particularly urgent
in the twenty-first century because public places for dialogue and exchange appear to be rapidly dwindling in an
increasingly polarised society. “How do we come together
in a world that isolates us?” asks the curator and educator Nora Sternfeld (in Tinius & von Oswald 2020). Multiple
crises mean that it is difficult to see the future as open andfull of promise, charged with “utopian energies” (Graf 2021,
10) – instead it seems threatening and dark. Museums are
informed by democratic values and ethical principles, andthey have the potential to support social, political and ecological change (French 2019). Taking up Richard Sandell andRobert R. Janes, we wish to understand museums as placesof the commons – a resource that potentially belongs to andcan be used by all members of society, and reciprocally has
an impact on them (2019, 17). Here we can have meaningful encounters with ourselves (Coutinho 2017). As a space

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that takes culture seriously in all its vitality, the resonant
museum can be understood as a place where knowledge is
produced interdependently and differences encountered.
The contributions in this book are based on conversations conducted with Berliners over the last two years.
Through the constellation of its respective participants, theconversation enabled disciplinary and professional boundaries to be crossed, moods and atmospheres to be captured,and “unlikely alliances” to be forged, as Danielle Olsen characterises it in her introductory piece. Our method sought
to show the constellations of different expertise on mental
health in Berlin. Who speaks? Those speaking in this bookdescribe themselves as alternative, poor, discriminatedagainst, migrant, marginalised, privileged or professional.
Lived experience and theory-guided contributions enter
into dialogue and meet on the same level. To speak about
the topic of mental health means questioning essential
aspects of how we live together. The conversations revolvearound the everyday working world, discrimination, gentrification and social inequality. Researchers and scientists, social workers, artists and cultural professionals, andpeople with lived psychiatric experience all expressed their
willingness to talk with us: people who move in activist, scientific, or political spaces. They have come into contact
with the topic of mental health either professionally or personally; in some cases, the explicit relationship between
the participating persons and mental health was produced
initially through the project. Some positions are wary andsceptical towards research and the museum, as the conversations make clear.
What does mental health mean for me in my specificcontext? This question was the reason for holding the conversations and identifying the concepts which run throughthis book. They encapsulate the key themes from the con-

The Resonant Museum

24versations in the various projects and function associatively.
Our own backgrounds in the discipline of anthropology
shaped our approach in the field; particularly in the textualisation, we were able to work with “ethnographic sensibility”(McGranahan 2018). In regular consultation with the conversation partners we worked freely with the text. We usedtranscripts of discussions we conducted or accompanied
either in interview situations, discussion groups or public
contexts. As a result of the dialogical situations, various
text forms emerged for this book. Conversations between
a number of persons lasting several hours are combined
thematically. Idea protocols describe a consensus in thegroup and are not assigned to a single author. Argumentsfrom individual persons combine statements they made ona specific theme in one or more discussions. In turn, otherdiscussions are fictive interchanges, put together from different one-to-one interviews, and contribute arguments toa concrete theme. Other contributions again arose out of
conversations with the authors and were written by themespecially for this book. The conversations are characterised not only by speaking, but also by listening and being
heard. Everyday or lived experiences are accorded thesame significance as knowledge from scientific researchand theoretical considerations on mental health, reflecting their relevancy and parity in the knowledge production
on mental health. The free associative approach to thetexts and our research data underscores the potential ofnarration in scientific work. At the same time, the conversations are deliberately construed to the degree that theycannot – and have no desire to – ensure objectivity, authenticity or representativity.
Introductory contributions discuss opening-up processes in the museum and pose the question of how
museums can become socially relevant places capable

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of effecting change. The head of the Mindscapes project
Danielle Olsen emphasises in her piece What Can We Do
Together That We Couldn’t Do Alone? the necessity oftransdisciplinary work to deal with the current problems in
the health system. The contribution by Stephanie Rosenthal, The Museum as a Living Organism, shows by way of
example how she curatorially engaged social issues in herrole as director of the Gropius Bau. The discussion with
Beatrice von Bismarck, Stretching, Disturbing, Expanding
the Museum, explores the curatorial field and the main
implications of curatorial work as presented by us in thisbook. The Resonant Museum thus shows how changing
curatorial work in the museum can contribute to the production of new knowledge.
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1987: Kanon und Zensur als kultursoziologische Kategorien. In: Aleida
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That We Couldn’t Do Alone?

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Danielle Olsen
For the past thirty years, I have worked at the intersectionof science, art and policy to raise awareness and take concrete action to address global health challenges. One infour people suffer from mental health issues every year;
however, the way we deal with them has barely evolved
over the last few decades. Novel approaches are neededto address this. The international cultural programme Mindscapes aims to change the way we understand, deal with,and talk about mental health, using a combination of art
and science.
In dealing with global challenges, science has influence and power, because it creates a basis of legitimacy
for its arguments through evidence. Nevertheless, scienceplays a minor role in many people’s everyday lives and is
not always seen as important. In addition, some people
feel excluded by seemingly impenetrable expert knowledge, or view science with a certain scepticism. Scienceand its interpretation of the world are often perceived assystemically biased or one-sided. However, to realise its fullpotential and have the greatest societal impact, science
relies on trusting relationships and should therefore strive
to be relevant to a large and diverse audience. Although
researchers and funders try, they do not always succeed in
making science and research responsive to the needs andinterests of diverse communities or in providing guidance
to policymakers.
Moreover, the sciences are often perceived as distanced
from the private, poetic and political. Yet it is these qualities that are most effective in generating public interest in
an issue or in shaping government decisions: a well-told,
moving story is more memorable than a list of facts – andthis is where the arts come in. Artists offer us different per-

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spectives from which we can look at and think about theworld in a new way together. They complement the objectivity proclaimed by the (natural) sciences by illuminating
stories – subjectivities. These help to create a sense of connection and hope, especially in areas such as mental health.
For mental health research and concrete treatment services alike, one of the great challenges is to strike a balance.
On the one hand, it is important to respect the uniquenessand very specificity of each human life. At the same time,
it is important to keep an eye on what huge, almost global
amounts of data, detached from the individual, can tell us
about populations as a whole. To span this arc, Mindscapes
highlights issues that are both globally present and local
and specific in their impact – from urbanisation to racism,discrimination and exclusion, gender, poverty, and theimpact of the COVID-19 pandemic on all of our lives.
Mindscapes creates spaces and opportunities fordifferent perspectives on mental health from art and science to meet. Based on artist residencies, Mindscapes is
an international cultural programme that brings together
partners in Bengaluru, Berlin, New York and Tokyo in co­­operation with four major museum institutions. Mindscapes
also consists of publication projects, a film that uses crowdsourcing to bring mental health voices around the world tolife, concerts, exhibitions and community events. Throughthese various cultural formats, Mindscapes contributes
to promoting diversity and inclusion in mental healthresearch, scholarship and policy. Through these activities,
which draw on lived experiences and personal testimonies,
Mindscapes opens up a multi-layered exchange about what
mental health means in different places and seeks to reachas many people as possible with its programme.
Mindscapes is the result of three years of enthusiastic
work with a group of individuals who share an interest in

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31

mental health research and who are open to diverse formsof expertise and practice. Furthermore, this group is unitedby their appreciation of the role that public spaces, heritage and the arts can play in connecting people, healing anddesigning a better future together.
Kader Attia was selected as a Mindscapes Artist in
Residence for Berlin because of his exploration of how thetraces of history affect collective memory and intergenerational trauma in an urban context. Together with a groupof curators, Attia, under the direction of the then directorof the Gropius Bau, Stephanie Rosenthal, created the exhibition YOYI! Care, Repair, Heal at the Gropius Bau (September 2022 to January 2023) and produced new works
for it. These explore the collective trauma triggered by thereunification of East and West Germany, which is still evident over thirty years later.
As in the other Mindscapes cities, the work of Mindscapes in Berlin began by bringing together those interested in and engaged with mental health in the city. We
organised three online convenings that brought together
Berlin experts from different fields and across disciplinary
boundaries, focusing on lived experience and marginalised voices. Together we explored how we could overcome
institutional boundaries and abolish hierarchies. In thisway, it was possible for all participants to shed job titles inorder to work together and reflect on what mental healthin Berlin could look like. Instead of trying to solve problems, the work at Mindscapes was explorative from the
beginning and allowed processes to unfold. In its projects,
Mindscapes acknowledges different forms of experiences,
practices and knowledge, which, thanks to mutual listening,
can create unexpected alliances around common concerns.
Intellectual precision, creative practice, emotional
intelligence, and activism from and for communities areWhat Can We Do Together That We Couldn’t Do Alone?

32

equally important to us and must work together to advancesocial change. Mindscapes is interested in what is possible together that we could not do alone. Thus, a community of practice has formed around the goals and values ofthe programme. Margareta von Oswald, the Mindscapes
Curatorial Research Fellow in Berlin, led the curatorial andresearch work in Berlin beyond Attia’s residency, bringing
together disciplines, organisations and individuals in thecity to create a multi-layered picture of what mental healthmeans to the residents of this city through the Mindscapescommunity.
I would like to thank Margareta for her thoughtful, caring
and imaginative leadership in bringing so many partners
together as equals in this project. I would also like to thankAbbie Doran, Carl Luis Lange, Diana Mammana, the Feminist Health Research Group (Inga Zimprich, Julia Bonn),
Franziska Anastasia Lentes, Jan Stöckel, Jennifer Hart, Joe
Kiely, Judith Galka, Kader Attia, Lea Hartung, Leo Owen,
Lewis McClenaghan, Masonde Luteta, Mazda Adli, Megan
Challis, Nassim Mehran, Oriana Walker, Pauline Meyer,
Sharon Macdonald, Stephanie Rosenthal and Ulrike Kluge.
Mindscapes can only thrive thanks to the commitmentof our partners. We rely on different networks and invite
diverse people with their perspectives and expertise toenrich and shape this project. This book is a wonderfulexpression of the diverse and inspiring work that has comeout of Mindscapes in Berlin because of the larger Mindscapes community. I am confident that many more culturally significant and productive conversations about mental
health research will emerge from Mindscapes – about whatworks for whom, and why.

The Museum as a Living Organism 33

Stephanie Rosenthal
When I started at the Gropius Bau it was important formyself and my team to create a sense of belonging – toestablish a connection to the city and put down roots. Specifically, I mean that it was important to explore issues andthemes relevant to me as a person living in Berlin. That was
the vision – to create and foster a feeling of belonging here.
To achieve this, we have worked on the connection between
space and place. We have focused our attention on how tointeract with the building. At the same time, it was crucial
to reflect on where we are actually located in Berlin. In turn,this has an enormous amount to do with community – thecommunity that exists in the vicinity of the institution.
Making connections to the neighbourhood was key in thisrespect. And it also meant giving due consideration to how
we can reposition our outreach or mediation programmeand enter into genuine exchange. For me it was importantto say that, as an institution, we do not know everything or
know what our visitors need, but that instead we have tolearn from our public if we wish to expand the existing community, and to ensure that people who have very specificconcerns and interests feel represented.
As an institution we have to be a living organism. I thinkthat this is only possible when the individuals in the teamcreate close ties to communities. I do not believe that an
institution can function as an anonymous body. Quite thecontrary: I firmly believe that an institution functions when
personal ties are created and a porous structure is put inplace. That when one thinks of the institution, then one
immediately also thinks of individuals. Of course, as the
director I am the public face of the institution. But I think
it is important that there is a diverse array of persons who
forge the individual links, as with a rhizome.

The Museum as a Living Organism

34

An idea emerged out of the collaboration with our Artists in Residence: to reflect on specific forms of welcoming,
to ponder this ritual, a ritual shared with a visitor whom
one has never seen before. What does it actually mean?
The structures we then introduced – the Welcome Team,the Gropius Bau Friends, and the Young Gropius Bau – arevery much informed by this work with the artists and ourdeliberations on how single conversations can be deepened. The first step is to have a personal contact personin the museum. As in most institutions, this work is limited
because of financial constraints. But I think it proved its
worth, both as an approach and a strategy, to have individuals at different points. They were entrusted with agency andweren’t there just to perform functions. They represented
the mindset of an institution, and the mindset of the institution is to have these different perspectives. What I mean isthat it is necessary to trust that an inclusivity arises throughthese different perspectives and approaches, and thatthese individual voices represent different communities.
The idea of YOYI! Care, Repair, Heal is a continuationof the question of how we can look after our public. Thisis a long road, and travelling its length is not achieved infive years. Ken Arnold, Danielle Olsen from Wellcome andmyself spoke together for the first time seven years ago.
This long-term orientation is incredibly valuable for someone like myself. I mean this careful, slow, joint feeling yourway when trying to find the right path. The pivotal question in our collaboration with Wellcome was always how
we as an institution can be a place that helps people tofind their place in today’s society and openly and sincerely
welcomes everyone. Over the course of many excellent conversations with the Wellcome Trust and Danielle Olsen we
looked for points where we actually fit together, in a total
openness. The collaboration with the Wellcome Trust and

The Museum as a Living Organism

35

Mindscapes was for me personally and for the Gropius Bau
as an institution an expansion of horizons, because we had
the opportunity to speak with various persons from different disciplines. We really tried to live out the idea to the full.
It was about pursuing this interest as keenly as possible – toask how a public institution can be a place that contributes
to mental health and how we as an institution help our visitors or public find a sense of balance through the possibilities afforded by interaction and exchange.
I believe that mental health very much depends on theplaces where interaction and exchange occur. Institutions
can be locations where one has the feeling that someone
is listening. This listening can take place in the museum
cafe or the bookshop, or with someone from the Welcome
Team. I believe that the whole organism around the exhibition programme is pivotal as to whether an institution or the
topics put up for consideration resonate with and reach the
public. To a certain extent this is always utopian but, due
to the intensive work by Mindscapes in collaboration with
Diana Mammana and with the additional support provided
by Wellcome, I think it proved possible to deepen these ties
and conversations more than is usually the case.
Collaborating intensively with groups, Diana Mammana
was already very familiar with the work on the ResonanceRoom and Mindscapes. These are not things you can set up
in a year. One key concern with respect to the neighbourhood projects was that the exchange be geared for the longrun, despite the structures existing in an institution without
a collection and a fixed team, relying on temporary personnel. Independent from this structure I was looking to create
continuity and give the neighbourhood the feeling that the
Gropius Bau is their institution, and that they can come here
and belong. We took a huge step forward with this project.
But it will take years before the point comes when these ties

The Museum as a Living Organism

36

have an impact at the very heart of the institution. I believethat it is important for this inner rootedness to create aconnection outward. And Mindscapes enabled this deepening and gave us the opportunity to have much more time
for and invest greater resources on working on the project.
For me it was important that the neighbourhood projects
are not merely a programme accompanying an exhibition
but that they actually create a parallel structure capableof docking onto everything, and that one considers how
themes broached and discussed can also be reflected in
the institution and help define the actual content of a programme.
I believe that only then can we have success with ourartistic programme – when we learn to appropriately welcome our visitors and to resonate with whom we are welcoming. I think that you can only be a host when you havea public that allows you to be hospitable. This is a processthat museums, in different forms and tempos, have been
attempting to realise since the 1960s. But I believe thatwe’ve moved on from the idea of entertainment prevalent in the 1990s, at least as it was in Germany, and are
now concerned with deeper layers of connecting. I believe
that, in the twenty-first century, an institution needs to bea place that different communities can use as a platform,
and where we learn from our public. This, for me, is the maintask facing institutions at the moment. By public, I mean
perhaps rather a community that helps one understandhow exchange can take place: an interaction inspired bya concrete programme. In the spirit of Édouard Glissant,I propose an archipelagic thinking and way of working, one
in which we are not insular and do not take the continent as
the starting point, but openly say that we as an institution
need to operate as an entity willing to constantly learn.

Stretching, Disturbing,
Expanding the Museum

37

Diana Mammana and Margareta von Oswald
in conversation with Beatrice von Bismarck
Margareta von Oswald:
In our practice we’re trying to find out how far participative
research can be understood as a curatorial practice. Whichparameters are necessary for such an approach? Where do
the possibilities lie and where are the limits? Where would
you see this form of work in a history of (institutional) practices and position it in the curatorial field? And which definition of the curatorial is required?
Beatrice von Bismarck:
I understand the curatorial as a field in which people andthings come together in public. All the practices called into
action to achieve this are to be understood as part of thecuratorial, without there being any need, however, to set out
at the beginning which professional role carries out thesepractices. In this respect, an institution like the Gropius Bau
faces the challenge of deciding beforehand how to whom it
wishes to assign these different tasks and roles, and what
this means for formulating professional positions. In turn,
institutional hierarchies tie into this.
Within the overall structure, the degree of involvement
in elaborating a specific interest needs to be negotiated.
I would avoid drawing a clear line between mediation andcuration, and I would not distinguish between academic
and curatorial research. I prefer to start from the assumption that these are forms of practice which, against thebackground of one’s own knowledge and methodology,
are geared to interact in synergy. The movement towards
learning, meaning and production is a shared undertaking.
It’s not about learning from but rather with someone else.
This is why I regard the distinction between artists andStretching, Disturbing, Expanding the Museum

38

curators to be unproductive, ditto the distinction between
mediators and curators. Rather, I advocate looking at thepractice itself in detail. How does the respective practicedefine itself in its objectives, its methodology and its sociality, precisely in coactive interactions with other contributors?
Diana Mammana:
Certain ways of understanding the curatorial nonethelessresist this. In (art) institutions, mediation continues to beisolated or separated off, particularly spatially. Time andagain the question is asked: where is the mediation to takeplace?
Margareta von Oswald:
Picking up this point, I’m interested in why there continues
to be such strong resistance in the curatorial field, evenwhen the institution supports thinking about these practices in combination. Firmly entrenched traditional practices continue, mediation is not at the centre of curatorial
work and hierarchisations persist.
Beatrice von Bismarck:
This has a lot to do with the logic of the field, which Pierre
Bourdieu identifies as using different types of capital tobuild a position, in order to take part in the meaning production within the field. As a consequence, this means playing
a part in the formulation of the rules and positions in thefield, and the relations amongst them. The larger the (art)institution, the more complicated it is to make long-practised roles porous again, to redefine them, or to place themin new relationships to one another, because accomplishing
one’s own work allows little time for critical self-reflection
on one’s position or the relationships it then manifests.

Stretching, Disturbing, Expanding the Museum

39

When we look back at the history of art institutions and theidea of mediation, while from the 1970s this idea has gained
its own intrinsic value, in many institutions this was initiallyseen more as an additional track accompanying museum
work rather than an integrated expansion of the curatorial.
The smaller an institution is, the greater the possibility – if
not the necessity – to reformulate this relationship between
mediating and curating, and hence to reflect on what is tobe achieved with which means.
The decisive question for me in this context is for whomor for what the positions are taken. Here I would direct attention to the institutional critique as practised by artists. Almost
thirty years ago the project Services posed questions like: doartistic positions which define themselves as project-oriented
and critical of institutions actually address their artistic peergroup with their critical approaches? Are they addressing one
specific public or several different ones? Are they addressing
the various people they have worked with within an institution?
Are they addressing the institution itself and its conditions? I
understand this form of awareness to be the prerequisite fordeveloping one’s own role. In this context, I consider the term
unglamourous tasks coined by Nora Sternfeld to be fruitfulfor reflecting on the existing status of mediation practices inpublic art institutions and its institutional hierarchisation.
Furthermore, I consider it to be a notable feature of yourproject that you operate like a kind of sub-institution. You
can take on or define other roles for yourselves and switch
between these roles. From my perspective, such an institutional sub-unit furnishes the possibility to set itself in acommenting relationship to the hosting institution. On the
one hand, it can introduce, mirror and change conditions,which then function as a kind of counter-bearing instance,a heterotopia, to the prevailing ones. On the other hand, it
presents a model of instituting practice which articulates

Stretching, Disturbing, Expanding the Museum

40

processuality anew. Here I see a perspective that permits
us to move away from designating this method to a professionally prescribed role, appreciating it instead as one thathas the same validity as all the other methods operating in
the curatorial field.
Diana Mammana:
I find the concept of sub-institution interesting in relation
to our working practice. Over the course of our projects,
I’ve often asked myself how we operate in this institutional
construct and how we can shift between our positions.
Institutional limits were mostly evident when the legitimisation and professionalisation of knowledge was at stake – so,too, in terms of the place given to the produced knowledge
within the institution.
Beatrice von Bismarck:
When I speak of a sub-institution I mean an instituting practice within the institution, one that does not have to get
involved with the fixed institutional conditions and framings
but, in articulating its relationship to them, can remain relational- and process-oriented. I would thus be interested tofind out what the long-term aspects of your project could
be under these conditions, in which the long-term charactermight be considered ambivalent at the very least.
Margareta von Oswald:
We feel the long term to be ambivalent as well. I think it isimportant to create a long-term orientation for a practicelike ours within the institution, one that enables flexible
responses, does not become permanent and is not obligatorily anchored in a department. The main task of thispractice would be to transport questions raised within theinstitution outwards – and vice versa. It becomes consoli-

Stretching, Disturbing, Expanding the Museum

41

dated across all departments and manifests in a stretching
movement.
Diana Mammana:
Our work causes confusion and insecurity with respect toprofessional positions, both inside and outside the institution. Long-practised institutional logic is disturbed. And
I think it’s productive to be a disturbing factor here. The
longer these blank positions are addressed through disturbance, the more long-term orientation is generated.
The long term does not thus manifest in the formulated
projects, but in the form of practice itself. Moreover, thelong term means that people active in fully different working fields know about the possibility or the availability of
the Gropius Bau. They know that it is a place where theirown working field can be expanded or one that can be integrated into their own work.
Beatrice von Bismarck:
It is interesting that you understand your work as a disturbing factor. From my point of view, it is akin to a productive
transversal impulse, in the sense of expanding the museum
space. It is an attempt to become active at the very boundary of the architectural, social, aesthetic museum space,and explore whether reciprocal formats of exchange can beestablished on the way, and which possibilities of changethen emerge for the relationship between the museum’s
inside and outside. How different discipline-specific methods can be made operative as well as be introduced with
their respective forms of knowledge, into the museum andexhibition work, which is usually accentuated somewhat
differently. For me, it is not so much a disturbing as an
expanding movement, one that pulsates through the different forms of practice. But at the same time, I can appreciateStretching, Disturbing, Expanding the Museum

42

that you understand the practice form itself as a long-term
perspective.
Diana Mammana:
An exhibition is curated to generate visibility for artistic
positions. We work with the same method. The specificcontents are not given by artworks, however, but are knowledge and experiences drawn from local contexts. The process of translating these into the institution thus always
also entails questions of visibility and their negotiation in
specific hospitable situations.
Beatrice von Bismarck:
Here you’re touching upon the question of the hospitablein relation to the neighbourly. The decisive feature of thehospitable is that it possesses a form of reciprocity andthat in this reciprocity the guest can become the host, andvice versa. The prerequisite for this is a form of mutual recognition of a status that is thought of as changeable andtemporary and that promises safety. In exhibition practicethis is very much a question debated time and again in viewof inclusions and exclusions as well as resources: how andby whom are the resources to be distributed which are atstake here, namely place, space and time, visibility, recognition? Who gets to benefit, who wants to benefit, or who
rejects what is offered?
If I understand correctly, your projects are about a formof expanded participative exchange, one in which institutions are supposed to be able to function as hospitable
places, including in a political sense. The challenge is tomaintain a form of reciprocity contrary to the unwritten andinvisible institutional barriers.

