Urban Research & Practice

ISSN: 1753-5069 (Print) 1753-5077 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rurp20

Artist intermediaries in Berlin: cultural

intermediation as an interscalar strategy of self-
organizational survival

Alison L. Bain & Friederike Landau

To cite this article: Alison L. Bain & Friederike Landau (2018) Artist intermediaries in Berlin:
cultural intermediation as an interscalar strategy of self-organizational survival, Urban Research &
Practice, 11:3, 247-262, DOI: 10.1080/17535069.2017.1334810

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17535069.2017.1334810

Published online: 07 Jun 2017.

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Urban Research & Practice, 2018
Vol. 11, No. 3, 247–262, https://doi.org/10.1080/17535069.2017.1334810

Artist intermediaries in Berlin: cultural intermediation as an

interscalar strategy of self-organizational survival
Alison L. Baina* and Friederike Landaub
a
Department of Geography, York University, Toronto, Ontario; bDepartment of Urban and Regional
Sociology, Technical University of Berlin, Berlin

This paper argues that intermediation is both a valuable form of occupational self-
organization for professional artists and a political act of embedding with socio-spatial
ramifications at different local, urban, and global scales. A case study of events
organized in Berlin by the interdisciplinary cultural centre Zentrum für Kunst und
Urbanistik demonstrates how artists strategically practice intermediation as modes of
autopoietic and dissipative self-organization and as an interscalar survival strategy.
These artist intermediaries add improvisational flexibility to the state’s understanding
of Verstetigung (sustainable anchoring that fosters a reliable relationship between
urban policymakers and cultural producers) and challenge neoliberal urban develop-
ment logics that instrumentalize creativity.
Keywords: Artists; cultural intermediaries; self-organization; scale; urban develop-
ment; Berlin

Introduction
For the last few decades, the economic, political, and social virtues of creativity have been
extolled internationally by scholars, policymakers, and urban planners, framing creativity
in the public imagination as an essential driver of the economy and urban neoliberal
policy tool. Creativity is interpreted as ‘an embodied, material, and social practice that
produces both highly specialised cultural goods and is part of everyday life, and it holds
within it the possibilities for making alternative worlds’ (Hawkins 2017, 15). The
seductive power of creativity for scholars, practitioners, and civic leaders alike is its
capacity to produce geographies. For Hawkins (2017, 15), the promise of creativity is
expressed through creative practices that ‘make places, shape subjects, connect commu-
nities and sculpt environments.’ These are the significant societal expectations of creativ-
ity and, by extension, of creative and cultural practitioners.
The role of the creative subject in society extends beyond the art field but is often
embodied in the figure of the professional artist and expressed through acts of creativity
that combine intellectual and bodily labour to create goods and services of aesthetic
appeal. Following the publication of Richard Florida’s (2002) oft-quoted and -critiqued
book The Rise of the Creative Class, civic leaders and urban scholars have become
increasingly interested in how the work of artists can foster new engagements with
urban spaces and places. Within contemporary urban development – processes often
oriented towards the privatization, securitization, and financialization of urban space –
grassroots and self-organized actors, like artists and artist-run organizations, have found

