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# Who Builds the Cultural Infrastructures of the Future?
- URL: https://www.artsoftheworkingclass.org/text/who-builds-the-cultural-infrastructures-of-the-future/
- Published: 2026-09-21T11:45:19.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-22T15:18:46.000Z
- Description: On Berlin’s independent spaces, collective labor, and the conditions that allow culture to endure.
- Author: María Inés Plaza Lazo
- Tags: Q&As, Art

*Thinking of infrastructural critique means returning to how culture’s conditions of possibility are organized—and whom they enable or exclude. For Marina Vishmidt, the organization of artistic production is itself a political practice inseparable from the work it makes possible. Infrastructure carries relations of power, labor, and access; transforming it requires attending to those relations as well as to an institution’s public program. Her work offers a way into the question at the heart of the conversation: who sustains the spaces in which other futures can be imagined, and under what conditions?¹*

*As part of the Soft Power Festival, this discussion brings together Heiko Pfreundt, co-artistic director of Project Space Festival Berlin; Anahita Sadighi, gallerist, musician, DJ, and Soft Power Festival’s co-curator; Tina Roeder, initiator, artistic director, and co-founder of the Conceptual Biennale; and Lutz Henke, who works at visitBerlin and speaks in a personal capacity. These participants’ practices span the creation of festivals, the development of artist-led platforms and spaces where research, hospitality, and public programming meet. As these initiatives increasingly take on essential roles in artistic production, public exchange, and community building, their continuity, nevertheless, often rests on uncertain funding and the labor of people already stretched to their limits.*

*The conversation moves between topics including the desire to build new systems and the need to defend structures won through collective struggle.* 

**Heiko Pfreundt:** We’re part of a large network of project spaces, and we try to organize politically and improve the conditions for artistic life here. We keep informing politics, and politics keeps informing us.

**Maria Inés Plaza Lazo:** How long has Project Space Festival existed, and how many spaces are part of the network?

**Heiko:** I wasn’t its founder. It began with an all-female curatorial team at the project space *insitu*. The festival was later handed over to us as former participants, which was an interesting collective idea. 

Although I call myself an Artistic Director, I work more as a cultural worker. We organize a peer process, which means that we compile our jury from former participants of the Project Space Festival. It’s a very collective undertaking, and it has existed for about ten years.

**Maria Inés:** Anahita, for those joining us on the festival’s final day who don’t yet know your work, could you introduce yourself?

**Anahita Sadighi:** Thank you for joining us on the third day of Soft Power. I develop formats around art, music, literature, and performance, trying to make underrepresented themes in art and cultural history visible. I believe in transdisciplinary and intercultural platforms, collaborations, and projects led by women.

**Tina Roeder:** I work across art, architecture, and design, developing independent curatorial and discursive formats that make transdisciplinary—and particularly conceptual—practices visible.

I’m here as the initiator and artistic and curatorial director of the Conceptual Biennale, which I developed with my two co-founders Thilo Reich and Anton Rahlwe. Its first edition took place last October at San Gimignano Lichtenberg. It’s a very young biennale.

Especially now, it feels important to keep talking about how different formats can coexist and how we can sustain culture and its infrastructure over time.

**Maria Inés:** What you and Anahita share is that you each began with a proposal for a model you wanted to build, then brought people on board who could help steer it. An individual vision became something shared. I’d like to return to the roots of that thinking.  
  
Lutz, you’ve worked as a curator and you come from a background in street art. You know Berlin from within institutions and outside them. What does it mean to look at the city from both positions?

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/d9/15/d915dd2a-765c-4262-8306-869873baa8ef/content/images/2026/09/05_TROPEZ_3955_JCLARK.jpg)

TROPEZ, PRÉSENT | (hier) Virginie Sistek | A Poem by repetition by Eugen Gomringer III after Natalie Czech. Foto: Joe Clark

**Lutz Henke:** I’m happy to be back here. I’ve experienced this place in many different configurations over the past twenty years, which says something about what has been possible in Berlin.

I work at visitBerlin, a public-private organization involved in city marketing, which is close to the administration and active internationally. But I want to stress that I’m speaking here in a personal capacity, expressing my own views.

That distinction reflects the dialectical nature of what I do. “Street art” is a term I’m not entirely comfortable with, but if you were lucky enough to grow up in Berlin in the 1990s, as I was, certain things happened almost automatically: exploring buildings, writing graffiti, encountering electronic music. Those experiences shaped how I understood the city. I went on to study cultural studies, and I now work both within an official organization and with independent initiatives.