Stretching, Disturbing, Expanding the Museum

43

Margareta von Oswald:
One main question in our work relates to translating ortransferring knowledge into the institution. How is theexchange to be moderated and controlled, particularly
when it concerns the museum as a place of democratic
participation? Ethnographic approaches have proven especially suitable in our practice, firstly in view of the research
design and ethic, and secondly in dealing with the research
data.
Beatrice von Bismarck:
It is also part of the curatorial hospitality dispositif to work
under rules which one has not set as guests. As guests, toenter the host’s place means to encounter other – more orless familiar – rules and conditions and to find ways of dealing with them. Because the rules and conditions are in partinternalised, it cannot be assumed that everyone involvedin the hospitable situation knows them beforehand. Rather,a quite essential part of the hospitable resides in a form of
mutual respect towards the respective conditions, thosebrought along and those already existing, in order to negotiate about how the available resources are to be shared out.
The question of visibility is an important point here
because visibility as such has no intrinsically positive value.
The curatorial hospitality dispositif entails dealing responsibly with the possible visibilities it offers, so as not to pervert
them by allowing for forms of vulnerability, abandonment
to penetrating gazes and public exposure.
What’s more, the risk – and you’ve mentioned it yourself
in the introduction – is that processes of making visible harbour the possibility of paternalism, when the institution or
the persons acting within the institution unilaterally assume
the right to define what is safe or not safe, and what is guaranteed within this safety and what is not. The elaboration

Stretching, Disturbing, Expanding the Museum

44

of a safety that mediates and is capable of keeping in view
all the varying interests is decisive for any work in art institutions that consider themselves welcoming. Besides theintra-institutional perspective, which we’ve already spoken
about, with your project you’re also asking about the concerns and interests of the invited. About what makes the
Gropius Bau appear to be a place that is more conducive
and appropriate than an office to pose specific socially relevant questions and to establish contact with people whoare vitally interested in these questions.
Diana Mammana:
Ideally, the question of the interests of the invited consistently determines the orientation of curatorial work, and ourwork was indeed influenced productively. Building on thisidea, I’d like to ask what you would see as the mission of apublic art institution currently.
Beatrice von Bismarck:
For institutions financed by the public purse I currently consider those practice forms to be most productive which use
the specific possibilities of art and culture institutions toinitiate an exchange about socially relevant problems, onethat factors in more strongly the everyday world and reciprocally contextualises local and transregional perspectives.

Stretching, Disturbing, Expanding the Museum

Draxler, Helmut and Andrea Fraser
1996: Services – Ein Vorschlag
für eine Ausstellung und eineDis­kussionsthema/Services – A
Proposal for an Exhibition anda Topic of Discussion. In: Beatrice
von Bismarck, Diethelm Stoller
and Ulf Wuggenig (eds.): GamesFights Collaborations. Das Spielvon Grenze und Überschreitung.
Kunst und Cultural Studies inden 90er Jahren. Ostfildern-Ruit:
Hatje-Cantz.

45

Golo Stone, Eric (ed.) 2021: Services Working Group, Kunstraum of
the University of Lüneburg. 22–23
January 1994. Vancouver: Fillip
Editions.
Sternfeld, Nora 2010: Unglamorous
Tasks: What Can Education Learn
from its Political Traditions? e-flux
journal, issue 14.

The Resonance Room47

A section of the exhibition YOYI! Care, Repair, Heal heldin the Gropius Bau (September 2022 to January 2023), theResonance Room collected and shared local knowledge
and experiences of mental health in Berlin. The broader
cooperation between Mindscapes and the Gropius Bau
centred around a major question: how can an art institution
contribute to changing our perceptions and understandingof health issues? Between September 2021 and December
2022, a series of projects was developed to this end. These
projects questioned the understanding of and approach tomental health in Berlin: how do individual health and society
interact? How does history affect the present? Which forms
of welfare and care, solidarity and community, are createdand practised in urban society?
As a gathering place, the Resonance Room initiateddialogue between these different voices from science,
culture, civil society, and politics in Berlin. The ResonanceRoom combined the research approach of Mindscapes with
Neighbourhood Exchange, a Gropius Bau mediation projectin place since 2020. The conception and realisation of the
projects were shaped in equal measure by these research
and mediation approaches. As both a physical and digital
location in the museum, the Resonance Room collected different forms of knowledge about mental health. Admission
was free of charge. The projects are described hereafter.

The Resonance Room48

The Resonance Room49

LIBRARYMENTAL HEALTH IN KREUZBERG

Concept:
Diana Mammana, Margareta von Oswald

Concept:
Diana Mammana, Lea Hartung, Margareta von Oswald

Participating persons:Aurélien Calpas, Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz,
Brook Andrew, Christina Scheib, Clare Molloy,
Kader Attia, Katharina Küster, Natasha Ginwala,
SERAFINE1369, Stephanie Rosenthal

Conversation partners:
David Buteyn, Dilay Dagdelen, Deiara Kouto, Kerstin Kühn,
Mary Buteyn, Maryna Markova, Murat Dogan,Remzi Uyguner, Tim Ünsal, Ulrike Koch, Veit Hannemann,Željko Ristič

On the basis of selected publications, the Resonance Roomlibrary provided insights into the conceptual foundations
underpinning the curatorial work of YOYI! Care, Repair,Heal. The curators suggested publications, while works bycurators, artists and theorists who took part in the exhibition and the accompanying discourse programme werealso included.

Personal and professional experiences on mental healthfrom participants located in the neighbourhood aroundthe Gropius Bau were exchanged and collected at regularmeetings held over several months. The organisations set
the respective topics. The series of conversations soughtto establish a continuous dialogue on strategies, practices
and experiences relating to mental health in Kreuzberg
and the everyday work of social workers in the neighbourhood. A zine grew out of the conversations, which was thenincluded in the library and was available to read in the Resonance Room.

The Resonance Room50

VISUAL RESEARCH ON MENTAL HEALTH IN BERLIN
Concept and interviews:
Margareta von Oswald, Nassim Mehran
Advisory board:
Kim Wichera, Lee Modupeh Anansi Freeman, Ulrike Kluge
Filming and editing:
Jan Stöckel
Production management:
Franziska Anastasia Lentes
Conversation partners:
Alina Georgescu, Andreas Heinz, Arno Deister,Carolin Ochs, Felicia Boma Lazaridou, Inga Zimprich,Julia Bonn, Kader Attia, Katrin Dinges, Kim Wichera,
Kirsten Schubert, Lee Modupeh Anansi Freeman,
Mandu dos Santos Pinto, Mazda Adli, Michael Bosnjak,
Niloufar Tajeri, Norma Kusserow, Pasquale Virginie Rotter,
Samie Blasingame, Tzoa, Ulrike Hamann, Ulrike Kluge,
Yasmin Merei
The visual research looked at how mental health is understood and dealt with, drawing on conversations with twenty-­
three Berliners. The complex relationships between mental
health and structural inequality in Berlin were of particularinterest: how do current and historical experiences of exclusion, conflict and division shape the mental health of Berliners? Consideration was also given to experiences from theother side of the spectrum. What kind of effect do examples
of solidarity and collectiveness have? What possibilities for
dealing and engaging with mental health can be concep-

The Resonance Room

51

tualised and practised through various forms of treatment
and care? Part of the research results were shown as a filmin the Resonance Room. The entire material is accessible
in an online film archive.
https://berliner-gespraeche.com/

The Resonance Room52

The Resonance Room

53

MUSEUMS AS PLACES OF HOSPITALITY

RADIO SHOW INTIMATE CONNECTIONS

Concept:
Diana Mammana, Margareta von Oswald

Concept:
Carl Luis Lange, Margareta von Oswald

Cooperation partner:Yeşil Çember ökologisch interkulturell

Cooperation partner:
Cashmere Radio

Participating persons:
Astrid Dulich, Aynur Türkel, Ayse Midikogl,
Carl Luis Lange, Cem Taşdelen, Cigdem Eroglu,
Denise Bade, Esengül Calışkan, Filiz Behrendt,
Gülizar Ince, Hatice Deniz, hn. lyonga, Kadriye Sezenoglu,
Maryna Markova, Michael Westrich, Meral Cendal,
Mine Senol, Nejla Yologlu, Nurhayat Tazegül,
Sevgi Erkabalci, Sevil Rüzgar, Susanne Da-Costa-Badu

Graphics and printings:
Carl Luis Lange, Kopierwerkstatt Cashmere Radio,
DJ Shlucht

The exchange with Kreuzberg associations and organisations was at the centre of conversations about hospitality. Conceptually, we were accompanied by the questionof how museums can become hospitable places and therole one’s own wellbeing plays in this. The participants fromthe neighbourhood around the Gropius Bau were actively
involved in producing the material basis of the Resonance
Room, for example the pottered teacups, the homegrown
herbal tea and the handsewn cushions. In this way personalconnections were created between the museum and theeveryday worlds of the participants.

What does music do to our body and mind? The radio show
Intimate Connections engaged with music’s capacity tohelp us cope and develop in manifold ways. Sometimes feelings can’t be put into words. This is perhaps where musicenters, helping to process emotions in an immediate andembodied way. In their broadcasts, various musicians andradio practitioners delved into specific emotional states,
their political textures and their interwoven experiences.
Intimate Connections was available for listening in the Resonance Room and was presented at a Listening Session in
the Gropius Bau’s atrium.

Participating persons:
Bitsy Knox, Edna Bonhomme, Juba, KitKat, KMRU &Ross Alexander, Lou Drago & Ligovskoï, Michael Makembe& Injonge Karangwa, Nikolas Brummer, Vera Dvale

https://cashmereradio.com/shows/intimate-connections/

The Resonance Room54

STUDENT RESEARCH ON THE HISTORIES ANDPRESENTS OF THE GROPIUS BAU
Concept:
Diana Mammana, Margareta von Oswald
Participating persons:
Alissa Dovgucic, Carl Luis Lange, Christin Haubenreißer,
Emma Jelinski, Frederike Nolte, Lars Holdgate,
Mia vom Bruch, Monique Machicao y Priemer Ferrufino
While research into the history of the Gropius Bau has
remained fragmentary to the present day, it is a location
where the entanglement of violent regimes of the twentiethcentury in Germany is tangible: colonial rule, the National
Socialist regime, and the GDR state have all left their mark.
An interdisciplinary group of students from various Berlin
universities researched these historical strands of the
Gropius Bau, talking with historians and contemporary
witnesses as well as researching the archives. The student
research was accompanied by considerations on how critical institution history can be appraised in a way that enables participation and mediation services, and how current
problems decisively shape this form of historiography. The
results of the research were then used for an audio walkthat could be heard in the Resonance Room and was activated by the students when conducting live tours.

Berlin
Conversations
on Mental
HealthAccess79

hn. lyonga, Kerstin Kühn, Veit Hannemann, Željko Ristič
Veit Hannemann:
I always have difficulty selecting what I can really open up tointensively. I rarely find orientation in a museum. Perhaps in
future there has to be sociocultural work in museums whichbuilds a bridge outward, for example to social institutions.
Kerstin Kühn:
We work a lot with migrants, and we work with the conceptof simple German. Tours in simple German would facilitate
access.
Željko Ristič:
The Gropius Bau is located in one of Berlin’s most sociallydeprived areas; right in the middle stands this palace ofhigh culture. The building itself is enough to trigger a senseof exclusion. Of course, it’s easier to get access if there’s
relations work going on. When there’s contact to a person
whom you value. Then you immediately also have a positive association to the building. You feel much more relaxedabout going there. You’re glad when you see the people,
and then people like to go there. For how long that could bemaintained is something that still needs to be developed.
Kerstin Kühn:
I believe the atrium is a start to dismantling barriers. But
when I’m immediately blocked again by security personnel,
then this low threshold is withdrawn.
hn. lyonga:
Can the idea of a resonance room be looked at as something expansive, as meaning a space that exists beyond its
own limits, as a space that shifts in meaning and function

Access80

depending on who is in it? Against a limited concept of aroom of resonance as something that follows after the mainshow and remains somewhat supplementary, my question
for testing such a space would be: can it hold things thatare both soft and dense? Things that we are all part of, likethe earth, that we shall all return to, or the inequality weface every day but also the warm feelings we have for ourfriends and kin; what does that mean to engage with it insuch a space?
Beginning from our gardening practice, how can soil
serve as a starting point, as something that can be looked
at as a medium everyone understands. How can the soil
become the language, a base language we all understandto the core?
My thoughts about a potential room of resonance boil
down to one single line: a soft space. That is, a place, aroom, or an idea of a space, etc. that is not an afterthought,
an appetizer, or an around-the-corner space, but an idea ofa room that stands and or exists on its own. A place wherefear can be deconstructed; it is a space where vulnerability
is at the centre; where collective desires can be shared,
expounded upon, and developed further; where the collective is at the centre; it is a space that goes beyond itself toinclude the voices of the communities around it not by way
of extraction and/or exploitation but in a manner that truly
considers the efforts of the communities around it as valuable, important and necessary. It is a place where everyone
is at the table, where we are equal.
Veit Hannemann:
The Resonance Room in the Gropius Bau has a very sobering effect on me. I actually feel the need to somehow first
immerse myself for a while and reflect or get a sense forwhat the room triggers in me. Or I want to strike up a con-Access81

versation with others, experience a shared resonance, orenter into resonance with someone about something I’ve
just experienced here. That raises for me the question of
how this can be made possible or facilitated.
Željko Ristič:
I felt lost in the Resonance Room because it was so cold.
It was too full and yet not personal. Although I was there, I
was looking for someone where I could get a hold and didn’t
find anything that I felt an association with, or something
where I could recognise myself.
Kerstin Kühn:
I think that the serving of the herbal tea was a good meeting
point.

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after the song

84

Nikolas Brummer… and actually, all of this started that one time I went on atrip and my smartphone broke and for two weeks I had nodevice to listen to music. There was something strangely
unnerving about this situation, mentally and physically, andthat demonstrated once more how much I was affected byalways having music at hand. I decided to dedicate myself
to maintaining a musical archive and became increasingly
obsessed with the idea of the musical assemblage in theform of playlists, and specifically what those could inflict on
my mind. To give you an example: I generally differentiate
between playlists of “feelings” and playlists of “ambience”.
And as the name already suggests, the “feelings” categorycontains a large number of playlists each of which touchupon a particular feeling: sadness, grief, panic, bliss, excitement, anger, anguish and so on, literally any type of feelingyou could imagine. Each playlist in that category aims toboil it down to that specific feeling, and to provide songs
that shelter, power and support that respective emotion.
They are concerned with a type of emotionality that is introspective, personal, which is being determined by the direction it is pointed at; those playlists are geared inside. They
are supposed to offer a transitory and conscious encounter
with your own emotionality, which makes the feeling direct,
impulsive and modifiable.
I want to make clear how I mean this, and how this might
deviate from other forms of playlists which are attached toother forms of emotionality. For example, the “ambience”
folder discusses the understanding of music as ambience,
meaning something that goes well with something, something that produces a backdrop or enhances somethingthat is already there, but without dominating it. It’s a placement of music that makes it coexist with the furniture ofafter the song85

a room, the light, the smells, the sounds surrounding you.
While surely you could concentrate on all of these different
elements separately, they have an impact on you directly
without a conscious recognition of that impact. In thisway, ambience shapes the emotive architecture of a room,
which is formulated in the form of a “mood”. That is also
how “ambience” differentiates from “feelings”. Ambienceaims to establish a sustained emotional state, instead of
only powering a transitory affect.
Apart from the mere idea of being a backdrop, ambience can be used to subliminally enhance a certain typeof activity. An increasingly popular field of ambience playlists is music that enhances your productivity and concentration, like music for the workplace or any other form ofworking situation. In the history of electronic music production, there are numerous examples of how specificallythis conception of music bore possibilities for commercialisation – one of the most prominent examples being
American background music brand Muzak that provided
soundtracks to public spaces and retail situations, and lateron the workplace. In a contemporary setting, what mightcome to mind are alluring playlist titles such as “Chill Beats
To Think To”. And what could fit better as a backdrop to asituation of labour than those things that fall into the category one could define as “chill”. “Chill” music is ideal forthe background because it does not only fill silence while
being unobtrusive, it also renders a mellow and comfortable
atmosphere within any form of working environment thatmight otherwise be straining or even damaging. In this case,the ambience takes the form of aid, of self-nurture, which
is utilised to alleviate an uncomfortable or unpleasant situation, undermining the efforts of changing the situation in
the first place.

after the song86

As you can see here, both the use of “feelings” and“ambience” playlists is first and foremost utilitarian. By
making these playlists, ultimately, I am producing some
sort of subliminal affect and emotion that can be applied
at any given moment. And through streaming platforms andmusic apps, the mere availability of all of this music makes
it possible that it can take up such a central position in how
we regulate our emotions. It becomes a ubiquitous resource
and an inexhaustible tool in emotional and psychologicalmanagement…

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Approach88

Diana Mammana, Maryna Markova, Remzi Uyguner,Željko Ristič
Diana Mammana:
When people don’t feel welcome in an (art) institution,then they’re not even there, otherwise they’d feel welcome.
Before all else, we have to try and understand why thesepeople stay away, address and discuss this absence, andfind a way of dealing with it. The next step would then be to
ask why we aren’t reaching them, or conversely, why aren’t
they reaching us.
Remzi Uyguner :We can’t be open around the clock at the TBB-Turkish Federation in Berlin-Brandenburg. But the people seeking ouradvice can’t always come to us with their problems duringopening hours, and that’s quite understandable. They ring
the bell and say, to give a specific example: “I’m facing
deportation the day after tomorrow.” That’s the kind of situation regulations create. Sometimes I can’t give the advice
I’d like to because of the structures in place. People arethen disappointed and irritated. For each individual case wetry to explore all the options afforded by antidiscrimination
work. For me, everything that isn’t illegal is doable.
Željko Ristič:
It’s not about just simply turning up to get into contact withus, the team of outreach.berlin. If you take community work
seriously, this means going to where you have to. In otherwords, don’t just send off emails but meet the people on
the street and build up a network. At some point, people
simply know about you. This is how first contact happens.
The youths have our mobile numbers and call us. Then wemeet up. Approaching them directly – no one does that. If

Approach89

I go up to a kid as a social worker and say, “Hey, you need
any help?”, the answer is “Piss off”. It is often rather hectic
and there isn’t a place to retreat to, where you could talk
one-on-one. That doesn’t work all that well at our location.
Maryna Markova:
At the Kurdish parents’ association, Yekmal e.V., we also discuss the topic of available space and orientation a lot. We
try to put ourselves in the situation of a Kurdish-speaking
woman who has just arrived with her child and stands infront of a closed door, and doesn’t know which buzzer sheshould press, or how she can make contact with us. We try
to make sure there are different possibilities to get someorientation.
Željko Ristič :Anyone who knows how to use a Google search engine
already has a giant advantage. They’re the ones who candock in somewhere.

Assistance90

Carolin Ochs
We who work in the social field, who work with administrative bodies, observe that this whole system of applications and loopholes in social legislation is not beneficial
for mental health; not in any way whatsoever. When people
have to apply for benefits, then the whole thing is an arduous administrative process – make applications, again andagain new documents need to be submitted – it’s a hugesource of frustration. Many people don’t even begin to try,or they just give up, and then they’re left standing there
emptyhanded.
Mental health could actually be supported if the administrative bodies would work as they should. This means
applying currently valid laws and not demanding an absurd
number of documents which aren’t even necessary todemonstrate the facts of the situation. A statutory declaration is often enough.
It’s problematic that in a country like Germany people
need the help of social workers to be able to assert theirrights and push through their claims. The threshold foraccessing rights actually needs to be low. If a person isin need, then they should be able to go to the respective
office and get assistance there. But often it doesn’t work
like that, and people require lots of support from social
workers, who first have to explain the principles of social
rights and how to access them. This is necessary so that theapplicant knows which steps and documents are important,and also what the authorities are permitted to demand fromthem and what not.