*Corresponding author. Email: abain@yorku.ca

© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

248 A. L. Bain and F. Landau

strategic ways to challenge the exclusions wrought by the overriding forces of global
capital (Bresnihan and Byrne 2015). Such socio-spatial self-organizational survival stra-
tegies have attracted attention from civic leaders who are eager to co-opt artistic creativity
to increase citizen involvement, transparency, and legitimacy in urban development and to
foster scenarios of community engagement and collaboration.
This paper considers the complex roles of professional artists as actors of urban change
with the capacities to create and occupy new places, build and augment community
relationships, and animate urban spaces through arts-based events. It argues that for profes-
sional artists, intermediation is not only a valuable form of occupational self-organization,
but also a political act of anchoring with socio-spatial ramifications at different local, urban,
and global scales. This paper reveals how the urban transformative practices of artists are
interlinked with those of other stakeholders, such as local citizens and municipal authorities,
and how tensions arising from different priorities and capacities are negotiated.
A case study of the interdisciplinary cultural centre Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik
(ZK/U) in Moabit, an ethnoculturally diverse and economically disadvantaged district on
the margins of Berlin’s city centre and art scene, is used to demonstrate how artists
strategically practice cultural intermediation. ZK/U, with its new studios and workspaces
and its diverse local and international community engagement practices, reflects the
repeated claim of Verstetigung by Berlin-based artists and social movements – a claim
to create and solidify an ongoing, reliable relationship between urban and cultural policy-
makers and cultural producers. Lacking a literal translation, Verstetigung revolves around,
but is not synonymous with, ‘institutionalization’ (which can be interpreted as the con-
struction or formalization of rigid institutional structures) and ‘continuity’ (because the
latter might foreclose non-linear modes of thinking and action). Verstetigung may most
succinctly be understood as a permanent yet open outcome of existing relationships.
Translation difficulties can be seen as emblematic of what is being asked of
Verstetigung: to stabilize a precarious condition, while simultaneously remaining flexible
and open as a structure. Through an examination of two arts-based events that ZK/U has
organized and one emergent project ZK/U is involved with, this paper asserts that
intermediation, as a mode of self-organization, is an interscalar survival strategy deployed
by artists to assert their own vision of Berlin as a creative city, and, in so doing, addresses
different expectations about their roles in urban development.
The paper is divided into five sections. First, a theoretical framework is established to
conceptually address the self-organization of artists as cultural intermediaries and their
strategic interweaving of spatial scales. Second, the research design and methodology are
detailed to justify the case study and event-based focus of the paper. Third, the broader
urban cultural policy context of Berlin as a creative city is outlined to situate the spatial
and political claims of artists. Fourth, two arts-based events and one emergent project of
ZK/U are interpreted as interscalar intermediation strategies of autopoietic and dissipative
self-organization. In the concluding discussion, the Berlin-based policy concept of
Verstetigung is re-examined and the unique skills of artist intermediaries are summarized.

Theorizing artists as self-organized cultural intermediaries deploying interscalar

strategies
Autopoietic and dissipative self-organization
Within art theory and practice, self-organization is interpreted not merely as a reactionist or self-
referential mode of organization but also as a deliberate choice. Hebert and Karlsen (2012, 19)
 Urban Research & Practice 249

define self-organization within the arts as a self-directed and organization-building process that
is created by ‘participants on their own terms (as opposed to one created for them to operate
within).’ They elaborate that self-organization should not be reified or romanticized as trans-
formative because ‘that could easily be mistaken for business management jargon and capital-
ism’s vicious capacity to profit by absorbing the alternative’ (Hebert and Karlsen 2012, 15).
When understood relationally as a self-reflexive practice, self-organization ‘links outwardly not
as identity, interest, or affiliation, but as a mode of coexistence in space’ (Rogoff 2012, n.p.).
Such a relational approach to self-organization decouples it from a critical or defiant response to
instrumental demands. The structural dilemma inherent within self-organization is encapsulated
in the phrase ‘We do it because we want to. And because we need to’ (Verwoert 2013, 132,
emphasis in original). Hebert and Karlsen (2012, 15) assert that for artists, ‘the urge to self-
organise stems from the struggle to survive.’ These appeals to self-imposed and necessary
conditions of self-organization reveal that – despite presenting an alternative to power asym-
metries in the art world – there are few other alternatives to self-organization.
In the context of processes of urban change, the concept of self-organization speaks to
a parallel tendency amongst citizens and other stakeholders to collectivize out of their own
motivations in order to contribute to urban developments and to challenge existing power
geometries. Urban planning theorists draw on complexity theory to treat self-organization
as the ‘emergence of new structures’ (Van Meerkerk, Boonstra, and Edelenbos 2013, 3).
Boonstra and Boelens (2011) discuss the instrumentalization or confounding of participa-
tion and self-organization in urban renewal as means to increase citizen involvement in
municipal policy. They advocate for an outside-in approach that focuses on the action of
self-organized actors rather than the imposition of planners’ hierarchical models.
In dynamic processes of urban development, a variety of urban actors interact within
networks of governance with no single stakeholder unilaterally controlling and determining
outcomes. In order to understand different self-organization strategies, Van Meerkerk, Boonstra,
and Edelenbos (2013) make a useful distinction between autopoietic and dissipative behaviours.
The former has an inward-looking orientation geared towards self-reproduction and the self-
enclosed maintenance of a system. The latter is more outward-looking, exploring open struc-
tures that seek to reconfigure a system. While Van Meerkerk, Boonstra, and Edelenbos (2013)
conclude that dissipative self-organization weakens the internal coherence of a group and
autopoietic self-organization strengthens collective identity, they emphasize the importance of
the continuous interplay between both forms of self-organization for relationship building
between diverse urban actors. This paper concurs, yet frames Van Meerkerk, Boonstra, and
Edelenbos’s assertion that new, emerging organizational structures are risky and threatening to
already existing systems in a more positive light. This paper argues that self-organized
structures, when embedded into existing systems, can display an enabling and transformative
socio-spatial potential that contributes to existing structures in regards to grander aims of
augmenting inclusivity, accountability, or transparency. For Chapura (2009, 471), ‘structures
emerge from the complex interaction of multiple actors and may reciprocally influence the
behavior of these actors.’ Moreover, structures are not reducible to the sum of their constituent
parts. Taking up Chapura’s observation about the dynamic interplay between self-organized
structure and self-organized agency, this paper focuses on artists’ agency as cultural intermedi-
aries in socio-spatial processes of urban transformation.

