The Südliche Neustadt district is known for its vacancy and stigmatization, but also for its vibrancy and high proportion of residents with a migration background – and this is what makes it so exciting for art in public spaces. Can we succeed in winning over the many spaces, squares, walls, people and ideas for interdisciplinary art projects where theater, muralism, urban dance, world music and virtual reality come together?
For us, the promising answer lies in the establishment of a Community Art Center, i.e. a permanent place for art in the district. It should act as a contact point, magnet, gallery, stage and network for an audience that is currently still worryingly underserved by art and culture. The first project year 2024 was to be used to develop a logo for the CaC and to implement three projects in public spaces that deal with issues in the neighborhood.
Negative prefabricated housing stereotypes can be deconstructed and creatively transformed. That’s why we worked with the artist Martin Schuster (www.martinschuster.net). Together with children from the neighborhood, he collected garbage that the residents found disturbing and transformed it into sculptures. The ‘garbage monsters’ were then presented as part of the “Back to the Future – A Play Street” festival (www.kaleidoskop-suedpark.de). In October 2024, the monsters will make another appearance at the “Beyond Plattenbau” exhibition, when topics such as the stigmatization of prefabricated buildings will be addressed.
In midsummer, we transformed the southern part of Neustadt into a playground in which rigid everyday perceptions were loosened up with fresh thoughts and expanded with imaginative visions. The street artist Mike Okay (www.mikeokay.com), who grew up in the district, used memories and anecdotes from his childhood and youth in the form of lyrical texts and small-scale street art images, which met with a lively response from the residents. The artist’s stories spread through a QR code that was distributed on stickers in the neighborhood.
freiraumgalerie.com/suedparkokay.pdf
On 16 August, we celebrated the cultural diversity of the neighborhood with a block party where residents could experience the power of community art up close, with Arabic food prepared by the residents, a breakdance jam, hands-on activities for children and families and the vernissage of a large-scale mural by the muralism collective Aphenoah (www.aphenoah.com), we transformed the neuralgic point of the “Am Treff” neighborhood into a place of visual and dance dialogue for a day. A live band from Mannheim provided groovy rhythms to which invited dancers from Berlin, Dresden, Braunschweig, Leipzig, Venezuela and, of course, Halle moved. The ritual space of the Cypher ensured that the audience were not passive consumers of culture, but were directly involved in the event. The block party was a joint project of CaC, Wall & Space e.V, Freiraumgalerie and Breathe In – Break Out!
“Providing impetus for the establishment of a “Community Art Center Südliche Neustadt” is a project of Wall & Space e.V. We would like to thank the sponsors of the project, the Freudenberg Foundation.