At Work91

Diana Mammana, Kerstin Kühn, Lea Hartung,Margareta von Oswald, Mary Buteyn, Maryna Markova,
Tim Ünsal, Remzi Uyguner, Željko Ristič
An office needs to be fitted out in a way that you feel
comfortable in it. So that you like to spend time at yourworkplace. Perhaps one can also listen to a bit of music.
Perhaps it’s about the space and, at the same time, about
the senses, something that goes through the body. Whensomething’s fun, then the stress is positive. It’s OK whenwork is stressful. As said, in that case you have to accept
that you can only take in the late movie. It’s the degree ofwork and how it is organised. That’s what’s key. Perhaps
there’s more to it than just self-determination. It’s the hierarchies which are disturbing, and how they are misused.
This leads to inner stress. At the same time, work is alsomeaningful. The difference between private life and workoften gets blurred. How can you keep it up? Our society
suffers because of stress, simply because we work so much.
Work is too much about earning money, and yet at the sametime we define ourselves through our work. Once, what we
do was called social work. Now social work is a subject tobe studied. But if it requires study, then why are you calleda worker when you’re finished? These vague definitions may
be attractive for your own work practice, but on the other
hand it’s difficult when there aren’t any appropriate terms
to designate your work. After all, work is also life and all that,and then there isn’t a word for it. It also has a bit to do withrecognition. In our work we have to be resilient; a lot of it’s
about being on the move, there’s turmoil to deal with andthere’s a need to offer stability. You have to be able to put
things down, let contradictions be, and allow yourself to be
overwhelmed.

Being Moved

92

Priya Basil“As you get older, you have to learn to be happy and sad at
the same time,” a friend said to me, years ago. I had been
bewailing a misfortune, lamenting that it was shadowing
some simultaneous good fortune, stifling my joy.
Some insights anchor in you quietly, the seeming stillness belying their power. I passed on the happy-sad wisdom
now and then, though I didn’t practise it as I would wish; thedarker things often occupy more of me, regardless of thequality of light.
As Mindscapes International Writer in Residence, I was
invited to immerse in the topic of mental health and work
towards a book, An Atlas of Mental Health, by seeking out
perspectives overlooked or marginalised by the dominant,Western, biomedical system. I wasn’t sure what this could
mean. I was drawn to the expansiveness of the notion
atlas, yet wary because I associated it with conquest – inthe sense that it presents things as fixed-complete-concluded. And wasn’t mental health unsettled terrain exemplar? Found only for fleeting moments, then gone, thenfound (or created? granted? achieved? imagined?), thengone, then –I realized early on that everything – foodhistorylovetrees­
community – can affect mental health – childhoodjobfamilysocialnormslegalrightsanimalsrelationships – yet, as I
travelled across the globe talking to different people about
the topic – culturesleepcoloursdrugspolitics – the sense of
everything went on extending – dreamsplantswaterwordsdancetouchborders. This opened sparkling, promisingvistas, but to speak of mental health, it turned out, is also – if
not more so – to speak of mental ill-health, panoramas ofpain.

Being Moved93

When I asked people who were not healthcare professionals how they understood the notion of mental health,they immediately began to describe problems. Was I going
about this the wrong way? Would the atlas, I began to worry,
just comprise sceneries of suffering?
Who decides how mental health looks-feels-speaks?
And who best knows how to treat, to restore it? Such questions induce a sense of vertigo, for they cause the groundfrom which you’re used to thinking-judging-knowing to
tremble, even collapse. In the course of my Mindscapes
work, I’ve often thought of how believers in a flat earth musthave felt on being told the earth was spherical. How to let goof flat-person theories around mental health and envisageinterdependent, wholesome, cosmic maps of being?
Midway through a workshop in Namibia, I was compelled to ask – conscious of the false dichotomy, yet hoping
it might illuminate something: How do you understandphysical health? “To feel well, strong, ready for anything,”
one person said, and others immediately agreed. So, howcome health has a positive connotation with physical andnot with mental, I wondered? There was silence. Eventually,a woman in her twenties spoke. “I think, for me, it’s because
I know physical health, I’ve felt what it is to be pain-free in
my body. Whereas I can’t recall any time in my life in the lastyears where I was just happy. There’s always been something wrong as well.”Versions of this outlook recurred in many conversations
I had about mental health. Were more of us now acutely
accustomed to this state in our pandemic-scarred, climate-crisis world? Was such duality an unavoidable affliction of our moment? Such were my thoughts, until anotherof the unacknowledged laureates of lived-experience I met
said, “But isn’t it amazing to feel happy and sad at the sametime?”

Being Moved94

The anchor tugged within me, loosening, rising – there
was the old insight again, gliding across the surface of mymind. Isn’t it amazing? Opposites-contradictions-tensions
can resonate, amplify and extend each other, lend an aching
lustre to living, give a full-bodied flavour to (well)being.
Could part of mental health be a capacity to feel happyand sad and more at the same time? How to cultivate anability to feel everything without (fearing) being felled byfeeling? Such questions, such moments, threw the atlas
into relief; shadows shifted, the ground moved, the horizon
glowed with possibility.
I am still on the Mindscapes journey; the orientation isclearer, but the territory is still taking shape – made fromconstellations of questions, from the intimate tectonics
of personal stories, from elements of serendipity. Feeling,
moving towards an atlas that knows, that shows, its own
limits – but that nevertheless stretches-reaches-touches
spaces beyond its own boundaries.

Belonging95

Christine Wong Yap
What gives you a sense of belonging? Holding deep conversations with friends? Hosting or attending block parties?
Volunteering? Feeling helpful? Could you give others a tasteof these activities of belonging?
As a visual artist and social practitioner, I create projects to engage with and to learn from communities, developing creative ways of gathering and disseminating local
knowledge. I invite participants to engage in self-reflection
or social connection to increase personal agency and emotional intelligence. By representing this research with care
via artmaking, I hope to facilitate an aesthetic process of“each one, teach one” from radical pedagogist Paolo Friere.
Positive psychology influences my work, as does the principle of affirming the positive; I have presented participatory
workshops related to belonging over the past five years in
the United States.
This year, as a Mindscapes Artist in Residence at large, I
conducted community workshops in Berlin, New York, Bangalore and Tokyo. Each workshop generated activity guides
reflecting individual and local experiences of belonging. I
gathered each city’s guides into a four-zine series, resulting
in a multilingual knowledge bank of homegrown activities
and an international zine exchange.
In Berlin, I collaborated with Margareta von Oswald,
the Mindscapes Curatorial Research Fellow and Lea Hartung, project lead of community projects of the Referat
Programm at the Central and State Library Berlin. While
my community engagement process is always collaborative, it’s especially so in different contexts and languages.
Describing belonging is challenging even when everyone
speaks the same language; Lea and Margareta’s roles as
co-facilitators and interpreters were critical.

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The three workshops served ninth-grade students in
Marzahn-Hellersdorf and recent immigrants, seniors andresidents of an intentional community at the community
garden project Nachbarschaftsgarten Kreuzberg and theAmerica Memorial Library. Participants opted to be identified by initials, first names only or full names.
I framed belonging as arising from specific categories
of experience (Brown 2017, Wise 2022): a place where you
feel safe; a ritual that makes you feel connected; a role inwhich you contribute to something; a system or practicethat makes you feel respected; communications whichmake you feel seen and heard; and/or a choice to be true
to yourself. Participants identified a salient experiencethrough brainstorming and self-reflective writing, thendesigned an activity guide using a cartooning process.
These activities testified to how ideas of belonging move
between poles of the individual and social, and the local andBerliner to the more universal, reflecting the complicatednature of belonging itself.
Many adults described sharing meals as fulfilling ways
to socialise. For teenagers, hanging out with friends canalmost be existential by providing affirmation on a deep,
developmental level. Social connection nourishes a senseof wholeness, illustrating humans’ fundamental interdependence.
For recent newcomers, finding a social network is a key
that opens many doors. Srour Alsrour joined a neighbourhood house to learn a common language and got involvedin the community, while Arora advised visiting with friends
met through library programmes. This network is not only
pleasurable, it’s a core aspect of mental health: fostering
an individual’s perspective that they matter.
For others, longevity gives deep roots. For octogenarian
Karl Weiner, the community garden Kolonie am Flughafen

Belonging97

is a multigenerational, interdependent network. Proximity,
shared interests and events are ways to feel seen, heard andknown, which can span years or even decades.
Acts of service connect us, too. Uwe Flamme finds
meaning in volunteering and in contributing skilled woodworking labour to the Nachbarschaftsgarten Kreuzberg. In
this way, belonging means being woven into a social fabric,
where the individual and society are distinguishable yet notdistinct.
Belonging is felt by individuals and is highly subjective. At the same time, belonging can be a prosocial goal
informing the structure of institutions. By creating spaces
for participants to engage in self-reflection, and by distributing their knowledge to wider audiences, we expand thepossibilities for understanding how we create and nourish
belonging for ourselves and others in our everyday lives
and larger systems.
Wise, Susie B. 2022: Design for
Belonging: How to Build Inclusion
and Collaboration in Your Communities. Berkeley: Ten Speed Press.

Brown, Brené 2017: Braving theWilderness. The Quest for True
Belonging and the Courage toStand Alone. New York: Random
House.

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Andreas Heinz, Kim Wichera, Kirsten Schubert,
Michael Bosnjak, Norma Kusserow, Tzoa, Ulrike Kluge
Andreas Heinz:
Germany has a very well-developed health system compared to other European nations or internationally. According to a statistic from The Economist, Germany takes firstplace in Europe. That’s not unwarranted. There’s hardly any
country in the world where health insurers cover the costsof psychotherapy, even if there is heated debate about
whether this is enough. Germany has a very good in-patientsystem, even if this is often criticised as wasting money. But
if you look at the situation in Berlin, then on some wards wehave between ten and thirty percent homeless persons or
patients without a dwelling place. Without in-patient help it
is hardly possible to treat these people. And then there are
the seriously ill who are glad to get away from their families
for a time. There’s an established network of licensed medical and psychotherapy practitioners who say they receive
too little money per patient. But at least they have that!
There are better financed outpatient clinics in the hospitals, and there is an extensive supply of counselling centres, although they’ve been subject to financial cutbacks
in recent decades.
Michael Bosnjak:
At the Robert Koch Institute we’ve been paying attention
to the area of mental health for a number of years now. In
2019 there was the political remit to examine the so-called
Mental Health Surveillance. This meant developing indicators of mental health for Germany which are comparable
internationally. We’ve agreed on about sixty indicators
which may be divided into four areas: firstly, the factors
influencing mental health; secondly, the various states of

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wellbeing – that is, mental health and mental disorders;
thirdly, the structures of care in place; and fourthly, theconsequences of mental health.
In both international and European comparisons, Germany is doing quite well – in the upper third – but at thesame time clearly not on the same level as the Scandinavian
countries. Specifically with respect to providing care services, we’ve observed that the situation is improving overall,and politicians are very attentive to the needs of the population here. Necessary legislation is being put into place andlots of things implemented – for example, psychotherapy asa master’s degree course – which reflect the general goal of
improving care services for the population.
Norma Kusserow:
In the state of Berlin, we had an important development in
the context of mental health. It all started with the de-hospitalisation in 1975. Based on the care side, over the next
few years Berlin specifically looked into how assistanceand support services can be created for people who arementally stressed or ill while not being not located in an
institutional setting. The care system in Berlin is meanwhilevery diverse. Berlin can be extremely proud that we have acare system with many different facets.
At the Berlin Senate Department for Higher Education
and Research, Health, Long-Term Care and Gender Equality we don’t consider individual cases but the collective,
the Berlin population. For us it is important to strengthen
the mental health of the Berlin population, to improveand maintain it. We want to offer a care system oriented
on people with difficult and complex needs. When thesepeople receive help, then a good care system is in place.

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Ulrike Kluge:
A great deal takes place in the field of mental health inBerlin, much of it very good, particularly in relationship tourban community. Nevertheless, my feeling is that it would
be even more beneficial if government and non-government, formal and informal institutions and infrastructures
entered into still more dialogue – to discuss together how
we can make mental health and health care possible foreveryone living in Berlin. I wish there’d be more scope todebate such important questions, for addressing conflicts,
for discussions in professional context, and also with thecivil and urban communities. I believe it is through negotiating conflicts that we often come up with better and more
effective ideas than when we put off the hard work of dealing with tensions and conflicts.
Andreas Heinz:
The system doesn’t act in concert as well as one would
like. All the components have points of friction with one
another – between licensed psychotherapists, hospitals,
drop-in clinics. I think tighter networking and exchange
would be a big plus. In a district like Berlin-Mitte with
300,000 residents there are 200 counselling centres, clinics, doctors’ practices, hospitals, all of them providing different services and yet often they know nothing about eachother. If exchange were easier and one would get financial
support for networking, then this would bring about animmediate improvement to the care system. In addition,
we also need local district health centres which wherever
possible are run by people from the respective community. Consideration would have to be given to how the networking would be organised, how contacts are made, andhow the health information could be passed on, so that

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the diverse counselling centres active in Berlin can be presented already networked to the population.
Kirsten Schubert:
We assume that where they live is important for people. We
are social beings, and we need a community around us. The
place where we live stamps its influence on us. It is important to have a good neighbourhood and good neighbours,a place where one feels at ease, is part of a network, isrecognised and respected, and everyone helps each other.
There is a strong correlation between the structure ofa city district and people’s health. Studies show that healthis poorer when one lives in a part of the city where the general standard of health is poor. How healthy or unhealthy
I am – this depends on my environment and the people I
live with in my neighbourhood. We therefore want to bringchange to our neighbourhood and join together with others
to fight for a good life.
That’s why we’ve founded the neighbourhood healthcentre in Berlin-Neukölln, built up over the last few years
through voluntary work. Here I practise as a family doctor
and a specialist for general medicine. The difference toother medical care is that we offer a variety of consultation
services directly in the centre: social counselling, psychological counselling, nursing and health counselling. We havea paediatrician practice next door, various other counselling services and a cafe that offers a place to meet and
get involved in self-organisation. As a health centre, we are
explicitly anchored in the local district. That means we doneighbourhood work and are very connected to the district
here in Neukölln.

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Ulrike Kluge:
Specific groups of players fiercely criticise many state institutions in the care system because, either in reality or in
the accreditation, they have not fulfilled or could not yet
fulfil the adequate, participatively inclusive expectations
made of care communities. When I, as someone working ina government organisation, take a look at non-state NGOs
and the informal infrastructures, then I always think it would
be great if we could make transparent who is actually pursuing which goals. I’d like to draw up a map, plotted along
the question: what are the needs in this city, in terms ofboth informal and formal services? Which inclusions do wewant? Where do we identify which exclusions? And who canactually do something, who is in a position to fulfil whichneeds? How can a cooperation take place? How can wecreate a tighter interlock between formal and informal infrastructures, and how can everyone name their own limits
within them?
For the psychosocial domain, at the Charité we havesucceeded over the last few years, for example with theCenter ÜBERLEBEN and XENION, to bring together state
and NGO practices and infrastructures as well as theirrespective logics, which were often dichotomous or quasi
oppositional to one another. Today, the Center ÜBER­LEBEN
offers an extensive array of day-clinic services. The necessary beds, allocated as part of the Berlin bed scheme
for Mitte and thus the Charité Psychiatrie am Campus
Mitte – these beds in the Center ÜBERLEBEN are available
for patients who have experienced torture and war. Like
the Charité, the Center ÜBERLEBEN is also in Mitte. It’sa wonderful development, enabling the Center to invoice
day-clinic services to the health insurers. They are thus partof the official standard care financed by the insurers. An

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important step for offering these person groups qualitatively equal care.
Kim Wichera:
I’ve been working since 2005 in the crisis centre Weglaufhaus – Villa Stöckle, a unique institution in Germany where
people can live outside the psychiatry ward and thesystem. Since 2005 I’ve experienced how the social situation has become enormously difficult for many people,
and as a result personal crises have come to a head. The
gap between rich and poor has fanned out and grown. The
housing shortage in Berlin is extreme and this emergency
is compounded by financial, economic hardship.
On the level of social organisations there is no increasein support as a result of these developments – on the contrary, there are cuts. Once there were five crisis centres,
now there are just two; the others had to close because
they couldn’t keep afloat economically due to difficult negotiations with the Berlin Senate and the rising costs. Once
there were sixty to seventy places for the whole of Berlin,
meanwhile it’s a mere thirty-one. For me, there is no doubtthat such centres are absolutely necessary in Berlin.
Another reason why I find this development scary is
because the effectiveness of the methods used in psychiatry are called increasingly into question. At the weekend I
attended the conference of the German Society for Social
Psychiatry. The results of a meta-study were presented, andthey showed that both psychotherapy and psychopharmaceuticals are effective only to about thirty percent. Facedwith such numbers then you could draw the conclusion thatwhat you’re doing as a psychiatrist is not particularly effective. Seventy percent of what’s done in psychiatric wards
has no effect on the experiences and lives of people whoare receiving treatment.

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I wouldn’t conclude from this that the Weglaufhaus
needs to grow, and that lots of Weglaufhaus centres needto exist in Berlin. I’d rather see that there are lots of diverse
answers to the question of how we can actually provide support. We need more openness to try things out and indeed
build on and take seriously the principle that the rights ofthe people who are given support are acknowledged. Thishas to be the basis.
Ulrike Kluge:
Providing care for people who have escaped conflict, been
forced to flee and have experienced migration can’t be considered Berlin-specific, but needs to be seen in a European,in a global context. You don’t have to tell anyone that thehealth care for refugees or migrants is not good. The current asylum and refugee policy hinders the most very basic
things like arriving or getting started in a new environment.
Yesterday at a talk I was asked to give my view on intercultural communication in the context of refugee migrationand mental health. But I can’t do that because it’d be quasi
point number five down the list. Point number one for any
understanding is that the conflicts in the care system often
arise out of how the lived realities of refugees are often
so precarious and problematic that we as professionals
first have to offer very basic support services, for example
enable them to arrive and settle before any kind of work on
their actual psychological state is even possible. Naturally,that often goes hand in hand. But working with vulnerable,socially marginalised groups puts special demands on psychotherapy practice. As therapists we experience our own
impotence when the reality of the lives of refugees is so
precarious that a trauma therapy is not (yet) indicated. Thenfor that to begin a person needs to feel a bit settled in a reasonably stable place; they need to feel that they’ve arrived,

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or can arrive. The situation of the Ukrainian refugees is agood example for what it can mean when the host society
offers spaces helping this sense of arrival. This should bepossible for all refugees. But the reality is very different,
for example for refugees from Afghanistan, or let’s take thesituation of the refugees from the former Yugoslavia in thelast thirty years. Back then, the refugees had to go to theforeigners’ registration office once a month and get theirsuspension of deportation renewed for another month. In
such a precarious reality and a continually recurring set of
exceptional circumstances, in such an ongoing crisis mode,
then a trauma therapeutic intervention can be provided, but
an actual processing of the experiences at a place felt to besafe and protective is hardly possible. It is not the city but
the political and juristic realities at the places of origin andarrival which lead to psychological and emotional stress.
We are still very far away from offering services on an equalbasis which fittingly address the reality, the narrative andthe biographies of the refugees.
Andreas Heinz:
One area needing improvement in Berlin is cultural sensibility. In many districts of Berlin, roughly fifty percent of the
population has a migrant background of some kind. A colleague sounded out the counselling offices in Berlin-Mitte.
Around half of them said they didn’t have a problem with
cultural diversity because there were so few migrants
there. “We haven’t changed anything in our service for thelast thirty years. We speak German, we have almost only
German-­German staff.” There was also neither cultural nor
language diversity amongst the staff, and that’s absurd. In
a district like Mitte where at least fifty percent of residents
have a huge range of different backgrounds and traditions,services actually need to be especially sensitive. One has to

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introduce cultural diversity as an accreditation criterion forlicensed psychotherapists. We have a shortage of trained
therapists who have native language skills or are at least
foreign-language competent. Moreover, health insurers arestill yet to finance services provided by interpreters andcultural mediators.
Tzoa:
Many people come to us in Casa Kuà asking where they
can go, to which therapists or doctors, they ask where
they can feel safe, where is there at least an awareness ofracism or transphobic attitudes. That’s always very difficult.
Naturally there are a couple in Berlin we can recommend,
but they mostly have no places left. I myself don’t know
to whom I should go. There are lists from other organisations here in Berlin with doctors and therapists who arerecommended. But a transphobic therapist can reproduce
racism, for example. If a trans male person feels comfortable with a therapist, that doesn’t mean that a trans female
person feels the same. There are lots of very different
levels and factors which come together. It’s often about
supporting people, showing them how they can navigate
the system – provided that they have access to the healthcare system at all. Many people who come to us have no
documents and are illegalised, and don’t have any access.
There are so many different levels through which people areexcluded from the health system, officially or unofficially.
Unfortunately, we can’t always change the situation. But
we can offer support.