Artists as cultural intermediaries

The concept of ‘cultural intermediaries’ was introduced by Bourdieu (1984, 359) as an all-
encompassing category to describe workers at the core of the ‘new petite bourgeoisie’ in
250 A. L. Bain and F. Landau

‘occupations involving presentation and representation … providing symbolic goods and

services.’ In Bourdieu’s (1984, 325) original formulation, ‘new cultural intermediaries’
are exemplified by ‘the producers of cultural programmes on TV and radio or the critics of
“quality” newspapers and magazines’ within a broader discussion of the different factions
of the middle class involved in the production and circulation of ‘middle-brow culture.’
Bourdieu (1984, 365 and 326) asserts that cultural intermediaries use their authority and
embodied capital as ‘role models and guarantors’ to frame and canonize that which is
‘not-yet legitimate’ for consumption and monopolization by the dominant class (Maguire
and Matthews 2010). Bourdieu’s subsequent analyses of literary and artistic production
offered little applied examination of cultural intermediaries beyond their narrow concep-
tualization as critics and commentators. However, numerous sociologists (e.g., Cronin
2004; Moor 2008), media and communication scholars (Maguire and Matthews 2010),
and cultural economists (e.g., Hracs 2015; Molloy and Larner 2010; O’Connor 2015;
Rantisi and Leslie 2015) have since provided detailed occupational studies of ‘workers
who come in-between creative artists and consumers … forming a point of connection or
articulation between production and consumption’ (Negus 2002, 503). These workers
have all been shown to be structural agents with cultural authority who mediate ‘between
the production of cultural goods and the production of consumer tastes’ with capacities
that include gatekeeping, co-creating, editing, networking, marketing, distributing, eval-
uating, and censoring (Janssen and Verboord 2015, 440). Most of these mediation
capacities are exclusionary and evaluative, serving to fabricate cultural meaning, shape
both use and exchange value, and construct markets. In a global cultural economy
premised on new forms of entrepreneurial labour, however, Molloy and Larner (2010,
366) assert that the identities of cultural ‘producer, mediator, and consumer are increas-
ingly intertwined in the same actor,’ rendering the concept of cultural intermediaries
ambiguous. Thus, there is scope to rethink cultural intermediation to better capture ‘the
practices that continue to proliferate in the space between production and consumption’
(Negus 2002, 502). This paper’s case study of ZK/U illustrates Molloy and Larner’s
(2010, 362) claim that ‘the boundary between culture making, cultural mediation and
cultural consumption is increasingly blurred and difficult to pin down.’
In a recent special issue of Regional Studies, the contributors provide rich case studies
of intermediaries that organize and govern the creative economy, shaping and regulating
the production and consumption of creative goods and services (Jakob and Van Heur
2015). These case studies focus on strategies used by intermediaries and their material
consequences for the production of the creative economy as a field of activity and an
object of governance. A key theme is that intermediaries negotiate multiple logics and
norms that extend beyond economic and political imperatives to include issues of
aesthetics, ethics, and organization of creative work. Furthermore, the notion of ‘inter-
mediation (non-)effects’ is raised to highlight the regulatory limitations of intermediaries
in terms of their degree of influence (or not) on the dynamics of a given sector (Jakob and
Van Heur 2015). A cultural economic perspective on intermediaries emphasizes that
cultural artefacts result from a non-linear network of associations and activities in
which ‘creators, consumers, and associated intermediaries constitute a cultural production
system’ (Rantisi and Leslie 2015, 406). What is poorly understood within this system is
how artists perform multiple functions as producers, intermediaries, and consumers of
culture. Hracs (2015, 463) alludes to this ambiguity in his empirical study of the relation-
ship of Toronto independent musicians to music managers, with his discussion of ‘disin-
termediation’ – through which the gap between cultural production and consumption is
closed with digital technologies ‘that allow “creatives” to cut out the middlemen [sic] and
 Urban Research & Practice 251

