Art and Concrete Intervention

Intervention Concerning (Un)employment
Wochenklausur

Kunstamt Kreuzberg and NGBK, Berlin,Germany - 1998

For this project, WochenKlausur decided to focus upon the question of unemployment respectively job creation as one of the most urgent fields of the ongoing political and economic debates - worldwide and also locally in Berlin as the growing new capital of re-united Germany. Kreuzberg is the Berlin district with the highest rate of unemployment, the highest figures when it comes to immigrants, mirrored in the media as a place of social decay, inspite of a strong tradition of integrative initiatives and a dense structure of welfare facilities.

Facing these facts, WochenKlausur elaborated a concept aiming at a close connection between the actual situation of unemployed people and their very individual needs on one hand and the development of new perspectives or working fields on the other. Consequently, the so called Workstation consists of two parts:

1. InfoTank - a meeting space of advisement and assistance for the local unemployed, to be built up at least in German and Turkish language to start with, due to the social and ethnical structure of the area;
2. ThinkTank - a model thought to bring together highly motivated and engaged professionals from different kinds of backgrounds, ready to face the challenge of developing consistent and practicable examples of new fields of employment. The idea is to form groups of five or six for each new case. At the first meeting, the participants agree upon the specific goal and a time schedule. For the starting group, WochenKlausur will invite the first interested participants. For the long-term assistance of the ThinkTank, a co-ordination team will be in charge of inviting further groups. The co-ordinators keep in constant close contact with existing initiatives and institutions, as well as with the public administration area and representatives of commercial enterprises, in order to define possible intervention fields. Adequate public relations and documentation of the outcoming results are also part of their responsibilities.

The implementation of the Workstation itself already implies the creation of four new jobs: two for the InfoTank and further two for the ThinkTank co-ordinators. As an experimental model focussed upon local needs and potentials, it could be a small, but very concrete example for the creation of new forms of subsistance.

Participants: Pascale Jeannee, Katharina Lenz, Christian Rupp, Michaela Schweiger, Paul Stefanowske, Malte Willms, Andreas Zinggl

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