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hn. lyonga, Michael Westrich, Susanne Da-Costa-Badu
hn. lyonga:
When I reflect on the act of planting, I ask myself what do
we want to heal or repair. What do we want to look after?
I ask myself how I can contribute to this in my everyday life.
What could be an act of repair? When I joined the Bauhütte,I felt a strong need to do something, in the true sense of theword. The Bauhütte is a free space right in the middle of thecity, a site where urban nature grows and people can meet,a place where I wanted to think about how we can create
spaces for mutual healing and shared growth. Basically,
I mean allowing coexistence. Side by side, to let different
things exist at one place at the same time. In relation toplants, I wonder how plants themselves could represent us?
Susanne Da-Costa-Badu
We’ve allotted eight patches and all of the gardeners arevery active. Often, they come after work. Some are trying
to grow peas and now they have a patch with wildly rampant flowers. I love looking at it. They bring with them theflowers they have at home, the flowers they may have on
their windowsill and plant them here. Our garden is like atiny oasis in the neighbourhood. People come together who
are growing lonely or don’t have any friends. They always
say they come along because of me or whatever, but I don’tquite believe that. The garden simply creates this cosiness.
Michael Westrich
In permaculture there’s a lot of experimenting around withplants which support each other, and so you plant them
together to enhance growth. This way of cultivating is
inseparably tied to social experiments in communal living
or other visions on how life in a community can work.

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110Feminist Health Care Research Group (Inga Zimprich,Julia Bonn), Niloufar Tajeri, Pasquale Virginie Rotter,
Ulrike Hamann, Ulrike Kluge
Pasquale Virginie Rotter:
Amongst the people I work with I sense a huge longing to
explore and try out what wellbeing is in collective spaces.
In self-created and self-defined spaces, starting fromintersectional experiences of racism, sexism, homo- andtransphobia. In these spaces I know that I’m not alone andI experience that healing is a collective process. I know thisneed from my own biography, which is characterised by thefeeling of having to do everything on my own. To feel anxiety
and shame whenever I show myself to be in crisis and ask
something of others. On top of that, I don’t always get thesignal that I’m welcome as I am. That makes it all the moredifficult to find the help that’s right for me, which would
enable me to come into contact with what really deeply
moves me. Again and again, my experience is that people
are alone with the question: how are you? That makes me
sad because there is a great and obvious longing for contact. A couple of questions are constantly present, like how
can we bravely, how can we once again learn, to face up to
the feeling of isolation? And in a social context that is permanently telling us that there’s no one there when the goinggets tough. How can we muster the courage and take therisk to ask people for support and say: “I need a hug.” And at
the same time sense the anger, and let it rise up, that it’s notseen as something quite natural for marginalised bodies toreceive the support they need? And the anger that we don’t
have the resources to make mental health for everyone anissue and indeed to enable it to happen? How can we be
brave and gentle and angry all at once?

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We’re here in an institutionalised space, the Trans* Inter*
Queer Community & Health Centre Casa Kuà, where people
can dock in. They can meet people who have decided toshow and offer paths to healing, recovery and wellbeing
beyond the established medical system. Here people canmake contact and interact.
It often makes me really angry that the dominant society does not understand that migrant communities, that
communities of people with disabilities, every single marginalised community, have been developing practices,mindsets and forms of healing since time immemorial! I
want this knowledge to be recognised and appreciated.
These communities know what’s best for them, and what
they need. But in comparison to established spaces, to theestablished understandings of illness and health and thedominant therapy forms, these approaches are trivialised.
That’s connected directly to power relations.
I’d really like to talk a lot more with other generations
and also with people from other communities than my own
and find out more about how collective spaces were created and continue to be created. What practices were andare used? What did they undertake to do good in this society? I think we need to ask many more questions, to mirror
these experiences as well as to show that this history andthis knowledge are valuable.
Feminist Health Care Research Group:
Anyone who says that they need therapy is usually in thesituation that they need it immediately. But that’s not possible for most.
In our workshops we make sure that plans are madefor how to best deal with the next crisis, both together andindividually, and to identify what would help. We ask questions like the following: what helped you in previous crises?

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What kind of personal network do you have to turn to? Whatagreements do you want to make with these persons before
the crisis surfaces? What’s good for me when I’m in a crisis
or in an emotionally vulnerable situation? We draw up a listof resources which are available. The goal is to become anexpert in one’s own emotional crisis on the one hand, andto learn from one another on the other.
Niloufar Tajeri:
I was jolted into action against the demolition of the Karstadt department store building on Hermannplatz while onparental leave. I was sitting on the couch breastfeeding mybaby and saw the news that the department store on Hermannplatz was to be demolished. The head of municipal
building and planning in Kreuzberg, Florian Schmidt, hadposted about the project on Facebook – that’s how I foundout. I was shocked by the planned monumental project andhow the historical building of 1929 was to be reconstructed.
Straightaway I knew that this would only serve to further
accelerate the housing squeeze on the longstanding residents in the neighbourhood and lead to large-scale displacement. That was 2019, a time when, thanks to scientificresearch but also the activism around the Fridays for Future
movement, it was becoming increasingly clear to everyone
that the climate catastrophe has been worsening exponentially since the 1970s. It was plain and simple: no, a limit has
to be set, and radically. Tear down a building, build a newone, tear down, build a new one – enough is enough!
I’m an architect and know just how massively construction has changed the surface of the earth – whether
through building giant cities or extracting materials fromthe earth, sand, stone, timber. Huge earth movements havetaken place. For me it was patently obvious that it is simply
absurd to tear down an existing intact building and pretend

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that it was 1929 again and build new cities skyward, obeying
the very same compulsion to grow. I sat there on my couchand got myself into a frenzy. I felt awful. What can you do? I
can’t do anything, absolutely nothing, and I’ve just broughta child into this world. Can we even still live here in ten
years’ time?
I then became active and started contacting people.
Within a few weeks we got the Initiative Hermannplatz up
and running and this was an extremely empowering experience. Suddenly there was a lot of hope. The fears and worries receded into the background and the belief took holdthat we can actually change something, or at least we canchange the discourse or slow down the process.
We’ve succeeded in slowing down the process. Three
years later and the thing’s still yet to be built and it won’t
happen in the next three years either and we’ll keep fighting
to the end that it won’t happen. At the same time, we’re all
too aware that this is only one building site, and it’s different
elsewhere, things just keep on going. What a few people
have established through the force of their will and using
their privileges – the privileges of having time or knowledge – is minute in relationship to what the status quo is
and what the Berlin Senate or federal politics are pressing
ahead with.
This feeling weighs heavily on your shoulders and pulls
you down again, even when small successes are achieved.
And then we get up and start stirring again or attempt
to show alternatives or open up utopias with small, local
things. But in the back of our minds, we know that everyone has to do something if the structural and systematictransformation is to be carried through with which is necessary to halt the climate catastrophe and put an end to
the ever-increasing social inequalities. For a good life, thisneeds to happen on the political level, not just the individual.

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That’s hard to take and difficult to swallow. This consciousness comes to the fore through activist work. It’s constantly
present, there’s no distraction. That’s an enormous strain.
For the last three years we’ve had an information standat Hermannplatz. We provide information and come into
contact with different people; some of them still know
nothing about the plans even today. The reactions areoften severe, very severe when we tell them. Middle-aged
men get teary-eyed and ask themselves what’s going on
and tell us that they haven’t been able to find any work foryears and everywhere they ask for help, they get none. And
then this guy comes along and can turn the whole quarter
upside down. Others say that they’ve noticed for some time
now that there’s politicking targeting them. They’re mostly
people with migrant backgrounds or People of Colour. They
tell us that they think it’s great that we’ve found out what’splanned and make such a racket. But also, that they’re familiar with this situation for decades now and are convincedthat what we’re doing won’t change anything. They say that
we shouldn’t waste our time but look after ourselves andtake care of our families and treat each other kindly.
Cynical activists claim that these people have no idea
how political work functions. I don’t see it that way at all. I
actually think that these people have been doing politicalwork long enough, possibly with another definition of what
it is. It is also political work to care about your community,
to help translate ideas and experiences and thus act in a
way as mediators, or give advice to new arrivals. This has
been commonplace amongst migrant communities for thelast forty, fifty years, not first since 2015. It’s quite simply
a form of political work to be engaged in this way and dothese kinds of things.
Or people do this kind of work for decades and noticethat nothing changes. It doesn’t matter how they work or

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what they do, they are disadvantaged structurally. And in
response, they retreat at some point. People decide not tojoin in, they don’t want to go to the demo only to be the firstto get arrested because of racial profiling. They’d rather justlook after their own family, community, their people.
Here we’re back to the privilege to go out on the street
and network. To work as an activist is different for a woman,a person with migrant background, or a Black person. We
know that certain people are picked out from the masses
at protests. Personally, I was much more concerned after
Hanau to go out somewhere and openly contribute toa discussion. Only later did I realise that it may have hadsomething to do with how, as a person read as a migrantor Muslim, you’re perceived by racists very differently. Racists – that means not only Neo-Nazis and the AfD, but all theracist structures within a society.
We have to keep in mind that Berlin-Neukölln is a district with a very active right-wing scene, which defaces
shops, smashes in windows, commits arson. And exactly
where migrant politicians or leftist activists live. From thevery moment you stand on the stage at a political gathering or openly in the public domain, then you’re simply
aware that you’re now a potential target for racists. Their
networks reach far, into the police force and public authorities. They can find out addresses or where your children
go to school. Or public authorities can give an assessmentof your political work that excludes you from employment
opportunities. The question is therefore not simply if you
want to or have the time to become active, but also what
dangers and risks you’re exposing yourself to. That’s why itdoes make a difference how you are read in society, and it
influences which groups in society can take action to assert
their interests. That some communities retreat is obviously
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cerns and fears are only rarely, and if so, then only withgreat difficulty, made public or visible. This in turn impairs
a potential process that could bring hope, or it diminishes
the feeling of self-empowerment.
Ulrike Hamann:
A lack of participation in society is also expressed througha lack of participation in the housing market. If you’re
homeless or threatened with becoming homeless, thenyou’ve already gone through a number of exclusions. You
no longer feel part of society if you can’t afford your flat in
the neighbourhood where your own networks are. When
you’re forced to take a flat in a part of the city that you
can still afford, then perhaps the threat is racist violence orother dangerous situations. Then the sense of participation
dwindles, and eventually leads to a sense of isolation anda retreat inward.
It is important to recognise that people have succeededin surmounting the boundaries of isolation and fear andhave organised themselves into social groups campaigning
for urban participation and the right to have a just share incity life. They’ve seen one another, made contact with one
another and turned the situation into a collective, structuralproblem, instead of feeling ashamed about their social position. This considerably alters how threat is perceived andfelt. In this struggle, in this joining of forces to fight rising
rents, people come to life again.
We were able to observe this first-hand in the first few
summers while setting up our protest camp at Kottbusser
Tor. Each day women from the neighbourhood who werealready retired came to visit us. They’d put on their makeup
again and dress up to go out instead of sitting in their flats.
And they pointed this out amongst themselves: “Oh, look
who’s coming, she’s nicely spruced up!” These are steps

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out of isolation. Joining forces in the initiative and sharing
problems reignited a zest for life, sparked sheer joy, theaffirmative, and then once more hope.
Of course, there were also moments when hopes weredisappointed or there was scepticism. Or fear of daring tohope again. We know that people affected by forced evictions basically collapsed; indeed, some didn’t survive. Housing is an issue that is so existential that if you lose it, then it
can trigger extreme crashes. At the same time, it can go theother way – the sense of the collective felt in the struggle tostay in your own flat can inject people with new optimism
and a courage to face life.
One of the most important points of our initiative Kotti& Co was that there was a place to meet. The Gecekondu,
the community hut, was built by the neighbourhood and isa place where people can meet and chat with one another.
There’s no specific intention tied to it. There’s no need tocontinuously discuss politics or do something political;
simply to be there is already a political act. As soon as
they go to the hut people are demonstrating a bit against
rising rents, but at the same time they are meeting others,
drinking tea, or having a chat, simply being present andsitting around. This is also a form of collective practice. The
absence of intention is important in this urban space, for itmeans that the space is not associated solely with a placeof protest per se, but lots of other things can happen, likeplaying or listening to music, feeding pigeons, or nibblingon nuts. Non-commercial spaces where one can spend time
without having to pay much money are becoming rarer andrarer in Berlin despite their essential function.
Ulrike Kluge:
I believe we ask the following, quite trivial but essential question all too rarely: how do we really want to liveContact

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together? How do we really want to live? Yesterday I saw theplay Geht es Dir gut? (Are you all right?) by René Pollesch at
the Volksbühne. To me it was about precisely this question:socially we’ve gotten ourselves into a situation where we’regetting more and more distraught and feeling all the more
powerless in the face of supposedly approaching crises
globally and yet we’re still occupied with our own mental
states and the question: how are we doing? And how mindful do we actually have to be with ourselves?
On the one hand, yes, to the point that we can say thatwe’ve developed further. In so-called Western contexts
we’ve developed in the direction of self-reflective relationships. At the same time, this harbours the danger of staying
in the confines of individual introspection. The sociologist
Eva Illouz sees this process critically; I’d say that she identifies something like a psychoanalysing of society. She
asks how psychoanalysis has contributed to how we persist in perpetual self-reflection, which though perhaps also
impedes collective empowerment. As a training psychoanalyst I value the contribution psychoanalysis has made as anenabling practice for individual autonomy. That’s one side.
The other side is that we all experience these crises,
but some only observe or surmise them. Crises, which arecollective, and which we realise can only be addressed collectively and in solidarity. And how do we bring this together
again? This contradiction was very noticeable in relation to
the pandemic, which paralysed us a bit. I notice that since
the pandemic I wish that we had more spaces to reflect
together and pause – to mourn what we have perhaps lost,to ask what we can develop out of this, and how we are toposition ourselves between the individual comfort zones
and social, collective challenges, as individuals, professionals, activists, groups, a collective. To find a productive
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tasks we take on – I find this challenging. I’d say that this is
one reason why – besides individual psychoanalysis – I’ve
always been interested in group analysis as well as the tradition of ethno-psychoanalysis, despite all its problematicconnotations. As individuals, we can only understand our
individual suffering when we take into account collective,social realities and their effects. This understanding is theprerequisite for collective resistance and a means to ensure
its effectiveness.

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Alina Georgescu, Felicia Boma Lazaridou,
Feminist Health Care Research Group (Inga Zimprich,Julia Bonn), Katrin Dinges, Lee Modupeh Anansi Freeman,
Mazda Adli, Pasquale Virginie Rotter, Tzoa
Mazda Adli:
Discrimination is one of the strongest social stressors weknow. Discrimination means social isolation, and this experience is a form of social stress. Social stress is a form ofstress that intensely stimulates our stress hormone system.
It sets our whole organism on red alert and through thiscauses considerable damage to both our mental and physical health in the long run. In experimental psychology, thethreat of social isolation (for example, through exclusion orsocial disparagement) is one of those stressors which mostcertainly stimulates the release of the stress hormone cortisol. Social exclusion therefore also leads to mental illnesses.
Social isolation also leads to early death. It costs us
years of our lives, and indeed more years than obesity,
than smoking, than alcohol abuse. It’s not for nothing thatsocial exclusion and social isolation, in their extreme form,
are used as forms of brutal torture or confinement. Experiences of discrimination make us ill, in a very direct way.
Alina Georgescu:
Our experience at the antidiscrimination network is thatmany people are confronted by doubts as to what’s happened to them, or indeed it’s even disputed. Most of thepeople seeking advice have been discriminated against
several times and for different reasons before they evencome to us. I try to explain that discrimination can cause anarray of traumata, and that you do not have to be left alone
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problem.” “I’m left all on my own with this.” Concepts likemental illness are taboo in this context, they put people off,or they create misunderstandings. Because people havetheir experiences of racism disputed every day – for example, through statements like “don’t take it so personally”,“they don’t mean it like that”, “that’s just your subjective
perception” – then people are traumatised and gaslighted[editors’ note: manipulated by the group and disoriented
and unsettled as a result]. The discriminating party is basically saying that the discriminated person has a problem oreven that they are the problem. Here we speak of a reversalof the abuser-victim logic. Concretely: the discriminating
party attempts to assign responsibility for their actions to
the person discriminated against as a way to clear themselves of any sense of guilt. I think this needs to be statedunequivocally: people who suffer discrimination are traumatised by this blaming. The problem is called racism, sexism,
ableism, anti-queerness, hostility to trans persons, and soon. That’s a structural problem and not an individual one.
I speak about and work based on the principles of careand empowerment. Empowerment means, first and foremost, that people who have experienced discrimination
have come to us and signalled that they are looking for help
or advice. No other person can do this for them. Empowerment means that we are in contact with the person seeking
advice in every step of the consultative process. Empowerment also means supporting people to use the resources
they have or have created themselves to cope in everyday
life. It’s possible to also define racism through the access
BIPoC persons have to social and political resources. If asa minority one is in a position of not having any access to
specific resources, which others do – for example, White
people – then I’d certainly consider that to be racism.

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In Germany, the first resource we look at and with which
we work is the legislation. In particular, we work with thefederal General Act on Equal Treatment (AGG, 2006) andthe Berlin State Law on Anti-Discrimination (LADG, 2020).
These resources, which are made available by society or
more precisely the state, are however the bare minimum
and full of gaps. We can’t and don’t want to then say that
we can’t offer any further support to the person seeking
advice. The question always remains how we can actually
help long term.
Here we then see if there are resources within the community: for example, support of family or friends. But also
what resources exist outside the community, such as information centres. It’s all about giving people the feeling that
there’s something stable to hold on to, to be able to keep
going. That’s one part of the care I try to give.

riences of anti-Black racism was racist. I contradicted. I
silently pondered whether this unwillingness to speak withcis people about trans phobia was in some way cis phobic
but knew that posing this question would be unconstructive and I’d feel even more isolated, unsafe and gaslighted[editors’ note: to be manipulated by the group and feel disoriented and unsettled as a result].
When you are a poor, migrant, not academically educated, dark-skinned, gender-queer person, your concerns
are not taken seriously, not at all. People positioned in dominant structures are very quick to dismiss you and you aretreated as though you are making things up. People treat
you as though you are not doing enough to help yourself
despite the obvious systemic and structural factors thatmake it very difficult to maintain a sense of balance in oneself: a sense of wholeness in oneself.

Lee Modupeh Anansi Freeman:
In the beginning of 2021, I voluntarily entered into a psychiatric inpatient clinic because I was experiencing a psychosis. It was one of the worst decisions of my life. I was in thefacility for three or four days. I realised quite quickly that
this was not the right space for me but I was desperate forhelp. For example, there were daily sessions where we, thepatients, had to sit in a room and speak to each other about
our issues, moderated by a social worker and a nurse.
At my first session I explicitly said that I didn’t feel comfortable in this group dynamic and wasn’t willing to speak
about the things making me anxious. And that applied also
to racism and trans phobia. One of the organisers objected
immediately that their husband is Black and they know allabout racism. I countered that, in my view, this argument
doesn’t count. Another patient was quick to inform me thatmy unwillingness to talk within the group about my expe-

Felicia Boma Lazaridou:
Racism has a special impact on mental health. This is mainly
due to the roles of racism and the history of racism within
mental health science. This not only makes it difficult
to establish trust but also to move past institutional
racism – on a theoretical level, on a practical level, and on
all the various levels within mental health care. There is thisperpetuating cycle. People need services, but they can’t
really use the services. If they use the services, they risk
retraumatisation. Even if they look past that risk and stillengage, there’s actual retraumatisation, and so on and soforth.
Most of my care work is informal. At the moment, I workin community-based mental health, so within civil society.
At the community level, there is a lot of empowerment workthat deals with discrimination and racism. I think what’s
missing now is a focus on clinical mental health: namely

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looking at mental disorders in a clinical sense. That’s where
the stigma work comes in because it’s somehow easier totalk about mental health as something that we all deal withand we all cope with, which is true. But then there are also
individuals who are struggling with mental illness who mayneed medication, who may need long-term psychotherapy
or hospitalisation.
When there’s a severity of symptoms, I always try to
introduce my clients to institutionalised processes, acting
as a mediator for those experiences. Very, very often, myclients come to me with various complaints but are too
afraid of retraumatisation. They are very afraid to go themore traditional mental health route, because they don’t
feel like it’s a place for them. There is a lot of distrust in thecommunities: “Am I going to be seen and treated respectfully or in the same way as everybody else?” “Am I going toface discrimination? Or am I not?” The internal dialogue in
itself can cause a lot of stress. On the other side, community-based mental health services exist and they are growing in number and growing in strength. So, we need moredialogue and more communication between communities
and institutions.
I currently work for the National Racism and Discrimination Monitor, NaDiRa. Our end game is to make changes atthe policy level. We have a strong emphasis on community.
We actively engage in communication with communities
because we see their value; we see that they have beenworking on the issue of racism for decades in Germany andhave gone unnoticed. That is very much part of our strategic development as a team. It is ethically something that isvery important. From my individual perspective, I couldn’t
talk about racism without the contacts and the discussions
that I have on the community level. I rely on the conversations that I have with people to understand my environment.

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Part of my role is to translate community knowledge into aformat that policymakers can read and digest and do something accordingly, as a next step.
Feminist Health Care Research Group:
It’s very important to introduce a quota system to psychotherapy and pay attention to the following: who becomesa therapist in Germany? Who gets an official licence recognised by the health insurers? Have those who get sucha licence worked in the field of class and racist exclusion?
Is there knowledge, education and further training in providing support for trans people? I believe these are things
which are still missing in large sections of the German
health system, especially in the area of emotional health. It’svery important that persons are given the help they needand don’t have to do educational work themselves whenthey’re in therapy. Structural rules are needed to initiatechange here. To be a therapist is a very privileged calling,
and a profession in which one earns a lot of money. Socially,
the profession is also a resource that persons with privileges draw on, use and hold onto. The privileges in thisprivileged profession are clung onto.
Tzoa:
You simply can’t separate Berlin from the German context
and German history. It’s no secret that Germany has a very
racist, antisemitic history and present. Naturally this has ahuge influence on the health of people, particularly thoseaffected by racism, whether day-to-day discrimination,
microaggressions, macroaggressions, physical violence,or verbal abuse. Racism also leads to systematic disadvantages and financial inequalities, and these impact on
people. This discrimination can make people ill, on all levels.

