You certainly can’t compare the vacancy of exhibition spaces with the vacancy of apartments. Nevertheless, they do have something in common: it’s about unused space that is needed.
We therefore decided to issue an open call to fill our special exhibition space, which was temporarily vacant after the Stuttgart – Afghanistan exhibition. It was deliberately intended to be low-threshold:
Fancy a new space? What is your idea? How does it fit into the Linden-Museum?
Fortunately, these three questions, posed at the beginning of the summer vacations, did not disappear into the summer slump, but were met with a great response. We received 25 submissions – from the independent dance and theater scene, visual artists, civil society actors and associations. We ultimately selected ten projects, which we will host from October to December 2024 under the FreiRaum (meaning: FreeSpace) label.
It was interesting to note that our museum was almost never linked to the collection level, but almost exclusively to themes: Identity, migration, conscious use of natural resources, gender, decolonization, polyphony or belonging. For us, this is a nice sign that the work we have started in recent years, especially in the LindenLAB, is being noticed and associated with us.
A few examples:
The Syrian network Enab Baladi e. V. kicked things off at FreiRaum: In an engaging discussion with lawyer Nahla Osman, the focus was on the legal and personal challenges faced by migrants. The audience was largely made up of young Syrians, for most of whom it was their first contact with our museum. It was a good place for them that afternoon.
A number of dance and theater projects submitted made it clear that the lack of space (for rehearsals and performances) is a major problem for the independent scene in Stuttgart.
In feminist dating, the silent ladies*_ took a humorous look at the patriarchal nature of romance and came to the sobering conclusion: “Disney has given me unrealistic expectations of love.” In the incredibly intense dance performance alieNation, Cie. Zeit/Geist explored the feeling of alienation. The lost connection to our bodies, to nature, to real togetherness becomes a piercing void. Does alienation lead to a disembodied society that is purely subject to the dictates of expediency and functioning?
Together with BLOMST! gUG für Kunst und kulturelle Teilhabe, Johannes Blattner created a dance piece about love and belonging for school classes: HERZrasen used changing dance styles to provide a platform for conversations and reflections on diversity and different forms of love and partnership. The piece celebrated its premiere at FreiRaum before it can now be booked by schools.
Thawing permafrost soils, melting ice sheets, rising sea levels, extreme weather and drinking water shortages: the catastrophic effects of climate change often hit the people who contribute the least the hardest. However, non-European perspectives are often ignored. The newly composed works by the Indonesian duo Tarawangsawelas and the indigenous composer Melody McKiver from Canada set musical memorials for water as part of the sound installation Bodies of Water. The PODIUM Esslingen exhibition project was combined with a visually stunning staged concert.
Boglárka Balassa also wants to draw attention to environmental destruction in her research-based artistic practice: she deals with the use and processing of natural materials, their change over time, their origin and their source. She seeks out places where these traditions are still alive. Her works are created in direct contact with nature, she uses plant-based textile dyes for her objects and also creates a kind of documentation of the plants used in videos. The works for her exhibition Colours Under Our Steps were created during an ifa-funded residency in Armenia.
Cuban artist Karina Pino Gallardo’s approach is just as processual and documentary as Balassa’s. She presented the prelude to her long-term project Letters for the Future: What is the future? How do we imagine it? Who will inhabit the earth in 100 years? How can we have a dialog with a time in which we will no longer exist? Four women with a migration background – Nur Alamir, Marielvis Calzada, Elham Kanaani and herself – wrote letters to a tomorrow they do not know. They are sensitive personal and at the same time political reflections on their own world that they want to leave behind. Each letter is a trace thrown forward, a possible archival object in a future museum of the past. Four personal pieces that are part of a larger mosaic that Pino Gallardo is planning over the next few years. These women opened their world to us.
The Connect 0711 – House of Cultures project laboratory of the City of Stuttgart’s Department for Integration Policy had its own space for two months. In various formats, the lab dealt with transcultural encounters, empowerment and raising awareness of racism and cultural appropriation. We hope that the project, which attracted a very diverse audience but is once again without a home for the time being, will soon find new premises.
We had defined goals for FreiRaum: First of all, we wanted to create space for committed people in the city. Of course, we also wanted to revitalize the museum, expand, diversify and rejuvenate our audience through a new offering and build new networks based on personal encounters. The spaces were filled with socially relevant content, redefined and surprising. For some artists and visitors, it was their first encounter with our museum or the institution of the museum in general. The feedback was positive, honest and encouraging: FreiRaum was definitely a contribution to a necessary opening of our museum, from which we should take a lot with us.
As a museum, you are a “cultural tanker”: a large ship with a heavy cargo that always heads for the same ports on fixed routes. FreiRaum was also a self-experiment in throwing certainties overboard, becoming more agile, seeing who else is at sea and getting involved. It wasn’t completely free of conflict internally – we had to get through a few gusts of wind together as a team in the organization. But that also brought us together – and we learned how to navigate around storms more easily in future. And the times spent on the sun deck clearly outweighed the others anyway.
Dienstag bis Samstag, 10 – 17 Uhr
Sonn- und Feiertage, 10 – 18 Uhr