interact directly with consumers.’ Hracs (2015) asserts, however, that the do-it-yourself
model is inefficient because of non-creative technical, managerial, and business skill
deficiencies amongst contemporary musicians. Into this gap step freelance managers, a
group Hracs privileges as the new cultural intermediaries to the neglect of the more-than-
economic market participant and the more-than-cultural-artefact creator – the socio-
political capacities of the producing artist herself. These capacities – or the artist inter-
mediaries’ agency – notably are constituted in relation to the context within which they
operate and vice versa; intermediaries co-produce the context within which they act. This
paper conceptualizes artists as cultural intermediaries and reinforces their agency by
framing them as artist intermediaries.
In contradistinction to Hracs (2015), this paper argues that for cultural producers, the
processes of de-specialization and multi-skilling do not necessarily result in a ‘corrosion
of creativity’ (McRobbie 2002). Where Hracs perceives a reduction in high-quality
creative content and lack of distinction and sustainability of un-intermediated products
in the marketplace, this paper’s study of artists reveals otherwise. It is multi-skilling as
producers and intermediaries, above and beyond a relationship to the marketplace, that has
allowed some artists to obtain affordable and reliable workspace, to undertake creative
projects at different spatial scales, and to maintain a living as professional artists. While
artists do seek to intervene into cultural political and creative industries discourses and
policymaking complexes in order to regulate the working conditions of artistic production
and reception, they extend their intermediation skills into these social and political realms
to self-empower and enable communities. This paper argues that artists practice inter-
mediation not just within the marketplace or cultural field but also on various spatial and
discursive scales between and beyond art worlds (c.f., Berthoin Antal 2012; Johansson
Sköldberg and Woodilla 2015).
For Maguire and Matthews (2010), cultural intermediation involves the capacities of
framing ‘goods,’ claiming authority, and evaluating. Their broad understanding of goods
is one this paper aligns with, encompassing not only products and services but also ideas
and behaviours. Artists can be understood as framers not only of economic goods and
value but also of public, social, and community value. In their capacities as authorities and
evaluators, cultural intermediaries participate in the construction and ascription of legiti-
macy with varying impacts. Cultural intermediaries make selections and evaluations that
‘do not only affect the reputations of cultural products and their makers, but also their own
status and authority (“their symbolic capital”) in the field’ (Janssen and Verboord 2015,
8). The authority of cultural intermediaries ‘depends on the credits they have earned by
making “successful” evaluations’ that are adopted by other experts and trusted by
audiences (Janssen and Verboord 2015, 9). This paper argues that cultural intermediaries
interconnect categories of ‘legitimate’ culture on different spatial scales, and, in that
process, potentially transform or challenge both. The geographical concept of spatial
scale, then, is key to understanding how artists practice intermediation.