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It would only be logical for people who get ill throughthe effects of the system to go to doctors to regain theirhealth. But the German health system is a mirror of society.
People encounter the same racist structures in the healthsystem. This leads to a situation where some of the people
in my circle don’t even go to the doctor anymore because
they simply don’t want to expose themselves to any further
violence in order to just have access to the health system.
For trans people affected by racism it’s naturally anotherstory because the discrimination can take place on several
levels.
Where should we go? That’s why this place, Casa Kuà, is
so important for us. We can simply be here and can decide
for ourselves: this event is now only for BIPoCs or only fortrans people or only for trans BIPoC people, or only to talkabout specific topics, to exchange views and impressions,and interconnect. Unfortunately, public spaces in the city
are not accessible for everyone, nor are they safe for everyone.
Health is very individualised in Germany. The problem islevelled down to the person. People affected by racism, forexample, are often accused of being the problem. They’reaccused of being too sensitive, they take things too personally, they don’t have any humour. Seeing the problem
as a collective one encompassing the whole of societychanges and deepens the perspective. Then one speaks
about conditions in society across the board, like everyday
discrimination, financial disadvantage, and the isolation andloneliness resulting from them, which has a huge amountto do with a sense of wellbeing. The health system can only
be changed fundamentally through a transformation acrossthe whole of society.

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Katrin Dinges:
I’ve lots of experience with discrimination, including personally. Despite it, I try to concentrate on the positive as
best I can. I ask myself: can I learn something from it, or can
I get something positive from what I went through? That’s
naturally very different to when you focus on the negative.
We all have deficits. If you go looking for one, then
you’re sure to find it. I’m an absolute duffer when it comes
to working with my hands. But you can also just turn itaround and say what you’re good at. For example, society
says: oh no, this person can’t see. Alternatively, you could
ask: what does this person see if she can’t see with her
physical eyes? How much does she perceive with her othersenses? Does she look inward perhaps? It’s the same withhearing. And emotionally in any case. No one even bothers
asking about that. Society asks about all the things a person
can’t do. But you can just as equally ask if there is any value
in that, or what can we learn from it.
For example, I found it interesting that at a doctor’ssurgery I was told that I might have to wait a bit longer. It
sounded like an apology, as if they were embarrassed andthink they weren’t quick enough. I thought to myself, let’sturn it around, then it directly sounds quite different. They
take their time in a context where everything is supposed
to be done quickfire. Isn’t that valuable? I’m only too glad
to wait the extra couple of minutes.
For me, inclusion functions similarly. In a really narrow
sense, inclusion means that everyone can take part, that all
are welcome. It’s not about the inclusion of singular individuals into the majority, but every person becomes included
because we offer support individually. As much freedom
as possible, as much support as necessary. I think that’s
great. That’s what’s actually meant with inclusion, thatevery person gets what they need. This broader, unusualDiscriminations

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idea of inclusion serves the individual and the collective.
This testifies to being in a very healthy mental state. I feel
good straightaway. I feel that it’s me who’s meant. I havethe impression they want me, and indeed with all that I am.
How wonderful, how beautiful is that? I think that’s exactly
what’s meant when we speak about mental health. What
serves us best, including ourselves as individuals? What
serves the collective best? If we think like this then we farewell in the world, in our specific context, in the universe, insociety and together with ourselves.
Pasquale Virginie Rotter:
The issue of violence in public space is very relevant for thepeople I’m involved with. There are areas in the city, certain
streets or railway stations where it’s not safe for me to be
as a Black, feminised person or a visible Person of Colour.
This really calls into question any experience of feeling at
home. The city is quite simply not accessible in many places
because I’m not safe, neither physically nor emotionally. In
empowerment contexts we create our own safe places. But
how does it feel physically to once again venture beyond
them? Suddenly I’m no longer safe. Due to the forceful andpushy way people move through the streets, or because thecity’s violent history completely overwhelms me.
By that I mean that urban space has a numbing effectin my perception, because of the sensitive body that I am I
have to blend out an awful lot. At the same time, though, I
have to be really on the alert and on the lookout. I have to beable to read the surroundings and that requires additional
mental capacity that I’m permanently mustering. While I
take a look at my phone, part of my attention is simultaneously occupied with noticing as much as possible aroundme, making sure I’m safe. That’s not some individual effort.
Like many other marginalised bodies, my body has memo-

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rised that I’m not safe. We share this horizon of experience. I
was in contact with bodies which, for example, experienced
violence in a street where I move easily, without any trouble.
In this moment I don’t experience myself as separate. This
is incredibly exhausting. It erodes your capacity to simply
have a good life, or indeed to even take part in urban life.
In my experience, privileged positioned persons arebasically unaware that discrimination ties up capacities. To
be fully occupied with finding information and solutions tojust survive ties up your capacities. This is a huge factor forme: which mental capacity – in the sense of energy – is tied
up when I’m immersed in trying to deal with discrimination,
racism and violence? This is something that needs to beunderstood. And then, after that? There must be absolute
trust, trust that the different marginalised communities
know best for themselves what they need, that the expertise lies definitely with those who move about in their own
very specific living situation in this city.

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For Each Other

133

Kader Attia
As an artist and curator, I believe that the arts sphere is aplace that we really need to care about. We must care about
the exhibition space because we are living in a society thatis erasing all human interactions. In the exhibition space,individuals come to a place where they don’t necessarily
speak to each other. But the fact that they experience thisvery same exhibition and sphere of the artworks makes
them belong. It creates a group for them to belong to, avirtual group of emotion, of knowledge, of learning and of
unlearning, to quote Ariella Azoulay. I really hope that thiskind of space – you can also call it agora – can be saved,
because it has cemented human society forever.
Mental health does not only affect fragile subjects. We
are all vulnerable when it comes to mental health. Artists
have the capacity to immerse themselves into the fragility of mental health. Art has the capacity to provide room
for the unpredictable. Art can address spaces and times
that are not understandable, and find forms to express thethings that we do not find words or language for.
We need art spaces because, in my view, the future ofmental health is the collective. It has always been the collective. Because the problem is the collective. So, the collective should be the solution. This is where we must startworking, we have to maintain the care of the collective.

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Alina Georgescu, Carolin Ochs
Carolin Ochs:
During my studies I learnt that legislation in Germany actively
violates human rights and that many people have no accessto the basic right to health. That sparked my interest, and I
then directed my professional orientation in a way that has
seen me end up in a field where we can practically open up
this basic right to health to many people. I work in the clearance office for people without health insurance. We also dolobby work to initiate change. Generally, it’s anchored in Germany’s Basic Law that everyone has the right to health. Germany has ratified the EU’s Charta of Fundamental Rights.
This means that this Charta has to be incorporated into local
laws. Supposedly there are laws applicable for all scenarios,
but de facto these laws simply don’t work.
Alina Georgescu:
The laws are also very sketchy in my area. At the Antidiskriminierungsnetzwerk Berlin (ANDB) at TBB we work mainlywith two laws: the General Act on Equal Treatment (AGG,
2006) and the Berlin State Anti-Discrimination Act (LADG,
2020). The AGG is the first law ever in Germany created inreference to discrimination. The law covers only a minimalarea, however, namely discrimination at the workplace,during the application process or when people experience
discrimination in the area of service provision. There’s acatalogue of attributions for identifying discrimination andpotentially taking legal action against disability, sexual identity, age, religion, worldview or ethnic origin. The LADG has
only been in existence for two years. It’s the law of a specific federal state, Berlin, and it covers acts of discrimination committed by governmental authorities. Together withother NGOs we put in enormous effort to see that this law

Legislation135

was passed, and we were involved in developing the legislation. But it, too, is not without its problems, for example
federal authorities – such as job centres, foreigner registration offices, youth offices, customs – are not covered by thislaw. In contrast to the AGG, however, the LADG has extended
the range of attributions, and very importantly, “racist” and“anti-Semitic” attributions now supplement “ethnic origin”(AGG). New attributions are also included in the catalogue:chronic illness, language, gender identity and social status.
These laws raise hurdles. Just very basically: how arepeople to know that these laws exist? In the work context,
employers are obliged to inform persons beginning employment about their rights. Naturally enough, employers arealso not to discriminate. But they also have to be proactive
and take measures to ensure protection from discrimination, for example by setting up in-company AGG offices.
Many employers we’ve contacted because of discrimination
complaints quite simply fail to fulfil their obligations. Most of
the people who come to us can’t afford a lawyer, they don’t
have any legal expenses insurance, they aren’t members ofa trade union. All in all, they can’t find any legal representation. They can’t make use of the laws. Another hurdle is thatmost people don’t understand what it means to assert theirrights in order to then lodge a complaint. That all sounds so
abstract. In the end, it simply means to make a short description of what has happened and reference the law (e.g., AGG)
and send it to the discriminating party. Another hurdle is that
this must be done within strict deadlines. For example, theAGG time limit to make use of your rights in an employment
context is two months. After that, the person can bring legal
proceedings within three months. If we assume, despite
these hurdles, that the discriminated person takes the legal
path and asserts their rights within the time limit and has thefinancial resources to litigate within a further period of threeLegislation

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months, then what happens after that theoretically? The
most that can happen is that the affected person receives a
bit of money. Most of the people who come to us don’t want
any money. People seeking advice simply want far-reaching
structural change, they want to take a stand. This means thatthe whole process is often very disappointing.
Carolin Ochs:
People fall out of the system quite simply because of the reality of their lives and they can’t profit from their right to healthcare. This is very evident in the case of people without documents. If a person is in Germany without documents, thenthey are obliged to leave the country. They aren’t allowed tobe here at all and actually have to leave. But the same person
has a claim to services based on the Asylum-Seeker Benefits
Act. But to receive these benefits the person has to registerwith the Social Welfare Office. In turn, though, the Social
Welfare Office is obliged to notify the Foreigners’ Registration Office of anyone who has registered without the necessary residency documents. This means that people living
in illegality with respect to residency status will not registerwith the Social Welfare Office because they know that theSocial Welfare Office will notify the Foreigners’ Registration
Office. In effect, in theory there’s a law, there are benefits
and services, and a right, but people can’t make any use ofthem and fall through the system. They then come to us,
to the clearance office for people without health insurance,
because they’re without any coverage if they fall ill.
I think that Berlin offers more publicly financed contact
points for people without health insurance than other federal states. But that’s just poor compensation for this gap inproviding health care. A genuine solution would be to adjust
federal legislation.

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Leisure138

Deiara Kouto, Diana Mammana, Kerstin Kühn,
Lea Hartung, Margareta von Oswald, Mary Buteyn,
Maryna Markova, Remzi Uyguner, Ulrike Koch,
Veit Hannemann, Željko Ristič
When you are able to do what you want with your time,a feeling of contentment arises. When you have time toreflect – alone or with others – then it’s possible to observe
how situations arise. When you find time to listen, thenwork can be a learning process. Sometimes it’d be goodto have more time for boredom when working. The best
ideas come when you’re bored. Creativity suffers whenthings are charged up. The good ideas come when you’reon holiday. Why can you have really good ideas about workwhen on holiday? Holidays are productive. You drift along.
In the GDR there was a reading day for librarians. Once aweek you had the day off to read. The time was used to do
the laundry or the washing up. But a lot more reading wasdone, too. And things thought about. Who decides what’s
work? Who draws up the job descriptions? These persons
are often not in our situation, in our job. Actually, they can’t
really know. That’s noticeable. We must have time for thepeople we work with. Our work would somehow look very
different. Then we’d have a completely different workday.

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Feminist Health Care Research Group (Inga Zimprich,Julia Bonn)In recent years we’ve researched a great deal into the healthmovement in West Berlin which arose at the intersection
between the squatter scene and feminist movement at
the end of the 1970s and the early 1980s. The political climate at the time was one in which a lot was possible, anda lot was tried out. The health movement was not simply
a protest movement that demanded a new health system.
It developed countless plans and concepts for improving
health care and providing health advice. Initiatives ranged
from doctor and chemist collectives through to feminist
health centres, radical therapy forms and courses on vaginal self-examination at adult education centres.
The health movement had a decisive influence on thecurrent structures we find in Berlin. There is still a doctors’
collective, the Heilehaus, the Feminist Women’s HealthCentre. But also, the Weglaufhaus, the anti-psychiatriccounselling centre, the anti-psychiatric self-help cafe
Komm­Rum, and the Berlin crisis service, all founded as partof the health movement. When you think about the special
institutions still existing in Berlin today, then you understand that they are from a specific time, one in which lots ofpeople were very active and created alternative structures.
It is supposed to be nothing out of the normal to be able toresort to alternative services when you are in an emotional
crisis or indeed just need regular health advice. Unfortunately, it’s become the exception that institutions like thesestill exist in Berlin today.
One crystallisation point for the movement was the
Health Day in Berlin in 1980, which was held as a counterpoint to the annual general meeting of the German Medical Association and explicitly addressed the continuity

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between the German health system and the Nazi past. It
was the first of five Health Days which then took place in
Hamburg (1981), Bremen (1984), Bavaria and Kassel (1987).
The Health Day of 1980 was organised by alternative healthcentres in Berlin and brought together currents from thediverse health movement. Around 12,000 persons attended.
Many doctors were active in the movement, above all male
doctors, some of whom had an occupational ban placedon them for political activities. From this context a strong
movement emerged which challenged the fundamental
structures of the health system: how can hierarchies in thehealth system be dismantled, for example, between patientsand doctors, but also between nurses and senior physicians? How can the pharma industry be effectively criticised? How can patients become self-empowered? Whatwould patient self-organisation and co-determination look
like in practice?
We find it absolutely fascinating that there was a social
movement that made health a political issue. Health careis such a complex topic, and it is difficult to discuss. Who
really wants to think about how the health system is structured, how health insurance functions in Germany or how
the health insurers got started? And yet, all of us are directly
affected in some way. Health policy has concrete effects on
how we experience illness, crisis and our need for healthcare, on which support we can then get or which hurdles
block access. Before COVID-19, the health system wasn’t
really such a big issue socially. But since then, issues likecare, the economic pressure on hospitals, working conditions in the health care professions, concepts for curative
treatment and healing, and the various types of care are
attracting more and more attention, including in the art
world.

Movement141

We are interested in what we can learn from the example of the health movement, specifically the strategies formaking health a social issue. Are there strategies we cantake up again today, and are there practices we can passon? The varied forms of action have always fascinated us.
Fliers and zines were strategically distributed and displayedin hospitals, making public the unwanted news from thehealth system, mentioning, for instance, mistakes made inoperations, or reporting that the senior physician drives acar sponsored by a pharmaceutical company.
At the time, the health system in Germany was, similar to
today, very hierarchical, very patriarchal. Feminists refusedto accept that it was mainly men who were gynaecologists.
In courses on vaginal self-examination, they swapped theirexperiences and together collected knowledge on their own
bodies. It was important to become experts of their own
body, for it enabled them to counter the patriarchal point ofview and its diagnoses. We have to realise that Clio, a periodic self-help journal, has been published continuously by
the Feminist Women’s Health Centre ever since. The cripple movement was very active at the time in Germany, with
important protagonists such as Udo Sierck and Nati Radtke,
who also criticised the health movement – and the cripple
women’s group in turn the feminist movement – for being
excluded. They called for a self-determined life for the disabled, beyond pity or gratitude, which was still the prevailingview of society on disability at the time in Germany. Anotherissue prominent in the health centres, in particular thanks
to the Berlin Info Office on Work and Health, was healthat the workplace. The practitioners there were inspired by
how the working class in Italy had taken the initiative andpractised their own medicine. They were of the opinion thatthe workers themselves were best qualified to judge thehealth conditions at their workplaces and could initiate theMovement

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processes necessary for organising healthier working conditions or tackle damaging factors like shift work, one-sided
and unbalanced strains on the body, and such problems.
The Heilehaus is another example; they brought out a healthmagazine for squatters, Doktorspiele (Playing Doctor). How
can one keep a healthy diet as a punk? What can one doagainst the widespread skin disorders in the Kreuzberg of
the 1980s? Which household remedies help against lice,
scabies and colds?
Overall, the time was shaped by socially organising discontent. The booklet Wege zu Wissen und Wohlstand (Waysto Knowledge and Prosperity), for example, was sold under
the counter and had instructions on how to simulate difficult to diagnose illnesses and so get a medical certificate.
It was about understanding illness as a timeout from having
to function and use this time to recollect one’s energies,
reflect and organise social and political alternatives.
People were attempting to jolt the health system fromall sides. This is the fascinating thing about the healthmovement. It came together from all different areas andhealth was quite simply a topic for every person: how do I
see a doctor? How political is my illness? What’s that got
to do with society?
As much as the movement inspires us today, there’s
also a lot to criticise. We think that many positions were notincluded, in particular the positions of Persons of Colour
and trans persons. We think it’s important to point out
these exclusions when we’re working on the health movement and passing on the relevant knowledge.
We approach affirmatively anyone who was part ofthe movement forty years ago. We are grateful for what
they accomplished. Talking to them, they often noted that
it was decades since anyone had shown any interest andthey were about to throw everything out. We are so grateful

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that they kept all the material. As part of the transmission,
it is important that we bring things up to date and criticise
aspects, point out flaws and gaps, and take these to heartin our own work. But we still enormously appreciate all thatwas done and established back then.
We have a feeling that a new health movement is forming, one that includes anti-racist and anti-ableist work, andwhich joins forces with new initiatives, structures and networks. As the Feminist Health Care Research Group, wetake a position between the generations, but also between
the discourses. We sense that those from the health movement and from projects of the second wave of the feminist
movement have done all this work over years on a voluntary basis and were acutely aware of the precarity of theirsituation. On the other hand, today young queer anti-racist
initiatives are emerging who rightly criticise how excluding the institutions of this period are, particularly for Persons of Colour, queer and trans persons. We underline thiscriticism. A critical discussion is often missing; indeed, it
has yet to really begin. We have to ask: what resources are
actually available, who has access to them, and how can
we make sure that they are shared out more evenly? Whichwork would be necessary to do this, precisely in the older
structures? How can we open up access?
We have to have this discussion, and wherever possible,
press ahead with changing, opening and expanding thesesocial spaces. And precisely at a time when passing on theknowhow between generations is on the agenda. As we see
it, spaces with these traditions have the inner capacity totake up the work. But we have to actively call for it to be
done.