Our own project space, the Senatsreservenspeicher, was a few hundred meters from here. We were there from 2005 to 2014\. It began, classically, with raves in the basement, and the building was demolished in 2015\. We also painted some of the large murals people knew here. When we left, we painted them black to provoke a discussion about the city, culture, and what could happen here.

About fifteen years ago, someone asked what our organization would look like in ten years. I answered: “Dead or institutionalised.” That turned out to be fairly accurate. Everything has been demolished, and I’m now on the other side.

**Maria Inés:** The city benefits from culture as a form of soft power, while you also want to remain connected to the grassroots conditions in which culture is produced. How does Berlin deal with that contradiction?

**Lutz:** One of the central challenges is that we need translators: people who understand both the grassroots city and the city organized from above.

The relationship is more complex than it might appear. It isn’t simply a matter of an administration being obstructive, or artists being revolutionary and refusing to work with companies or the city. We need people within the infrastructure who can translate in both directions, whether that means understanding funding processes or safeguarding artistic freedom.

Before joining visitBerlin, I had already worked with Raumlabor Berlin, who were often critical of the administration. We tried to find common ground. Berlin had long used cultural workers’ activities for marketing without paying for them. Could we, maybe, use marketing budgets in ways that also benefited culture?

**Maria Inés:** Raumlabor is a collective of architects and people working with urban space, and they were involved in projects such as Floating University.

Tina, you assembled the first Conceptual Biennale very quickly. How do you approach the challenge of making something that can last, particularly when its first location already raises questions about ruins, temporality, and what a place could become?

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/d9/15/d915dd2a-765c-4262-8306-869873baa8ef/content/images/2026/09/42_Stay-Hungry_5923_JCLARK.jpg)

stay hungry, Zur Verkieselung des Stadtraumes 3 - Die Zukunft | (hier) Göksu Baysal | 27.06.2026\. Foto: Joe Clark 

**Tina:** I should clarify that we aren’t planning to hold the second edition at San Gimignano Lichtenberg. We want to work with different architectural contexts.

It’s important to ground a biennale in its surroundings. Architecture is part of our field because it asks questions such as: how do we want to live, and what kind of society do we want to build?

Finding a space is the first challenge, but a space alone is far from sufficient. You need an ecosystem of conditions and relationships. Bringing those together is the real work.

Funding is our biggest challenge. If the Biennale is to develop over time, we need to find a model that combines public funding with other sources of support. The difficulty is that cultural funding is often structured around individual projects, while continuity requires longer-term conditions.

**Maria Inés:** Why “conceptual”?

**Tina:** We didn’t begin by deciding to make something conceptual in the abstract. We noticed practices developing across architecture, art, and design that worked transdisciplinarily and conceptually, but lacked a shared platform.

When we put out an open call, the applicants understood what we meant. People looking in from outside sometimes found it harder to understand. That response confirmed that there was a need for visibility and common ground.

There was also a particular sense of momentum. Given what is happening more broadly, questions of how we want to live and what kind of society we want to build felt increasingly urgent, and in Berlin there were already many practices moving between these fields. The Biennale grew out of that convergence.

**Maria Inés:** Anahita, it may be too early to define the system we’ve created here. From within, I’ve seen the energy people have brought together to make this festival happen with scarce resources. How did you establish a framework for that vision in a time of austerity? What did you need to address first?

**Anahita:** I wanted to propose something new within the existing art world in Germany and Berlin. I come from a family background in which music, art, and hospitality are closely connected—these are also migrant competencies, if we’re honest. Bringing them together allowed me to develop a festival that proposes new spaces and possibilities collectively. What I’ve learned through my practice is how much relationships matter: building trust over time, building a community, a family.

For me, that is how we move forward—through an ecosystem that can sustain itself, that is loving and caring, and that wants to have an impact together.

Curating an exhibition collaboratively is still less common than one might expect in the art world. It has been beautiful to share that experience with you, Maria Inés. That collaboration is part of Soft Power’s foundation: coming together with new conditions and new visions. It is about survival, and about celebration as a political act.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/d9/15/d915dd2a-765c-4262-8306-869873baa8ef/content/images/2026/09/Akshita-Garud.png)

Akshita Garud at Soft Power Festival

**Maria Inés:** I like that you put survival and celebration in the same sentence. Heiko, what challenges have you faced in continuing Project Space Festival, including through the pandemic?