The spatial scales of artistic intermediation

In human geography, recent debates dispute the notion that spatial scales are ontologically
pregiven and essentially hierarchical and argue that spatial scales are socially constructed
and contested by different actors, their meaning and relevance changing over time and
space (Castree, Kitchin, and Rogers 2013). For Marston (2000, 220), scale is a ‘contingent
outcome of the tensions that exist between structural forces and the practices of human
agents.’ These tensions produce a ‘politics of scale’ that is generated by human actors in
252 A. L. Bain and F. Landau

response to particular socio-spatial dynamics, both underpinning the ways in which spaces
and scales are produced and transformed, and cross-cutting hierarchical structures and
discrete scalar units (Jonas 2011). This notion of a politics of scale highlights how
political action can occur at a different spatial scale from that which the desired political
change may have been brought into effect. Similarly, Swyngedouw (2004) argues that
potential success and the available capacities of a group are influenced by its spatial
location. An investigation of the various spatial scales a group is connected to and acts out
of reveals the ‘continuous tension between “scales of regulation” and “scales of net-
works”’ (Swyngedouw 2004, 33). For Swyngedouw (2004, 33), the politics of scale
involves ‘continuous reshuffling and reorganizations of spatial scales which are an
integral part of social strategies and struggles for control and empowerment.’ Brenner
(2001, 600, emphasis in original) argues for a distinction between a singular and plural
politic(s) of scale, asserting that the former treats scale as a bounded and self-enclosed
geographic unit while the latter ‘refers to the production, reconfiguration or contestation
of particular differentiations, orderings and hierarchies among geographical scales,’ what
he describes as ‘a modality of hierarchization and rehierarchization’ within which it can
be difficult to locate a causal agent or scale. As Chapura (2009, 463) affirms, ‘many
causal processes operate across multiple scales,’ thus ‘comprehending most social phe-
nomena will demand a poly-scalar approach.’ In place of poly-scalar, this paper refers
instead to interscalar, understanding it to be networked relations between different spatial
scales, and not merely a multiplicity of potentially non-interactive scales implicit in the
former term. Such interscalar strategies, Matusitz (2010, 10) asserts are a ‘response to the
growing variability and flexibility of institutional topologies by orienting governance
networks towards localities and regions.’
If Swyngedouw’s relational interpretation of spatial scale as a constant process of
contestations and temporary fixations of networks, meanings, consensus, and power is
followed, then scaling can be understood as a form of intermediation. More precisely, it is
interscalar strategies that display negotiations between cooperation and competition,
homogenisation and differentiation, empowerment and disempowerment, and locality
and globality that can, this paper argues, be interpreted as practices of intermediation.
Swyngedouw’s (2004, 43) call for social groups to forge ‘“scalar” alliances’ speaks to the
interscalar activities of cultural intermediaries as they seek to access and create networks
and spaces; in so doing, they leverage potential from iterations of their social and
symbolical capital. This paper reveals how artists deploy interscalar strategies as practices
of cultural intermediation to change their relative positions of power within contested
processes of socio-spatial urban change.

Materials and methods

This paper’s empirical data come from a larger comparative research project on the socio-
spatial impacts that artists have upon neighbourhoods and urban-cultural development
contexts in two German cities (Berlin and Leipzig) and two Canadian cities (Toronto and
Hamilton). In Berlin, while there are numerous examples of independent artist spaces that
have been made possible by the Cold War division of the city and the exodus of small and
large industrial firms, government agencies, and private services, this paper focuses on a
singular case study of an artist-run space established in 2012, ZK/U. What is unique about
this current example of the socio-spatial and scalar interventions of artists as cultural
intermediaries is ZK/U’s operation with the self-acclaimed goal of critically engaging art
and the urban condition. In Berlin, 18 semi-structured interviews1 were undertaken with
 Urban Research & Practice 253

municipal politicians, urban planners, arms-length organization administrators, arts man-