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145

Norms146

Andreas Heinz, Feminist Health Research Group(Inga Zimprich, Julia Bonn), Kim Wichera,
Lee Modupeh Anansi Freeman, Tzoa
Andreas Heinz:
In psychiatry and psychology there’s a tendency to construct norms and the idea prevails that mental illnesses areanormal and health normal. That this is nonsense is something that’s been known for seventy years. The philosopher
and psychiatrist Karl Jaspers once wrote: ‘Caries is normal
in my time, but it’s still a disease.’ Statistical normality thus
ceases to apply. And if you no longer statistically enumeratea norm but take a concept of illness and health and fixate
an ideal as to what makes a tooth healthy, or how a person
should move, then you immediately see how this approach
can be burdened with ideology. You’re not at liberty tocompel people to lie in a Procrustean bed of expectations.
If you’re in luck, then you’re in a tolerant, open society that
permits diverse ways of living. If you’re unlucky, most of thecountries around the world are not tolerant, open societies,
and all sorts of possible socially unwelcome behaviours are
stigmatised.
Kim Wichera:
I don’t find the concept of mental illness helpful. Who actually determines it? Where does illness begin and where doesit stop? Who defines it? At which point in a process do I
decide that recovery is taking place? Or is it indeed possiblethat there is no recovery, and you have an illness you’ve got
to deal with your whole life? Or is the crisis understood aspart of your life experience, as experiencing our very existence and a possibility to express the modes of behaviour
we have as humans? In that case, a very different question

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arises, namely the question of human rights, of existence
and tolerance.
Tzoa:
What is considered ill and what healthy in our society?
Issues like these bother me, on both the personal and social
level. Who actually defines what? Who possesses the power
to define who and what the norm is – what is normal? Thisis something I find very fascinating.
In capitalism a person is considered healthy when they
can be productive and work within the system. What’s
important for me is to understand how the person is feeling.
I consider this society to be ill. And this begs the question:
how can a person be healthy in an ill system? Or is a person
considered ill in an ill system actually healthy? As a transgender person, I am pathologised by the official healthsystem when it diagnoses me as mentally ill. But I certainly
don’t define myself as or feel that I’m ill.
Lee Modupeh Anansi Freeman:
The pathologising of transness is very upsetting. I don’t
need anyone to confirm my mental health status for me
to know whether or not I want to have surgeries or to haveaccess to hormones. I think it’s incredibly infantilising. Cis
gender people make decisions about their bodies every
day – decisions that are either significantly life-altering
and/or life-changing. There seems to be no gatekeepingof those decisions. It’s incredibly upsetting because this isjust another brick in the wall of the systems that keep us
from actually living our best lives.
Kim Wichera:
The main question in mental health is: when do I feel well?
I’d contend that a large number of factors are necessaryNorms148

until everything actually feels good for a person. There arescores of social factors, for example: what’s my current
situation with respect to income, with respect to housing,with respect to social contacts? We all have prolific innerlives. For me, the question is to what extent this inner life
has – day in, day out – a place in the outer world, under conditions which are often extremely difficult. No longer to justkeep on functioning and performing, but allowed to simply
be, with all the quirks which are part of being human, andalso with personal questions: how do I position myself inthe world or how do I get along in this world? This question
is uppermost in many people’s minds. We all go throughcrises in our long lives. Thus, for me it is vital to ask where
and how there can be a place within society for people who
can no longer comply with certain rules of behaviour wehave imposed on ourselves. And how do we deal in thissociety with people when they can no longer adhere to thissocial contract and instead act or talk or make connections
which I simply don’t understand?
Feminist Health Research Group:
In our view, the concept of mental health is associated withpsychiatry and a certain stigmatisation. We thus prefer tospeak about dealing with personal or emotional crises andneeds. We also don’t employ the concept of health withthe goal to distinguish health from illness but speak aboutcrisis as a time of emotional work, which we all have at somepoint or from time to time in life. Needs and emotions arepart and parcel of life and are not to be split off and castaway as something that’s ill and has to get better or as if
wellbeing were the goal. In our workshops we try to say,for example. that we focus on emotional needs because
they are often repressed. We regard emotional work as very
valuable – because it is socially relevant. Society changes

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in relationship to how many people who are part of it are
willing to work on themselves emotionally. On their fears
and anxieties, on their mechanisms of repression, on theirpositionings. We really wish that there’d be greater recognition for the emotional work people do in therapy. A great
number of individual problems have structural dimensions.
And we’d criticise that the health system in Germany does
not follow this approach.
What does your personal problem have to do with society? This is naturally the classical feminist formula whichsays: me too, me too, me too! I too feel worthless, and I too
feel as if I don’t get everything done and can’t keep up. And
then one notices at some point: uh-huh, when everyone
feels like that, then what are the conditions which bring us
in this situation?
Lee Modupeh Anansi Freeman:
I would like to have children. I’m taking my first steps intrying to figure out how that works as a transgender personwith a uterus. I think a lot, for example, about postpartum
depression and how birthing could affect me as a depressive person and about how I would find compassionate
care. How do I find a therapist whom I can relate to andwho can relate to me, who has that expertise I am looking
for but is also sensitive to transgender issues? Any recommendations? I doubt it. I am also in the process of trying tounderstand myself as a neurodivergent person. There is solittle information about the links between being neurodivergent and being transgender, although a high proportion oftransgender people are also neurodivergent. There are no
meaningful studies on this and there are certainly no meaningful studies on the intersections of being neurodivergent,
being transgender and being Black. So there are a lot of
aspects around mental health and emotional, psychologicalNorms150

wellbeing that are not even currently touching the surface
of being addressed by the systems and institutions here.
So unfortunately, a lot of it is like trial and error. A lot of itis being the first, being a trailblazer, a pioneer. That wasn’tquite what I was hoping for. For my experience, I really wasjust hoping to go through it kind of smoothly – to be justlike everybody else – but I’m not just like everybody else.
It’s like the first pancake. It’s always a little bit weird. The
temperature is not right. Not enough oil – too much oil, thepan is wonky. There’s a lot of figuring out to do to get theconditions just right. I suppose I never intended to be thefirst pancake in any context. But here I am.
Tzoa:
In my utopia there are no health norms or body norms:
everyone can define themselves. There is neither racism
nor any other form of discrimination. Everyone is seen as
they are and what they want to be seen as. Each body would
be approached and treated with dignity. Everyone would
have a right to be heard, enabling them to define and decide
for themselves what they need, which path they want totake or what kind of support they’d like in order to find theirpath. I try to realise this in my own practice, for example, byrefraining from using words which I’d be imposing on thepatients. I have no diagnosis with which I describe mental
health but describe rather the possible relationships I see.
When people come to me then it’s all about their needs andwhat they want to change. I work with their own definitions
instead of imposing my own ideas on them.

Optimisation

151

Deiara Kouto, Diana Mammana, Lea Hartung,Margareta von Oswald, Remzi Uyguner, Željko Ristič
Lea Hartung:In everyday working life there’s a lot of stress. I ask myself,
what’s the cause of stress? Is it because of the projects, thecurrent situation, or my own way of working?
Diana Mammana:
Tools like continued education give the impression thatsomething is being done for the employees. But in fact, it’s
just another instrument to improve oneself and function
better.
Remzi Uyguner:
Every therapy that the insurance pays for is oriented on
you recovering your health in order to integrate you into
the working process.
Željko Ristič:
If you don’t have strategies to deal with stress, then you
burn out.
Margareta von Oswald:
Burn on displays similar symptoms to burn out, with the difference that one keeps on functioning. That means that the
breakdown that comes with a burn-out syndrome doesn’t
happen. Burn on is most evident with those who burn for
their job. For people who suffer from burn on, breaks are
there to briefly recharge the batteries and then carry on as
before. The catastrophe never happens because one knows
how to find quick solutions without ever changing anything
fundamentally.

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Deiara Kouto:
Self-optimising also means innovation for me. You have toimprove yourself and be progressive. In my opinion that’s
not really possible with human beings. The idea is utopian.
Always higher, better, faster.
Diana Mammana:
We aren’t machines that can be programmed. We all workin an area in which there are people who can change something. Our work is never really measurable. Self-optimising
is in some way always geared to measurability and comparability.
Željko Ristič :Our instrument for measuring is a category, namely thehours of our availability. The model conceals what really
happens. Models like these have very little to do with reality.
I don’t understand how one could measure how much timea person needs in order to give good guidance. If indicators
are then created, it gets very critical. When it’s about time,then that’s when it stops with me. We have to be available
for a certain number of hours a year to justify the financing.
What I do here, for example, that’s nothing. It doesn’t countas work.

Perfectionism

153Željko Ristič
I view the concept of mental health very critically. For me
it means an inclination towards perfection. We’re the very
opposite. We work with youths who are going throughcrises of meaning and identification. Crises of not succeeding, of a lack of prospects. The whole of society is striving
for maximal perfection. We wish it would be possible also
to show one’s weaknesses. That’s what we work with andwhat we set as an example for youths. If everything were
perfect, then our job wouldn’t even exist. We try to redress
the balance. We’re surrounded by perfection. Be perfectin the family. Be the perfect son or daughter. Get the qualification. It’s always about performance and achievement,
grades, reviews, target agreements. We’re supposed to permanently deliver, and we bring up our kids the same way.
And so it rolls on, day after day. The children are stressed,
society is stressed. That’s why it is our responsibility tocreate spaces which are genuinely free, where it’s possible
to simply switch off. I ask myself in which direction we want
to go with this society. Seemingly, there’s the norm in oursociety that one can succeed at and achieve anything. And
then when you fail, you’re alone. That’s a huge problem.
That’s why I was somewhat sceptical about the concept ofmental health at the beginning.

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Present

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Feminist Health Care Research Group (Inga Zimprich,Julia Bonn), Kader Attia, Pasquale Virginie Rotter
Feminist Health Care Research Group:
Germany has a very complicated, difficult history and there
is a lack of critical appraisal of this history across many
levels. We at the Feminist Health Care Research Group lookat the health system. We live in the continuities of these
historical processes. In the National Socialist regime, Jews
were murdered, queer persons persecuted and murdered,
Sinti and Roma murdered. People with disabilities, persons
with psychic problems were killed, people were forciblysterilised. Medical experiments were conducted on people.
Colonialism is hardly touched on in Germany.
These histories continue to have an effect in our society, they’re present, and indeed are so in all institutions
throughout the country. The health system is also one ofthese institutions, but so are homes, for example, where
people with disabilities are placed. These are processes
that continue to have an impact on all of us and are constitutive factors of this society.
Another example is German reunification, which has
produced enormous disruptions in many lives throughout Germany. Scores and scores of biographies and much
worthwhile knowledge were devalued, rewritten, and professions, values and truths vanished. There was no collective discussion about how the legacy was to be approached.
Persons with psychological problems and life crises went
into individual therapy, although obviously a collective process was at work that caused all the disruption and discontinuity.
Socially there are no formats for working through ourshared enmeshment and the collective experiences, that is,
the structural and social level of our subjective experience,

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our personal problems. As a society we have to ask: what
are we repressing? What are our fears and anxieties? What
are our defence mechanisms? We firmly believe that thiscan’t work unless collective dimension is recognised.
Pasquale Virginie Rotter:
One aspect that is very relevant for me is the knowledge
about all that has already happened in this city. Specifically,against the background of Germany’s violent history. Someplaces still exude it. I’m convinced that everything has amemory. Every stone, every tree has a memory. And it’s
possible to sense this in the city. You can really sense what
happened to people just a short while or several hundredyears ago, how humaneness was understood or was denied
to some. This is hugely relevant for some communities, particularly in Berlin. On this German soil, on the very groundwhere Nazi crimes were committed.
What does this knowledge about the violent history do
to us? Which part of our human capacity to perceive andsense, potentially at least, everything around us do we haveto actually split off in order to cope with how stolen bones
are stored in various buildings in Berlin? What does it doto the people who work or study there, at a university, forexample? What does it do when we know there are bones
lying there, and no one really knows exactly where they’re
from, let alone what their history is?
In exactly the same way we can perceive places of violence, we can also perceive places of resistance and energy.
In the more recent history of resistance there is the initiative to change street names, for example. The May-­AyimUfer is like a refugium. It feels fantastic to walk down the
Lucy-Lameck-Straße instead of Wissmannstraße. But a
great deal is missing from the city’s history. It is as if a partof the reality of a diverse array of communities is erased.

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Not only the resistance movements are forgotten, but also
the energy invested in these movements. Because there ishardly any commemoration of these movements, and theseexamples of resistance are barely visible. That’s the very
opposite of empowerment and it weakens the individual aswell. So much of this city’s history has yet to be considered
and worked through. I thus move through a city in whichlots of lies dominate, a city where so much is masked over.
And more and more lies are always being added. I find thisto be extremely toxic.
Kader Attia:
Repair and injury are always interlinked; you cannot separate the wound from the repair. Western modernity suggests that repair means to return to a state before theaccident or incident occurred, before the injury. Modernity
is obsessed with the fantasy of controlling time. Controlling
time means controlling the accident, the crack, the fault, bypretending that repairing means you can erase the woundand come back to the original form of the object. This is an
insane fantasy. We can never go back to the original stateof things.
When an object was broken in pre-modern societies – African, Japanese and also European – people used
to repair it by keeping the injury visible, as, for example, withbig, rough staples or the Kintsugi art from Japan, where thecrack in ceramics is filled with gold. Many cultures see thewound as a fertile ground for an object’s new life. If you takethese processes as metaphors, and apply them to society,the effects are huge.
One of the sneakiest processes of imperialism is thegovernance through regimes of invisibility, hiding the crime.
In her book The Colonial Trauma, Algerian psychoanalyst
Karima Lazali quotes Albert Camus. Camus depicts a con-Present

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versation between an officer and a settler after a massacre
in a village, in his book Le premier homme (The First Man).
They are looking at the dead bodies, at the village in ruins.
And the officer says: “Well, if what we have committed here
is a crime, then we have to erase it. We have to hide it.”Through ten years of research, Karima emphasised how
colonial crime has produced so many absences in the colonised subjects’ narratives. By erasing the injury, you deny
the past. Learning from her, I started to focus on how muchrevealing these invisible injuries is crucial to understandhow to repair. My interest in mental health in Berlin comesfrom the observation that it is a city that has been marked
by history. Despite all the repairs, you still feel the injuries ofthe past. These injuries, though they seem silent, still produce a significant noise. We live in a completely woundedworld, without acknowledging it.

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hn. lyonga, Remzi Uyguner, Ulrike Koch, Veit Hannemann,Željko Ristič
Remzi Uyguner:
Our conversations in the neighbourhood about mental
health took place in an atmosphere without any pressure
to achieve anything. That’s what I liked the most. No one
controlled what we worked on. We got to know each other.
We all work in the same neighbourhood and had probably
heard about one another in some way or another, but wehadn’t yet had contact this close.
Ulrike Koch:
The conversations were about taking the time to reflect on
our working conditions. For me, this was rewarding. I did
this outside of my working hours and I would’ve liked tohave had my whole team there.
Veit Hannemann:
I found it to be a very good project for networking, because
I knew some of the others by name but had never personally
met them. Through the project I got to know not only thepeople but also the institutions behind them. The project
was participatory; we could choose our own topics. There
was a space – if you like, a resonance room – to ponder andreflect, and at the same time to listen to what others arereflecting on.
hn. lyonga:
When an opportunity to be in conversation with Gropius
Bau presented itself, Michael Westrich from Bauhütte e.V.
and I took on the task of illustrating the work of Bauhütte
and its multiple initiatives and projects. My own personal
motivation for being part of the conversation started withRelations163

a certain curiosity about Gropius Bau. I was curious to visit
the building; to see for myself what its spaces were like on
the inside; to understand how a place marked by complicated colonial histories can seemingly become a place for
Artists of Colour and Black artists to exhibit their works; I
wanted to know how my Black body would feel within itsvery heavy walls; to proactively criticise, question and identify what needs to be changed to make this building a “softspace”; to throw its doors wide open; to be in conversation,
actively.
Remzi Uyguner:
For me it was very important to come into contact with sucha large institution that’s just around the corner from where
I work, without exactly knowing what we’d get from it. First
off, make contact and stay in contact. That motivated me
personally, and also the association, to take part. Personally,
I consider this to be a beginning of something that should
and needs to be expanded upon.
Veit Hannemann:
One question I have is how I can take back the topics discussed in the group and present them to our staff. For
example, the topic of overwork. Where could we set up aresonance room where we come together and think about
how we can speak about these topics? I haven’t got ananswer yet. But if it worked here, then perhaps it can also
work in-house.
Željko Ristič:
Lea Hartung approached me. I’ve worked with her for a longtime. She works in the Central and State Library Berlin anddoes community and outreach work. I think very highly ofher. That was the first doorway and I trusted her. I’d heard

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about the Gropius Bau but I’d never been there. In Berlin,
throughout my everyday life, it has never played a role.
There isn’t a newspaper telling you something about it. No
one knows it. There isn’t any publicity for particular target
groups. That’s why I was curious. We’re often used as an
exploited association because we have such a large network. That’s why I’m often wary about cooperations withlarge institutions. But in this project, I really had the feelingthat it was about us. For once it was the other way around.
It was all about developing something together, something
we can participate in.

Simply There165

Diana Mammana, Dilay Dagdelen, Kerstin Kühn,
Lea Hartung, Mary Buteyn, Tim Ünsal, Ulrike Koch,
Veit Hannemann, Željko RističŽeljko Ristič:
Our teenagers at outreach.berlin often just want to be there,
sit around, hang out, be part of what’s going on or listen toconversations. It’s the laidback atmosphere. When they go
home, they’re confronted with pressure and stress. Sometimes they simply come to us to get a rest. We include
everyday routine activities. Shopping, for example. Thenthey feel that they’re of use. There aren’t any more public
places for youths where they can simply hang out. They doexist, but they’re getting smaller and smaller, and fewer andfewer. That’s why youths gather together in such numbers
in parks. Bars and pubs are far too expensive. How can ayoung person afford it? We attempt to create places where
it’s possible to just catch your breath.
Lea Hartung:
One of the library’s main qualities is that it’s fine just to be
there. Many come because they can concentrate on theirwork and perhaps don’t even communicate with others.
And yet, in a library you always have the feeling that you’re
not alone. It’s this busy quietness. In a library you’re neverasked why you’re there.
Dilay Dagdelen:
We have a sewing workshop every Friday that actually runs
only from 4 to 6 pm. But the women want to stay until 9 or
10 pm and dance there after they’ve finished sewing. We
let them. Then they don’t have to go home where perhaps
they feel lonely.

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Simply There

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Veit Hannemann:
How do you actually notice that someone is lonely? No one
comes and says: “You know what, I’m lonely, what should
I do?” We don’t approach people in the neighbourhood
centre in this way and they don’t make any big announcement. We notice it rather in how they stay longer and havea lot they want to talk about.

in der St. Lukas Kirche, we consciously try to start up conversations with people.

Ulrike Koch:
Simply being allowed to be there is also something existentially important at the tam – Interkulturelles Familien­
zentrum. The kids can play. There’s tea or coffee, and you
don’t have to do anything. Places are needed where people
feel alright and where it’s possible to meet another nicefamily or have a chat.

Diana Mammana:
I’m just thinking about reliability. About places where one
can simply turn up and you know: something will be goingon, even if I’m not there.

Mary Buteyn:
In the WillkommensGemeinde in der St. Lukas Kirche we
make sure we have a lot of time for one another and createa space where we meet each other personally. We are lessinterested in a programme and focus on relationships
instead.
Veit Hannemann:
The retired persons in the Mehrgenerationenhaus Gneisenaustraße know exactly when it’s time for their roundof cards and afternoon coffee. That’s always on. But that
doesn’t mean that we always have to offer something else
as well. That’s just another obligation to do some activity.
Kerstin Kühn:
Presence is also important to create this atmosphere; theinternet simply isn’t enough. In the WillkommensGemeinde

Lea Hartung:
But to create these social places is often not enough forthe supporting authorities because they can’t appreciate
the value of that.

Tim Ünsal:
There’s nothing worse than going somewhere and there’s
no one interested in you being there. You don’t go back,ever.
Veit Hannemann:
At times it can also be frustrating when you’re trying torepair a society that has stopped learning what community is all about.

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Mandu dos Santos Pinto
Already while studying architecture, I found it interesting
but also controversial that people who were to later live inthe buildings you designed were never asked anything. It
was never about these people. And you’re building structures for a hundred years and they will leave their markon these people. In this context I’ve explored in particular
the qualities of informal, self-built quarters in cities. Many
people claim that it’s chaos. That’s not true. People are very
conscious about what they build and while building theyreflect on their way of life. This way of life enables a great
many social spaces which are important, precisely withrespect to mental health, because that’s where people canbe picked up as they are and looked after.
There’s naturally ancient wisdom about this, but meanwhile also studies: people who have a mental illness should
surround themselves with at least six to ten people who arecontinuously interacting with them, time and time again,so that there is a chance to recover without medication.
But today people are living, particularly in Europe, more
and more in a single flat on their own. Perhaps someone
calls in on them once, twice a week, often enough a healthcarer. But a person can’t get rid of their problems without
interacting with others.
The structures in the informal quarters absorb this kindof problem or don’t even let it arise in the first place. That’s
what struck me in my analysis of these quarters. In Luanda,
Angola, these districts are called Musekes, place of the redearth, because they are not tarred. The name itself indicatesa connection to the earth, to nature. The inner courtyards
not only have the quality of social spaces – it’s often thecase that several families live in the houses adjacent to one
another around a shared courtyard. Here it’s possible toSpaces169

keep small livestock, to plant vegetables, and these yards
are also safe places for children to play. These quarters thus
have many economic, social and interactive qualities.
I can remember very clearly the time I was in Senegal, inthe mid-1990s. I told people that in Switzerland or Germany
it’s possible that someone can die in their flat and the deathis first noticed a month later because there’s a stink. People
thought I was making it up; they simply couldn’t imagine it.
When someone doesn’t leave their flat, then someone else
knocks on the door. People watch out for one another andnotice when something’s not right. Behaviour like this isnaturally motivated by a crucial question: how can people
live together? Meanwhile there are cases like this in Senegal as well. That means, a way of life and living, heavily
influenced by the West, has been adopted – one that’s by
no means healthy.

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Mazda Adli
What’s most likely to strain us psychologically in the city,and becomes relevant for our health, is social stress. This
stress can arise out of living and interacting with people.
Amongst the social stress typical in cities is density stresswhen there is a lack of personal space to retreat to, andisolation stress that burdens us if we experience social
exclusion or loneliness. The mixture can be toxic whensocial density and social isolation affect you simultaneously, in particular if the individual has the feeling thatthey are unable to influence their surrounding context ina way that fits their needs, or indeed not to have any control at all. When we feel that we’re permanently exposed tosocial stress, then it can impact on our health and lead tostress-related illnesses.
But it’s also correct to mention the other side: large
cities like Berlin contribute positively to our wellbeing. And
that’s why cities are growing. Large cities have more advantages than disadvantages, provided of course one has goodaccess to the advantages: to education and personal development, to the prosperity of a growing city, to health careservices, to cultural diversity. This advantage and all that acity offers are not equitably shared, however, and are notaccessible equally to all. People who have poor access towhat is called the urban advantage are often those without the resources to counter social stress and who more
frequently suffer from the impacts of stress. The barriers
blocking access to urban advantage include poverty, language barriers, discrimination or belonging to a marginalised minority. In sum, these barriers mean that the risk ofmental ill-health grows.
Like other big cities, Berlin causes social stress. But
Berlin also has a lot that protects us from social stress.

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It offers numerous factors capable of protecting health.
Berlin has plenty of green spaces, for example. We knowthat urban green is good for our brain and our emotional
state. Green spaces keep down the level of stress hormonesin our blood; they help us to relax and find a bit of peace.
When we’re frequently in contact with nature, our brain
cells react differently to stress. Also, Berlin is a city wherea great portion of public life takes place in the open; it reallyis an outdoor city. Berlin thus offers opportunities for lotsof social interaction between people, which is good for themind. Spending time outside on your doorstep directly
counteracts social isolation, that is, social stress.
One observation we made, however, is that public
space – that is, space not commercially used – is diminishing in Berlin. These are spaces crucial for public health,especially our mental health. These spaces bring people
together; they promote social cohesion and thus counteract social stress. My worry is that the disappearance ofsocial space will have a negative influence on the mental
wellbeing of Berliners in the long term.