**Heiko:** During the pandemic, there was no festival because we didn’t receive funding.

**Maria Inés:** But the infrastructure and the network were still there. People wanted to continue.

**Heiko:** Yes. We resumed in 2022\. The festival depends on people organizing throughout the city, in very small groups and larger ones, each with their own ambitions.

Its idea was to create a community of spaces. Even when people work collectively, those collectives often operate separately. We wanted to bring those separate forces together once a year.

Berlin is a city of self-organization. Through an open call, we bring thirty spaces together over a month. We sometimes call it the city’s largest institution. That was also the founders’ idea: all these separate entities could form something larger together. It is an organizational motivation, but an aesthetic one too.

**Maria Inés:** It’s like talking about *lumbung* without naming it. What makes this independent scene—the *Freie Szene*—a collective presence as important as any other institution in Berlin?

**Heiko:** The wider network is around 150 spaces (Kulturkataster Berlin). Some have existed for thirty years; others started a month ago or will begin next week. The people and their motivations are very different.

The common ground is a desire to survive, to experience things, and to be part of a community of spaces. It is also a space for listening to other people’s practices.

We don’t impose a single coherent program. The participants create the experience themselves. That requires trust, and people have taken the responsibility of protecting the festival as a communal event very seriously. That is what motivates me to keep doing it.

**Maria Inés:** Is there a new space or organization you’ve encountered that has changed how you understand infrastructure? Lutz, perhaps we can begin with you.

**Lutz:** I would start with resources. Whether you can do something for ten years, ten weeks, or ten days depends on what is available: money and space, but also networks and knowledge.

Two years ago, we opened a project space in an abandoned hotel near Kurfürstendamm. We had a network and an empty building. We knew it was irresponsible, but we couldn’t resist. Something had to happen. That impulse is part of Berlin’s project space culture: you do something, and it broadens people’s horizons.

When we opened our earlier space in 2005, we received no public funding from Berlin for an entire decade. We had some support from the European Union and elsewhere. We also worked on commercial projects around Berlin Fashion Week, which we found embarrassing enough not to advertise, and we used that money to support the project space.

It worked because one of our largest resources was almost free. We had 1,200 square meters in central Berlin for very little money. We invested our labor, but we didn’t need much funding. It felt possible to organize the art world differently.

Over the past twenty years, access to space has become harder, and there is more attention to regulations. There may be more public funding than there was then, but fewer resources in other senses. You might now need to work five days a week to support yourself instead of two nights in a bar.

Getting started increasingly depends on knowing how to navigate these resources. It can feel as though you need a Ph.D. and thirty years of experience to understand what the district is doing, why it disagrees with the Senate, how the federal level fits in, and where support might come from. It shouldn’t be that way.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/d9/15/d915dd2a-765c-4262-8306-869873baa8ef/content/images/2026/09/31_ACUD_PaulaGVidal.jpg)

ACUD Galerie, Venus in Three Movements | (hier) Jordan Deal 05.06.2026 | Project Space Festival 2026\. Foto: Paula G. Vidal

**Heiko:** We gradually moved into funding. The first two festivals ran without a budget. At the time, I was a participant with my own space. Everyone contributed €50 to a pot that money was used to make a leaflet.

**Maria Inés:** The press conference was at a Späti. I thought that was very fitting.

**Heiko:** Yes, we didn’t book an official venue. We all went to a Späti.

The funding system did improve. We first received funding in 2016, through the city-tax funding. We kept going to the Senate Department of Culture and asking whether there was a way to support the project.

I come from a working-class family, and I have sometimes felt alienated by academic language. But we had collective strength and found a language together. We also had numbers: a survey had counted around 120 project spaces in Berlin. That is an older figure, but it helped us articulate our case.

We moved from a narrative of making things possible through our own efforts to a position where we could receive funding and discuss artist fees. We no longer run the festival without paying people. Since the third edition, participants have been paid.

If we don’t receive funding, we won’t do it for free simply to preserve the name. That commitment has become an important bond with the participants. We spend half the year on administration so that everyone gets paid.

**Lutz:** Those are examples of infrastructure. The use of city-tax revenue for culture followed substantial advocacy, including work by Christoph Knoch and the independent scene. The tax isn’t exclusively earmarked for culture, but it has been used for cultural purposes.