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Anna Yeboah, Magnus Elias Rosengarten, Mazda Adli,
Shermin Langhoff
Mazda Adli:
I’m convinced that every theatre, every museum, every cultural centre has a public health mission and thus has animportant role to play in our mental health. Whether one
wants it to be like that or not, it’s simply a fact. They areplaces which animate people to come together. They areplaces where people meet and interact. Much like a preventive measure, they can actively counter one of the mainstressors in urban society, namely social isolation and loneliness.
I’d like to especially emphasise this after we have discussed, time and time again during the pandemic, which
structures are essential for survival, and which are relevantto the system. If we’re missing cultural institutions, then ourrisk of social isolation increases, and it becomes more likelythat our health suffers. When cultural institutions are open,
then people feel better. This shouldn’t be drowned out inthe discussion. Cultural institutions are system-relevant.
Magnus Elias Rosengarten:
I think that museums can be and should be places where
people come together. Obviously the question always is
who the addressees of curatorial work are. Particularly in
Berlin’s museum landscape, we still have a lot to do because
so many people and communities don’t feel welcome.
Shermin Langhoff:
To start with, I’m absolutely delighted that the next generation is working scientifically on the questions I and othermigrantised people raised over two decades ago. It’s fantastic that these demands have finally arrived in the middle

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of society, in the high culture and subsidised houses. I canalso embrace this for myself as director of the Maxim Gorki
Theater: we are meeting places, places where togethering
is possible, where we can gather and collect ourselves.
Beyond whom we are addressing, I’m also interested inwhat we narrate in these places and how we do it.
This is for me a question with much broader andfar-reaching implications, impacting on the whole system,
not least because it is being posed in a neoliberal context.
Over the last three decades the system has become geared
towards competition, individualising, towards quicker,
greater, higher, towards who’s the best. In no sense at allanything to do with solidarity, with care. A key word here
for me is loneliness. Loneliness, from the political perspective of Hannah Arendt, also describes abandonment. The
dynamics of polarisation mean that people don’t feel as if
they belong anymore; they feel shunned, outcast. As a cultural institution we can pick up these themes, and indeed
also the broader political contexts, but we can’t stage arevolution alone.
Anna Yeboah:
I really wish that cultural institutions would include thepublic health mission in their self-understanding. Speaking from the perspective of the Black community, I’d saythat a museum is anything but a place conducive to mental
health. For example, if I went with my younger siblings to theGerman Museum of Technology or the Humboldt Forum,
then we’d have a crisis talk afterwards because they’d be
feeling really bad. When considered from my position, thepromise of public mental health in cultural institutions is
not being kept forthrightly.

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Mazda Adli:I think what you’ve just said is incredibly important. What
our cultural institutions are providing is not there for all of
us in equal measure, nor is it accessible. This is especiallytragic when, of all places, you experience social exclusion at
the portals of a cultural institution. Cultural institutions are
one of the resources protecting health. If we agree on this,then we can discuss how culture is to be made available
and for whom, and who’s left out. These are by no means
easy questions for which there are quick fixes. We have todevelop the paths of access to cultural institutions. If they
have such a positive effect on our minds and emotions,then access to them must be open to as many people aspossible.
Anna Yeboah:
One of the first measures is, naturally, to offer culture freeof charge, to throw open the doors, and to then see what
doesn’t work. But that alone is not enough. At the Dekoloniale – Memory Culture in the City programme we have a
lot to do with many museums, and their way of acting andbehaving is at times hurtful and has become stuck in its
beginnings. I then call for the decks to be cleared internally
before people are invited in who will only end up traumatised.
Magnus Elias Rosengarten:
If we decide that museums are places where people canlook after their mental health and where we can cometogether, then it is essential to ask: who defines the spaces
in reality and who determines the contents? Who works
here? Who makes the curatorial decisions, who organises
exhibitions, which artists are invited? What kind of understanding of culture do we stand for? We thus inevitably

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move towards aesthetic questions as well, questions which
are elementary if we want to create places where diverse
communities can gather. In Germany, White people fromthe upper-middle-class often work here; they’ve studied art
history, and represent a very specific way of appreciating
art and what makes up the canon. The UK and the USA areat least a century ahead of us in this respect. That’s theheart of the problem, I think. There are examples in Berlin
which go against the grain, in particular the diverse formsof cooperation throughout a whole neighbourhood. WhenI arrived in Berlin fifteen years ago, the Ballhaus Naunynstraße – a theatre and meeting space – was such a place forme, one where I could see myself mirrored, where my stories are told, where people work and perform who look likeme. That has had an ongoing resonance.
Shermin Langhoff:
But the Ballhaus project is basically accidental; it’s not reallythe result of an explicit policy. It’s fully correct to expectthat the existing cultural institutions with the resources
should share these across society and make them available
to the general public – not keep them within a bubble, thepreserve of a single participating clientele. The proposals
put forward here are exactly what’s needed in this context.
But we must also be awake to what is happening concretely
in Berlin.
From the 1970s and 1980s, neighbourhood centres andother sociocultural bodies represented the approach of
culture for everyone. When you consider the youth centre
Naunynritze and its history, a lot of very diverse neighbourhood work was done by cooperating with the Ballhaus andother neighbouring institutions. Two generations of youths
from so-called migrantised families have had the opportunity to produce music, dance and culture, and a few of them

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have gone on to become stars. There was a possibility toabsorb, to hear and to do stuff that was potentially richer
than just kicking a football about in the backstreets.
But it’s precisely these kinds of opportunities whichhave been dismantled since the 1990s and 2000s. Cultural
institutions cannot compensate for what the political distribution of resources has failed to do. They cannot redress
the shortfall from existing budgets, which have in any caseshrunk dramatically. It’s important to make demands ofcultural institutions. And then working together with these
institutions, direct those demands to the political powers ofa city, to complain to them that support has been massively
slashed in the last two decades.
We really are lagging behind in Germany. We can’t draw
on the groundwork already done in the US or Britain withrespect to their history of postcolonial critique, practiceand demands. It’s only two decades ago that I was laughedat when I said that something has to change, and that thisway of looking at people, tainted by racism and non-participation, has to stop. It’s absolute madness that we’retalking about institutions which with public funds can still
continue to exist in this dialectic we’re entangled in. Democratic progress moves way too slowly in our country – that’s
obvious when you look at the parliaments, at the media, atthe cultural institutions, in fact everywhere. In Germany it
is by no means a given that urban society is reflected in all
the institutions across all the different levels of the city.
Something that should be a given simply doesn’t happen.
We’re in a pitiful state and healing is necessary. Currently we’re subject to political backlashes. The processesof healing, care and repair which have taken place are being
reversed, discredited as sinister attacks by people plying
political correctness. Not a word about democracy, about
participation, about what needs to be accepted as a matter

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of course. That is to say: it’s not about identity politics. It’s
about democratic politics and a perception that we arediverse and we are many. And to create as broad a spectrum of culture as possible for this diversity. It really is that
simple.

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The Intervening Mind

184

Bitsy Knox
No silence is alone. Each silence is two. One isexpressible, lends itself to speech, and the otheris ineffable. That is what Ibn Arabi described as
the two silences: “The silence of the tongue andthe silence of the heart. Only the former can beformulated, and whether you keep silent or make anutterance, you speak.” And yet “between utterance
and silence”, between articulation and its antithesis,
al-Nifarri said, “there’s a liminal zone wherein lies
the mind’s grave and the graves of things”. This is
the threshold that propels our silences toward theircorporeal conditions.
Fady Joudah, “The Silence That Remains: On Translating the Poemsof Ghassan Zaqtan”, Los Angeles Review of Books, 15 August 2017

When you are very small, the people who take care of you
say things like, “No more sugar before dinner, you’ll ruin yourappetite”, and, “it’s late, isn’t it time for bed?” Their prompts
gradually become yours, moving inside of you, into yourcontrol. You learn to self-regulate by sending and receiving
messages to yourself from within the confines of your own
body-mind. Your language becomes private, covert, silent
to everyone but you. It condenses then, becomes mumbled
and subsentential, a shorthand, often called “inner speech”(as coined by Leo Vygotsky, in his 1934 theory of child development), but there are other names. With it, you may learn
to hear your own thoughts, transforming abstract mental
processes into syntactic expressions. You may learn to tellyourself what you need. You may learn to keep knowledge
to yourself. You may learn to rehearse what you say before
you say it, to commit details to your working memory (seeThe Intervening Mind185

the “Phonological Loop”, Baddeley and Hitch 1974, quoted
in Ben Alderson-Day & Fernyhough 2015). You may learn
to tell yourself who you are (at the University of Palermo
RoboticsLab in 2021, Pepper the robot passed the mirror
test – which assesses self-awareness – while engaged in
the following inner dialogue: “There are a robot, a mirror,
an apple.” “What properties has the mirror?” “It reflects
images but not itself!” “There could be an apple and a robot
in the mirror.” “There are not other robots here.” “The robot
in the mirror, it’s me.” [Pipitone and Chella 2021]). You may
learn to say many things at once. You may find that there
are many voices speaking your language: the reporter, flatly
reciting that the world’s glaciers are melting; the bookkeeper, noting your pastry consumption in accordance with
inflation; the cynic, reminding you why things don’t workout for you; the prince, writing sonnets to luxury; the radio,crooning three lines of that song, that song, that song; theeditor, asking, “but is that true?”; the slob, who doesn’twant to cook, wants to order pizza instead. You may feelthat your body is a dense and noisy place, like a visa office,bad acoustics, everyone needs something. You may take up
meditation, learn to hear the voices approach, hear them as
they grow louder, hear them as they pass, nod to them, isthat right? Yes. You may learn to hear the beginning, middle
and end of your breath. You may find yourself wanderingwith your voices and your breath, stopping on occasion tolisten, crouching low in observation. Together, you may findyourselves in diffuse conversations, sparking plans, enacting them beautifully.
Unvoiced and overtly quiet, these nascent words conjunct close to the surface of utterance, held by the mechanics of formulation: muscle and air. Beneath them, a milky
primordial depth, and the silent language of electricity.

The Intervening Mind

Pipitone, Arianna and Antonio
Chella 2021: Robot passes themirror test by inner speech, Robotics and Autonomous Systems,
vol. 144.

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Alderson-Day, Ben and Charles
Fernyhough 2015: Inner Speech:
Development, Cognitive Functions,Phenomenology, and Neurobiology,
Psychological Bulletin 141 (5),pp. 931–965.

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Katrin Dinges
How we approach and deal with touching says a lot about
us as a society. Socially, during the pandemic it was said: as
little touching as possible. Only first during the pandemic
did I even notice how important touches are for me. I asked
myself: how are the touches which are there impacting on
my health? And I realised that the touches which come fromthe heart are crucial for my sheer survival. Fundamental tosurviving, literally. I’ve had a few life-threatening situations
in my life, ones where my life hung by a thread. The connection between me and life held by the thread was finer thana strand of hair, it could’ve very easily torn. If I hadn’t hadthese essential touches, I wouldn’t have survived. I sufferedfrom the utter lack of touches during the pandemic.
That was the reason why I began to delve more deeply
into touching. Since the pandemic there is far less meeting of people personally. I’ve cut back a lot. Actually, I’m asociable person, but also belong to five or six risk groups.
I thought: if I’m feeling like this, then what about people
who don’t have a well-functioning social network, who don’t
have any assistance, who experience social exclusions? And
what about people who aren’t even aware of how important
touches are, and therefore don’t do anything to make surethat they’re in a healthy environment or make use of techniques enabling or reinforcing your own touching? The indirect consequences of the pandemic are thus much worse.
This fear of being touched, which we don’t speak about, andwhich far too few people take into consideration.
Touching affects us all, across all cultures, languages
and other boundaries, from the very first development
stage until death. When we call to mind that we can alreadyfeel and perceive physically at the embryonic age of justeight weeks, although we don’t even yet look like a humanTouch188

being – that’s fascinating. How early it begins. The auditive
sense develops much later, the sense of sight first when
we’re born. When the haptic faculty is in good order at the
beginning of life, and is experienced as harmonious andpositive, then you can become a fully-fledged member ofsociety. You actually don’t need the other senses. People
who are blind or deaf from birth get along somehow. The
sense of touch is the only sense that can never be missing
completely and never completely destroyed. Unless you die.
The big question is: how can touches be intensified? For
all of us, but above all for those who feel lonely. I believe thatthe gravest shortcoming of our society is that we become
isolated. Someone who feels alone has for the most parta glaring lack of touches. Loneliness is the lack of every
kind of relationship, including to oneself. When I’m good tomyself and feeling good about myself, then all is good withothers. Anyone who can feel good about themselves whenalone rarely feels lonely.
Touching is so simple and yet of such great importance.
For every single person and for the collective. I believe it’senormously important that we touch inwardly and outwardly and let ourselves be touched. That we let it happen.
It requires courage to come that close to one another. Even
to a complete stranger. I think it’s really important to beopen and outgoing about it. For me, that’s the most beautiful form of love there can be.

Trickery189

Diana Mammana, Lea Hartung, Margareta von Oswald,
Maryna Markova, Murat Dogan, Remzi Uyguner, Ulrike
Koch, Veit Hannemann, Željko Ristič
Ulrike Koch:
My work revolves around aligning application to reality.
An idea has to be fitted into a form. There’s a need to becreative in the formal framework. We call it report prose.
Certain words have to be used. Especially severe are theadministrative phases at the beginning and the end of ayear. You have to reinvent your work and the projects. Every
single year.
Diana Mammana:
We often work with people who don’t know how the structures of an institution function. They’ve never written an
invoice in their life. I’m only too glad to send them a proto­
type and explain how to go about invoicing. I think that’s
legitimate, otherwise many collaborations wouldn’t be possible.
Remzi Uyguner:
We have different projects and at the same time do politicalwork. The time spent doing political work is unpaid. As amigrant organisation we want to be heard and have a say in
our area. We want to ensure that we can transfer our valuable experiences in the project area to the political sphereand use them there.
Veit Hannemann:
Although I’m not an activist, as a social worker in community work, I am politically involved. When I want to help
people in society, then I do, even if it isn’t set out in a service
contract. Also, the term “emotional work” just occurred toTrickery

190

me. In my view, far too little attention is given to this aspectamongst social workers. In conversations with individuals,
you’re often confronted with emotions. But if I feel genuine
compassion, then I step into a risk zone. In moments likethese I have to playact. I need to do this professional acting
to protect myself and that’s what is known as emotional
work. I somehow have to relate to my feelings in a skilled
way. And that’s why it’s all the more necessary for me tohave an opportunity to process these emotions for myself.
The key word here is supervision.
Remzi Uyguner:
In my work at the housing section of the Antidiskriminierungsnetzwerk Berlin (ADNB) at TBB, I often have to takea risk when dealing with laws. Let’s say a person comes tome seeking advice and I tell them that there isn’t a flat available, and the person goes away – even though it is clear thatan experience of discrimination could be proven before acourt. I therefore try to explain that there’d be a chance to
get a flat if I exert some pressure. Concretely, this meansthat we’d go public with the case. Sometimes a flat thenbecomes available for the person after all.
Maryna Markov:
I ask myself how in my capacity as head of parental andfamily education at the Kurdish parents’ association Yekmal
e.V. I can create spaces which match my interests and passions. I’ve come to realise that coordinating activities takeup almost all my time. Everything that interests me justvanishes.
Margareta von Oswald:
For me, to play a trick also means to make things appear
real which are quite possibly not real. I mean, magic can

Trickery191

be whatever changes a situation and thus enables you to
do your work differently. In my work as a researcher at theuniversity, it’s quite often about dismantling hierarchies.
Between different forms of knowledge, between disciplines,
within the university, between different professional positions. How do you get everyone into one room and speaking
with one another without necessarily being aware of theirrespective positions? I’ve found that this works pretty wellonline. This offers a possibility to sit down together virtuallyand talk to one another in small groups. And then, it isn’t
always the professors who do all the talking.
Željko Ristič:
It’s interesting what you’ve just said about rhetorical tricks,
Margareta. We also set up illusory worlds sometimes. Withthe youths we formulate a vision and we work towards it
together. That’s a ruse to induce them to muster the energy
to realise their potential. They learn to keep specific rules
and how to believe in a goal. And if they develop a real
enthusiasm for the social domain, for example, then that’sa real bonus for society. The one thing they can’t afford is tobe paralysed by a fear of failure. That’s always the problem.
Murat Dogan:
We also play tricks with words. Our society is obsessed withmust: you must go to school, you must be there, you must
perform, you must work. When they’re with us, the youths
mustn’t do a thing, nothing at all. The only must is that they
develop their own ideas, find their own thing, and then say:
“Hey, I’d like to try that out.” They decide how they’ll spend
the imposed hours of community service, not us. We try to
see the abilities a person has and not demand what society
usually wants. Then real relationships are formed, and that’s
worth its weight in gold these days. Many of the youths

Trickery

192

don’t have good relationships with their parents or teachers. But there’s a great longing for relationships and a need
to be connected with other people.
Lea Hartung:
Murat, I’ve just mulled over that as well. Weakness is not a
shortcoming. We all have some weaknesses somewhere.
That’s not just a problem facing marginalised groups.

Utopia193

Niloufar Tajeri
I have a very ambivalent relationship to the concept of
future. For me, the concept serves as the foundation for theidea of growth peddled in the capitalist narrative of a society irreversibly driven forward by progress. I see speculative thinking-into-the-future as something that drives us tobe reductionist and to push complexities to the side. In fact,
we need to focus our attention far more on the present,
to look at it more closely. Here I am referring specificallyto Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ concept of the expanded
present and the compressed future.
Much of what appears utopian is emerging in the present. The categories and the logics of planning with which we
act in the present are very reductive. We have to find strategies, and indeed also words, to understand our present,
to expand it, to complicate it. We actually have to consider
each and every situation very precisely: what can be done
and how, and above all, what’s already been done and how?
And in doing so, build on the existing and not push things to
the side in order to work the future in a specific direction. I
think in fact that all solutions already exist. These solutions
have also been already tested out and already thought andput into practice, in microcosm. We have to concentratemuch more on these things and reflect on their scalability. I think that the referendum on the Tempelhofer Feld issuch a concrete utopia that points to the future. Actually,it should have been replicated everywhere and suitably
scaled. Or the example of Habersaathstraße, where a vacantresidential building was made usable for homeless persons
by activists. This utopia must be supported. Instead, theGreen Party’s head of building planning has just signed thedemolition order.

Utopia

194

These are the basis for corrective adjustments. We
observe things where we could say: there’s already autopia here, we have concrete, future-oriented, sustainable,socially just actions here. These deserve to be reinforced,
but today they are being destroyed. We have to give far
more attention to this present, for it is in the present that
utopia lies hidden.

196

197

Appendix

Interlocutors

199

Alina Georgescu is a queer, non-binary/fluid personof colour, trained boatbuilder, educationalist, Reiki
energy therapist and since 2018 councillor at the
Antidiskriminierungsnetzwerk des Türkischen Bund in
Berlin-Brandenburg (TBB).
Andreas Heinz is professor of psychiatry and director of
the Department for Psychiatry and Psychotherapy at theCharité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Campus Mitte.
Anna Yeboah is the coordinator of the Berlin project
Dekoloniale – Memory Culture in the City.
Beatrice von Bismarck is a German art historian,
curator and publicist. She is professor of art history
and visual studies at the Hochschule für Grafik und
Buchkunst – Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig.
Bitsy Knox lives and works as an artist, poet and radio
maker in Berlin. Her show Something Like has beenbroadcast since 2019 on Cashmere Radio and 96.5 CHFR
Hornby Island Community Radio in British Columbia,
Canada.
Carl Luis Lange studies musicology and European
ethnology at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. He
created the radio show Intimate Connections as part of
Mindscapes and provided technological guidance for theseminar Repair, Fractures, Divisions: The Histories andPresents of the Gropius Bau.

Interlocutors

200

Carolin Ochs is a social worker who since 2015 has
advised people without health insurance how to gain
access to the German health system, currently at theclearance office for non-insured persons.
Christine Wong Yap is an artist who explores theaesthetic potential of social relationships in her work.
She involves communities in processes of participative
research to study the various dimensions of psychologicalwellbeing, for example resilience and belonging.
Danielle Olsen is Cultural Partnerships Lead at Wellcome.
She is a producer, curator, filmmaker and writer.
Deiara Kouto is a designer and researcher. In her researchshe examines the production of history and design
cultures in West African and European contexts. She iscurrently working as an outreach assistant at the Gropius
Bau.
Diana Mammana is a cultural scientist and curator.
Dilay Dagdelen is the director at the family centre of
the Kurdish parents’ association Yekmal e.V. in BerlinKreuzberg.
Edna Bonhomme works as a historian of science anda freelance author in Berlin. In her culture journalism
she analyses how humans variously deal with science,
epidemics, culture, race and gender.

Interlocutors

201

Felicia Boma Lazaridou is a psychologist, doctoralcandidate at the Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin andresearch assistant in the National Discrimination andRacism Monitor (NaDiRa) at the Deutsches Zentrum fürIntegrations- und Migrationsforschung.
The Feminist Health Care Research Group (FGRG) is an
artistic research project that since 2015 has developed
exhibitions and workshops as well as publishedpamphlets. Their practice aims to reveal self-empowering
perspectives on health care. At present, the FGRG is
made up of Julia Bonn, artist, bodyworker and mother,and Inga Zimprich, artist, assistant in the field of
multisensory impairment and mother.
Franziska Lentes worked, as part of Mindscapes, with thevisual research unit on mental health in Berlin together
with Jan Stöckel, Margareta von Oswald and Nassim
Mehran.
Gülcan Nitsch is the founder and director of the nonprofit association Yeşil Çember (green circle), an
organisation engaged in barrier-free environmental
education accessible for all people in Germany.
hn. lyonga works as a queer BPoC curator and author
at the intersection of postcolonial literature and criticalrace theory. His interest is focused on anti-Black racism,
language in Black speculative fiction and the fixation ofland as infrastructure.

Interlocutors

202

Jan Stöckel is a maker of documentary films andanthropologist. As part of Mindscapes, he worked on thevisual research into the topic of mental health in Berlin
together with Franziska Lentes, Margareta von Oswald
and Nassim Mehran.
Kader Attia is an artist and curator whose longstanding
research interest and artistic practice revolves aroundthe idea of repair.
Katrin Dinges is an artist, art and culture mediator andlyric poet.
Kerstin Kühn is a voluntary assistant at the
WillkommensGemeinde in der St. Lukas Kirche in Berlin.
Kim Wichera is an artist living in Berlin who also works in
the Weglaufhaus, an anti-psychiatric facility.
Kirsten Schubert is a general practitioner who cofounded
the Geko Stadtteil-Gesundheits-Zentrum in BerlinNeukölln where she also works.
Lea Hartung works in the Zentral- und Landesbibliothek
Berlin. She is responsible for outreach and community
projects at the Kreuzberg location.
Lee Modupeh Anansi Freeman is a Black,transcontinental, transgender, multidisciplinary artist
living in Berlin, as well as a creative event producer
and community organiser. Lee breaks chains and is astoryteller, somatic healer and educator. At times Lee is agood witch, at others a bad bxtch.

Interlocutors

203

Magnus Elias Rosengarten works mainly as an author
and curator in the areas of performance, discourse andfilm/video, most recently for the Gropius Bau in Berlin.
He has written and produced for Contemporary And(C&), Artforum, the Berlin Biennale and arte/ZDF. He has
also presented works at the Kraine Theater, New York
City (2016), the California African American Museum, Los
Angeles (2018) and the Ballhaus Naunynstraße, Berlin(2023).
Mandu dos Santos Pinto is an activist, artist, architect
and urban planner who focuses his work on developing
sustainable solutions for cities in the Global South.
Margareta von Oswald is an anthropologist and curator.
Mary Buteyn is pastor at the WillkommensGemeinde in
der St. Lukas Kirche in Berlin. New arrivals and migrants
from different cultures and nations meet here.
Maryna Markova is head of parental and family education
at the Kurdish parents’ association Yekmal e.V. in BerlinKreuzberg.
Mazda Adli is a psychiatrist and stress researcher,head of the Fliedner Klinik Berlin and directorof the mood disorders research group at the
Department for Psychiatry and Psychotherapy of theCharité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Campus Mitte.
Michael Bosnjak is research director and head of
Epidemiology and Health Monitoring Department at
the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin and professor forpsychological research methods at the Universität Trier.

Interlocutors

204

Interlocutors

205

Murat Dogan works at outreach.berlin – Mobile undsozialraumorientierte Jugendarbeit – area 1. He was bornand grew up in that neighbourhood and has lived there
for twenty-six years. He moves a street further on every
ten years.

Remzi Uyguner is a board member at the Türkischer
Bund in Berlin-Brandenburg, a civil society umbrellaorganisation founded by migrants of Turkish backgroundthirty years ago. One focal point is antidiscrimination
work.

Michael Westrich is a cultural anthropologist who works
at the intersection of urban practice, artistic-film researchand urban development.

Shermin Langhoff is theatre director and artistic director
at the Maxim Gorki Theater.

Nassim Mehran is an urban sociologist and architect.
As part of Mindscapes, she worked on the visual research
into mental health in Berlin together with Franziska
Lentes, Jan Stöckel and Margareta von Oswald.
Nikolas Brummer is an artist and curator living in Berlin.
He is the cofounder of PlusX, a project space involvedin performance, text and sound. PlusX has existed since2017, also as a radio show on Cashmere Radio.
Niloufar Tajeri is an architect, activist and theorist ofarchitecture. She is cofounder of the urban political group
Initiative Hermannplatz.
Norma Kusserow is the psychiatry officer at the Berlin
Senatsverwaltung für Wissenschaft, Gesundheit, Pflege
und Gleichstellung.
Pasquale Virginie Rotter is a somatic coach, author,
trainer and process facilitator for empowerment, as well
as a lecture performer and gardener.

Stephanie Rosenthal is an art historian and curator. She
was director of the Gropius Bau in Berlin from 2018 to2022.
Susanne Da-Costa-Badu works at the Wassertor e.V.,a neighbourhood centre in Berlin-Kreuzberg. She is
responsible for the creative and garden areas.
Tim Ünsal works in the Mehrgenerationenhaus
Gneisenaustraße, a multigenerational neighbourhood
centre in Berlin-Kreuzberg. He is involved in all areas ofsocial work there.
Tzoa is a gender non-conform trans Person of Colour whocelebrates tofu masculinity, a practitioner of traditional
Chinese and Daoist medicine and a founding member ofCasa Kuà.
Ulrike Hamann is the managing director of the Berliner
Mieterverein, Berlin’s central tenants’ association. The
trained metal fabricator and political scientist cofounded
the tenants’ initiative Kotti & Co and helped organise theBerlin rent referendum.

Interlocutors

Acknowledgements

Ulrike Kluge is professor of psychological andmedical integration and migrant research at theCharité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin and director of the
migration and health section at the Berliner Institut fürIntegrations- und Migrationsforschung.

Abbie DoranAida Baghernejad
Alaleh Shafie-Sabet
Alex Harris
Alfred Freeborn
Alina Buchberger
Alissa Dovgucic
Alex Waidmann
Alina Georgescu
Amelie Hornung
André Merfort
Andreas Heinz
Andreas Lechthaler
Anja Engel
Anja Rigamonti
Anna Viehoff
Anna Yeboah
Anne Rediger
Anthea Longo
Arno Deister
Arthur Heckmann
Astrid Dulich
Aurélien Calpas
Avinash Kumar
Aynur Türkel
Ayşe DemirAyşe Midikogl
Bahar Kaygusuz
Barbara Klemm
Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz
Beatrice von Bismarck
Beck Smith
Bert Schülke
Birgit Oehmcke

Ulrike Koch is director of the intercultural family centre
tam in Berlin-Kreuzberg.
Veit Hannemann was long active in community workand currently works for the city district coordination at
the Nachbarschaftshaus Urbanstraße, a neighbourhood
centre in Berlin-Kreuzberg. His main task is to network
between local initiatives and social organisations on alllevels.
Željko Ristič works as a social worker withoutreach.berlin – Mobile und sozialraumorientierte
Jugendarbeit – area 1, and was himself with outreach.
berlin in Berlin-Moabit as a youth.

207

Bitsy Knox
Brook Andrew
Carl Luis Lange
Carla Oevermann
Carolin Ochs
Carolin Schmitte
Cecilie Waagner
Falkenstrøm
Cem Taşdelen
Christin Eberhardt
Christina Scheib
Christine Wong Yap
Christin Haubenreißer
Chiara Alessandra
Middeldorf
Cigdem Eroglu
Clare Molloy
Colin Hacklander
Daniel Cape
Daniela WeberDavid Buteyn
Daniel Oxenhandler
Danielle Olsen
Deiara Kouto
Denise Bade
Diana Peitz
Dilay Dagdelen
Dora Vargha
DJ Shlucht
Edna Bonhomme
Ekaterina Vassilevski
Elena Klass
Elena Montini
Elias Hanzer

Acknowledgements

Elīna Bresle
Elisa Tinterri
Elisabeth Arslan
Elke Kater
Ellen Erhardt
Emma Jelinski
Esengül Çalışkan
Esther Kaack
Esther-Maria Antão
Evelyn Riegel
Farahnaz Hatam
Felicia Boma Lazaridou
Felix Bentlin
Filiz Behrendt
Flavia Cahn
Franz König
Franziska Anastasia Lentes
Franziska Taffelt
Frederike Nolte
Gabriela Kapfer
Gabriele Salzmann
Giacomo Gianetta
Grace Gatera
Gülcan Nitsch
Gülizar Ince
Hatice Deniz
Helmut Maier
Hiroko Kikuchi
hn. lyonga
Huong Nam Nguyen Thi
Ilona Stöcker
Inga Zimprich
Injonge Karangwa
Irena Kern

208

Ivana Domezat
Jack Snow
Jacqueline Annika Khelouf
Jan HöckJan Stöckel
Jennifer Hart
Joe Kiely
Joerg Fingerhut
Johanna Schindler
Joseph Kamaru
Juba
Judith Galka
Julia Bonn
Julia Grosse
Kader Attia
Kadriye Sezenoglu
KamaraKat Ripea
Kate Martin
Katharina Heise
Katharina Küster
Katharina Schmidt
Kathrin Steinborn
Katrin Dinges
Ken Arnold
Kerstin Kühn
Kim Teys Beavers
Kim Wichera
Kirsten Schubert
Klaus Bock
Kristian Moltke Martiny
Kukiko Nobori
Lara Keuck
Laura Fiorio

Acknowledgements

Laura Scholaske
Lars Holdgate
Lea Hartung
Lee Modupeh Anansi
Freeman
Lewis McClenaghan
Linus Lütcke
Lisa Malich
Lou Drago
Lorenz Fidel Huchthausen
Lucas Liccini
Luis Kürschner
Luise Haubenreiser
Magnus Elias Rosengarten
Mandu dos Santos Pinto
Maria Assmann
Maria González-Leal
Marina Naprushkina
Mary Buteyn
Maryna Markova
Masonde Luteta
Matteo Spano
Mazda Adli
Megan Challis
Melissa Gül Halil
Meral Cendal
Mette Kleinsteuber
Michael Makembe
Michael Westrich
Michael Top
Mine Senol
Miranda Wolpert
Miriam Ewering
Mona J. Zwinzscher

209

Monique Machicao y
Priemer Ferrufino
Morten Kristensen
Murat Dogan
Nadin Gaasch
Nassim Mehran
Natalie Schütze
Natasha Ginwala
Nejla Yologlu
Nergis Kismir
Nestor Jelipe
Nicole Rankers
Nikolas Brummer
Niloufar Tajeri
Norma Kusserow
Nurhayat Tazegül
Oriana Walker
Pasquale Virginie Rotter
Patrick Bieler
Paul Bowman
Pauline Meyer
Peter Kilroy
Priya BasilRebecca Jacobs
Remzi Uyguner
Rhea Newman
Richard Hartlaub
Rohan Patankar
Roman Klarfeld
Ross Alexander
Samie Blasingame
Sarah Crowe
Sarah Hegenbart
Sarah Marks

Acknowledgements

Sarnt UtamachoteSharon Macdonald
Sarnt UtamachoteSebastian Köpf
Sehnaz Layikel-Prange
SERAFINE1369
Sevgi Erkabalci
Sevil Rüzgar
Shani Leiderman
Shermin Langhoff
Simone Schmaus
Stanton Taylor
Stefan Landwehr
Stephanie Rosenthal
Susanne Da-Costa-Badu
Tapes
Tim Ünsal
Timo Schmidt
Thomas Götz
Thomas Schnalke
Thomas Wittmütz
Tzoa
Ulrich Tempel
Ulrike Hamann
Ulrike Kluge
Ulrike Koch
Veit Hannemann
Vera Dvale
Wiebke RössigYara Kloock
Yasmin Merei
Yori SchultkaŽeljko Ristič

210

Image Credits

211©Alex Waidmann, Stresemannstraße, 1957, pp. 82/83)©Alissa Dovgucic, Carl Luis Lange, Emma Jelinski,
Topographie des Terrors, 2022, pp. 182/183)©Alissa Dovgucic, Carl Luis Lange, Emma Jelinski,
Topographie des Terrors, 2022, pp. 196/197©Barbara Klemm, Gropius Bau ruin, after 1945, p. 87©Barbara Klemm, Gropius Bau ruin, after 1945, pp. 98/99©Barbara Klemm, Gropius Bau ruin, after 1945, pp. 120/121©Barbara Klemm, Gropius Bau ruin, June 1989, pp. 174/175©Helmut Maier, view from the roof of the Gropius Bau,
1981, pp. 154/155©Helmut Maier, view from the roof of the Gropius Bau,
1981, pp. 160/161©Helmut Maier, view from the roof of the Gropius Bau,
1981, pp. 170/171©Jan Höck, Gropius Bau, 1977, p. 144©Laura Fiorio, Resonance Room Gropius Bau, 2022,
pp. 12/13©Michael Topp, Gropius Bau atrium, before 1977, p. 132©Michael Topp, Gropius Bau atrium, before 1977, p. 137

Text Credits

212

What Can We Do Together That We Couldn’t Do Alone?
was written by Danielle Olsen, assisted by Margareta vonOswald, Pauline Meyer and Richard Hartlaub.
The Museum as a Living Organism was developed froma conversation between Margareta von Oswald, Diana
Mammana and Stephanie Rosenthal held on 27 February2023.

Text Credits

213

The entry System Relevance is compiled fromcontributions to the panel discussion Claims for a
Neighbourhood Policy. Berlin Conversations on Mental
Health with Anna Yeboah, Magnus Elias Rosengarten,
Mazda Adli and Shermin Langhoff, moderated by Aida
Baghernejad, held on 15 October 2022 in the Gropius Bau.
Editing: Margareta von Oswald

Stretching, Disturbing, Expanding the Museum is basedon a conversation between Margareta von Oswald,
Diana Mammana and Beatrice von Bismarck held on 3
November 2022.

The entries Approach, At Work, Simply There, Leisure,
Perfectionism, Optimisation and Trickery are compiled
from the conversations on mental health in Kreuzberg.
Editing: Diana Mammana and Margareta von Oswald.
Assisted by: Lea Hartung and Deiara Kouto

after the song is based on a script for the video
performance what comes after the song? (2021) by
Nikolas Brummer, who produced the segment raw audio
as part of the Intimate Connections radio show.

The entries Relations, Common Ground and Accessare compiled from conversations held as part of thegarden project and the conversations on mental health inKreuzberg. Editing: Diana Mammana

The Intervening Mind by Bitsy Knox describes theconceptual framework of her programme of the same
name that is part of the Intimate Connections radio show.

The entries Touch, Movement, Discriminations, Present,
Legislation, Contact, Norms, Spaces, For Each Other,Stress, Assistance, Utopia and Care are compiled fromthe film research on mental health in Berlin. Editing:Margareta von Oswald and Nassim Mehran

Being Moved is a text written by Priya Basil, Mindscapes
Writer in Residence.
Belonging is a text by Christine Wong Yap, MindscapesInternational Artist in Residence.

Paul Bowman translated all entries except after the song,
Being Moved, Belonging, The Intervening Mind and What
Can We Do Together That We Couldn’t Do Alone?

Glossary

214

AfD:
The Alternative for Germany (AfD) is a right-wing populist
political party in Germany.
Amerika-Gedenkbibliothek:
The Amerika-Gedenkbibliothek is a public librarylocated in Berlin-Kreuzberg. It is part of the Zentral- undLandesbibliothek Berlin.
Antidiskriminierungsnetzwerk (ADNB) at TBB:
The Anti-Discrimination Network Berlin is a project of
the Turkish Union in Berlin-Brandenburg e.V. (TBB) and
was founded in 2003. The ADNB of the TBB is fundedby the Landesstelle für Gleichbehandlung-gegen
Diskriminierung (LADS) within the framework of the
programme against right-wing extremism, racism andanti-Semitism of the Senate of Berlin.
Berlin Museum:The Berlin Museum was a museum of urban and cultural
history in Berlin. It existed from 1962 to 1995 and was
located in the Kollegienhaus, Lindenstraße 14, in BerlinKreuzberg.
Berliner Festspiele:
The Berliner Festspiele, founded in 1951, is amultidisciplinary cultural institution that realises andpresents festivals, exhibitions and other event formats
in the Haus der Berliner Festspiele, the Gropius Bau andmany other Berlin venues.

Glossary

215

Bauhütte:
The Bauhütte hosts numerous NGOs, initiatives andassociations, coordinates and curates their activities
and serves as a performance venue for its own or guest
discourse series, cultural productions and participatory
formats with a migration and urban policy orientation.
Hanau:The Hanau shootings occurred on 19 February 2020. A
far-right extremist killed ten people and himself in the cityof Hanau. The massacre is considered an act of terrorism
by German state officials.
Heilehaus e.V.:
The Heilehaus project was created in 1981 and since thenhas endeavoured to offer various services to heal the
body and mind through natural methods, particularly
for socially disadvantaged people. It is located in BerlinKreuzberg.
Humboldt Forum:
The Humboldt Forum describes itself as “a place forculture and science, for exchange in debate”. It is
located in Berlin-Mitte, and hosts exhibition of four
institutions: the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz
with the Ethnologisches Museum and the Museum für
Asiatische Kunst der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin, theStadtmuseum Berlin together with Kulturprojekte Berlin,
the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and the Stiftung
Humboldt Forum im Berliner Schloss. The building
reconstructs large parts of the facades of the historical
Berlin Palace, which was demolished in 1950.

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Karstadt:
Karstadt Warenhaus GmbH, based in Essen, was a
German department store franchise.
Kunstgewerbeschule:
The School of Applied Arts and Crafts was an artsand craft teaching institution that began operating in
Berlin-Charlottenburg in 1899. After several changes oflocation, realignments and rebrandings, the school wasincorporated into the Hochschule für Bildende Künste
(now Universität der Künste Berlin) in 1971.
Kolonie am Flughafen:
The Kolonie am Flughafen is an allotment garden in
Berlin-Tempelhof.
Mehrgenerationenhaus Gneisenaustraße:
The Mehrgenerationenhaus Gneisenaustraße serves
as a neighbourhood meeting point where people of all
generations and cultures come together.
Nachbarschaftsgarten Kreuzberg:
Since March 2019, the project has been developing aneighbourhood garden in the Kolonie am Flughafen e.V.
with refugees, mainly from Syria and Afghanistan, andolder people from Berlin-Kreuzberg.
outreach.berlin:
outreach.berlin works with the concept of mobile andsocio-spatially oriented youth work. The project exists ineleven Berlin districts with very different approaches.

Glossary

217

Referendum Tempelhofer Feld:
The Tempelhofer Feld is a former airfield that was
opened to the public for recreational and leisure use in2010. In a referendum held in 2014, the people of Berlin
voted against peripheral development and in favour ofpreserving Tempelhofer Feld in its current state for themost part.
tam – Interkulturelles Familienzentrum:
The intercultural family centre tam is part of the
Diakonisches Werk Berlin Stadtmitte e.V. It offers awide range of opportunities for learning together, forcounselling and for supporting families. The Diakonisches
Werk is an institution of the Protestant church whichtakes care of people holistically in different emergency
situations and promotes social services in society.
Türkischer Bund in Berlin Brandenburg:
The Turkish Union in Berlin-Brandenburg (TBB) is a
non-party, non-denominational, democratic umbrellaorganisation of both individuals and organisations from
Berlin and Brandenburg. As a migrant organisation ofprimarily people of Turkish origin, the TBB works together
with administrative institutions and other organisations
for the legal, social and political equality and treatment ofpeople with a migration background.

Glossary

218

Völkerkundemuseum:
The museum was founded in 1873 as the Königliches
Museum für Völkerkunde. In 1886, the museum opened
at Königgrätzer Straße 120 (today: Stresemannstraße)on the corner of Prinz-Albrecht-Straße (today:
Niederkirchnerstraße) in Berlin-Kreuzberg. The building
was partly destroyed during the Second World War
and demolished in 1961. Referred to today as theEthnologisches Museum, the collections are housed in
Dahlem, and the museum’s exhibitions are presented in
the recently opened Humboldt Forum.
WillkommensGemeinde in der St. Lukas Kirche:
WillkommensGemeinde in der St. Lukas Kirche is a
project of the Berliner Stadtmission e.V. New arrivals andmigrants from different cultures and nations meet here.
Weglaufhaus:
The Weglaufhaus Villa Stöckle is an anti-psychiatric crisis
centre in Berlin.
Zentral- und Landesbibliothek Berlin:
With a total of over 3.5 million individual media andcurrently 1.5 million visitors a year, the Central and State
Library Berlin is Germany’s largest public library.

Imprint

219

This book is published on the occasion of the exhibition
YOYI! Care, Repair, Heal at Gropius Bau Berlin,
16 September 2022 to 15 January 2023.
©2023: The editors, authors and Verlag derBuchhandlung Walther und Franz König, Köln
Editors:
Diana Mammana, Margareta von Oswald
Copyediting:
Sarah Quigley
Translation of the German original texts:
Paul Bowman
Design:Studio Hanli
Typeface:
HAL Four Grotesk
Production:
Nicole Rankers
Print:		
Druckerei Kettler, Bönen/Westfalen
First published by:
Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther und Franz König
Ehrenstraße 4, D-50672 Köln

Imprint

220

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche
Nationalbibliothek: The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists
this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie;
detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at
http://dnb.d-nb.de
This book is published under a Creative Commons
CC BY 4.0 License. All images are reproduced withthe permission of the rights-holders and are expressly
excluded from the Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 Licencecovering the rest of this publication. Permission for reuseof images should be sought from the rights-holders.
Attribution should include the following information:
Diana Mammana, Margareta von Oswald (eds.): The
Resonant Museum. Berlin Conversations on Mental
Health, Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther undFranz König, 2023 (CC BY 4.0).
Printed in Germany

Imprint

Distribution:
EuropeBuchhandlung Walther König
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English edition
ISBN 978-3-7533-0480-9

221Imprint

This publication has been made possible thanks to the
support of:Mindscapes is Wellcome’s international culture
programme about mental health.
Project partners:

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