The work of the BBK (Berufsverband Bildender Künstler\*innen/The Professional Association of Visual Artists) around artist fees is another example: establishing that public funding must come with payment for artists. These may seem like small infrastructural steps, but they exist.

**Maria Inés:** And they’re crucial.

**Lutz:** They are. The other issue is self-exploitation. I saw it in myself and many people around me: people doing things out of commitment that they would never agree to do for money, and ending up exhausted ten or fifteen years later, while their projects are used to promote the city or a product.

There is a danger in saying, “We don’t need money; we have space, and we’re doing it because we want to.” It can leave very idealistic people completely burned out.

**Maria Inés:** I want to hold on to the question of what inspires new projects. Tina, Anahita?

**Tina:** I have to respond to that, because it describes our experience. We put the Biennale together in four months for under €20,000, with extraordinary voluntary help.

Afterwards, we were exhausted. It was one of the most intense things we’ve ever done, and we don’t want to reproduce those working conditions. It happened that way, but changing the \[conditions\] is the biggest challenge for us to continue sustainably.

We feel that we contribute something, and that there is room for many different formats to coexist. Through dialogue, we can gradually build the conditions they need.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/d9/15/d915dd2a-765c-4262-8306-869873baa8ef/content/images/2026/09/CB_Installation_View_Credit_Robert_Damisch_03.jpg)

Conceptual Biennale, Installation View. Credit: Robert Damisch

**Maria Inés:** Can you also acknowledge the inspiration in that work, alongside the precarity and the weight of the labor? Does the fire remain?

**Tina:** Absolutely. But everyone needs to be paid, as Heiko said. Those basic conditions have to be there.

We deliberately chose the form of a biennale rhythm because it slows things down and allows relationships to develop. Sometimes it’s wonderful to make something spontaneously in a day. But there is also value in working over time, planning properly, and inviting people well in advance.

I saw a related conversation at the Currents design festival involving the recently founded design union (Design Gewerkschaft), which had also joined our Conceptual Biennale symposium on Money. People were speaking very directly about money: where it comes from, where it doesn’t, and what that means over time. We are all in the same boat, and I hope we can develop something together.

**Maria Inés:** Anahita, I don’t want to talk about money for a moment. Tell me about your inspirations.

**Anahita:** For me, it is relationships. Each year has brought new challenges, politically and globally. We need to ground ourselves in what we want to achieve, and build infrastructures, platforms, and spaces around values.

I feel that we barely speak about values anymore. They should be at the heart of our initiatives: what world do we want to live in, and what world do we want to create together?

I miss those conversations. There is so much room to develop these ideas together, strategically and creatively. That is also at the heart of this festival.

**Maria Inés:** Austerity makes us believe there is no room for this, but we create that room through relationships. If your work could offer something to other projects, what values would you want to share?

**Heiko:** Trust. Over time, I’ve become less exhausted by this work because I’ve learned to trust people. Relationships develop with spaces: some are known for their continuity, others for what they stood for while they existed. A community forms, and the responsibility becomes shared.

For me, the answer is to build a structure that doesn’t exhaust you. We don’t have to be exhausted to work in culture. We want to build something, live, and have some fun.

I like to remember the word “festival” in Project Space Festival. When everything becomes administration—funding applications and calendars—I ask myself: where is the party? There is a lot of celebration in it. That positive feeling rests on trust.

**Lutz:** I would return to translation. To navigate something as complex as Berlin, you need to understand its systems and know which structures and networks matter, including those beyond the people you already know or who agree with you.

I remember an interview with Marcus Staiger in which he said: “Revolution simply means getting up earlier than the guys at Daimler.”

I like that line because it suggests that you have to work harder, be cleverer, and recognize the structures that exist around you. Where are the opportunities? Who do you need to speak to? Who can mediate between different worlds?

**Maria Inés:** Anahita, what kind of system are you imagining?

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/d9/15/d915dd2a-765c-4262-8306-869873baa8ef/content/images/2026/09/Hashem-Shakeri--from-the-series-An-Elegy-from-the-Death-of-Hamun-2.jpg)

Hashem Shakeri, from the series An Elegy from the Death of Hamun

**Anahita:** I don’t have a definitive answer. But I feel an urgency to imagine new systems together: to gather, listen, and arrive at something collectively. I would like us to explore that much more within our fields.

**Tina:** I agree, although I’m cautious about the word “new.” Trust, emotions, and these supposedly soft things are fundamental. But they need a structure in which they can grow, like the one we are making through this conversation.

That is the challenge with the Biennale. We may need a different organizational concept, even a different business model, because I don’t think funding alone will sustain it. We can’t simply wait. Applications take a long time, and we may or may not succeed. How do you sustain something through support that is so unreliable?

**Lutz:** A new system would be desirable. But I also feel that the existing system is breaking down, or moving in the wrong direction. That creates its own urgency.

**Anahita:** Precisely because of that, we need to imagine another system and fight the one that is gaining ground.

**Maria Inés:** I’m with Anahita in that ambition, while also hearing Lutz’s awareness of how slowly systems are built. Do we simply give ground to the AfD, or do we defend and reconstruct structures even when we feel that our parliamentary democracy has failed us? Building from ruins will take longer.

The exhibition at the heart of this festival also allows room for not knowing. Its chapters are active verbs: Arriving, Listening, Ritualizing, Celebrating, Imagining, Becoming. They don’t prescribe exactly where we are.

The artworks and the music suggest other languages, beyond those through which we are forced to negotiate space and even our rights.

“Soft power” itself comes from a vocabulary of diplomacy and cultural hierarchy, and it is closely associated with US influence. How can we occupy that terminology differently? What words—or forms of communication beyond words—could help us understand soft power as something we can mobilize to bring about change?

**Audience member:** What Anahita said about values made me think that we have something to learn from religion, because values move people. I’m not religious myself, but I believe in the religion of partying. If you have shared values and invite people to enjoy being alive, they want to keep being with you.

**Lutz:** That is a prime example of soft power. I was recently in Lourdes, and the number of people who go there to experience it is extraordinary.

I want to be optimistic about the possibility of a new system. But soft power can also be understood as voluntary submission. Alongside US culture, propaganda, and public relations, we can look at the growing influence of countries such as South Korea.

Infrastructure may be the hard backbone of soft power. Social media is one of its central infrastructures, and I find that concerning. If such an important tool is controlled by a handful of oligarchs outside Europe, how do we respond? We use that infrastructure ourselves, including to make festivals like this visible.

**Maria Inés:** So we need to recognize the implications and contradictions of the platforms through which we communicate our values and ambitions, as well as finding new languages.

**Audience member:** You’ve spoken about relationships and the systems that make spaces and artistic work possible. I’m new to Berlin. How can someone who is creative enter those spaces and participate?

**Heiko:** Alongside changing or breaking systems, one of the biggest challenges is stabilizing what already exists. There is infrastructure here that helps people sustain their practices, but it depends on people knowing about it.

Studio programs, for example, are part of an infrastructure built through protest and resistance. We should recognize what has already been achieved and build on it.

The Berlin Network for independent project spaces and initiatives, which we’re part of, is often in negotiations with politicians, and I see problems in administration. But I also see that we have built something. We need to make that knowledge available.

You can join groups or a project space. There is a project space for almost every interest in Berlin. Follow Project Space Festival and follow the bbk berlin for intel on political decisions. There are different groups and different positions.

It also helps to distinguish that political and organizational work from your own artistic practice. Some people invest a great deal of their energy in representing others; other artists need to understand and support what those people do.

Repeated funding rejections can be extremely frustrating. I’ve experienced that myself. But there are ways to learn how things work. Funding results are published. I studied other people’s projects: how they wrote about them and what they wanted to achieve. We can learn from one another. That collective learning is something I feel very positive about in Berlin.

**Maria Inés:** Thank you, Heiko, and thank you for the question. Hospitality also means active engagement.

To close, I’d like each of you to offer one word, both to our audience and to Berlin’s next governing mayor. What does culture need? What are you asking for?

**Tina:** Continuity.

**Lutz:** Power. If we’re asking what culture needs from a mayor: power.

**Heiko:** Trust. Definitely.

**Anahita:** A Revolution—inspired by friendship and collectivity.

  
//  
  
*This conversation took place at Soft Power Festival on September 13, 2026, and has been edited for clarity and length.*   
  
**Footnotes:**  
(1) Marina Vishmidt, [“From Speculation to Infrastructure: Material and Method in the Politics of Contemporary Art,” *OnCurating*, issue 58](https://www.on-curating.org/issue-58-reader/from-speculation-to-infrastructure-material-and-method-in-the-politics-of-contemporary-art.html?ref=artsoftheworkingclass.org). The connection to this discussion is an editorial framing, not a quotation from the panel.