agers, and local and international artists affiliated with ZK/U. These interviews provided
insight into divergent understandings of the municipal cultural planning and policy
contexts and the multifaceted roles of artists as urban visionaries, resisters, collaborators,
and intermediaries. Interview findings were supplemented by document analysis of
relevant municipal planning and policy reports and participant observation. Both authors
undertook numerous visits to ZK/U during and outside of programmed public events to
understand how artists, local residents, and visitors use the site. The ethnographic data,
collected in field diaries and photographs, provided insight into the micro-dynamics of
cultural intermediation as practiced in two events organized by ZK/U. An event-based
analysis constitutes the empirical focus of this paper, permitting both a disaggregated
representation of different spatial scales with each event designated to happen at a
particular scale and the unpacking of cultural intermediaries’ interscalar strategies.
Ultimately, this ‘eventfulness’ – the events produced and enacted by the cultural inter-
mediaries of ZK/U – is both an empirical condition of intermediation as well as the
analytical unit of analysis of this paper (Kern 2016).

Space for artistic production in Berlin: a long-term intervention by ZK/U

As Germany’s post-reunification capital and most cosmopolitan city, Berlin not only has
the country’s greatest concentration of political and arts institutions but also is marked by
urban transformation and reinvention (Arandelovic and Bogunovich 2014). A creative city
policy discourse was first mobilized in Berlin in 2001, when city leaders began instru-
mentalizing cultural and subcultural capital to further civic economic competitiveness,
social inclusion, and neighbourhood revitalization agendas (Colomb 2012). This urban
policy strategy capitalizes on Berlin’s historic and contemporary position within the
global art world as a key site for art production, ‘with the expectation that the work is
presented and/or sold elsewhere’ (Forkert 2013, 117).
Berlin has a cultural workforce of over 160,000 people, upwards of 5000 resident
contemporary visual artists, some 400 art galleries, and numerous internationally
renowned major cultural institutions and festivals; however, what is particularly distinc-
tive about Berlin’s arts ecosystem is the 150 ‘project spaces’ that facilitate interaction
between arts stakeholders (Marguin 2012). Project spaces are sites of artistic production,
presentation, and collaboration characterized by ‘interdisciplinarity, participation, interac-
tion and processuality’ (Marguin 2012). Despite accelerated urban renewal in inner-city
districts and the rising rental costs and social displacements that accompany new-build
developments and gentrification, Berlin remains noteworthy for its oft-temporary provi-
sion of affordable workspaces for artistic production, experimentation, and innovation in
comparison to other international art hotspots.
Temporary spatial use of the urban built fabric for cultural production and creative
collaboration was characteristic of Berlin’s cultural landscape in the first decade of the
twenty-first century (Groth and Corijn 2005). The ‘in-between use of abandoned space for
little to no rent’ fostered grassroots, low-cost creative, and subcultural activities (Jakob
2010, 195). These free spaces are a carry-over from squatter movements of the 1990s that
have been ‘absorbed into the “software” of neoliberal urban renewal’ (Holm and Kuhn
2011, 655). While temporary space is still available in multi-ethnic, working class,
‘disadvantaged’ neighbourhoods (Blokland and Nast 2014), more recent debates revolve
around the long-term sustenance of artistic space and new forms of ownership for the arts.
Various organizations such as Koalition der Freien Szene (Coalition of the Independent
254 A. L. Bain and F. Landau

Scene) or Allianz bedrohter Atelierhäuser (Alliance of Threatened Studio Buildings)

(Landau and Mohr 2015) have collectivized and organized politically around access to
affordable and stable multidisciplinary artistic space. A number of self-organized artist-led
initiatives also strive to combat spatial insecurity: ZK/U is one such organization,
established and operated by the non-profit artist collective KUNSTrePUBLIK.2
ZK/U is located in a former train station, Güterbahnhof Moabit, on industrial railway
land in the district of Moabit in the west of the borough of Mitte, on the edge of Berlin’s
largest inland port, Westhafen. In the last century, Moabit was an important manufacturing
area and transportation corridor where goods were moved to and from Berlin via the
railway and port. A decline in manufacturing in the twenty-first century, however, has
negatively economically impacted local residents. Of Moabit’s 75,000 residents, 44% are
immigrants, representing 60 different countries, with prominent Turkish and Arabic
communities, and with high percentages of working poor, unemployed, and child poverty
(Bezirksamt, 2009). In Berlin, a concerted effort has been made city-wide to cope with the
spatial, social, cultural, subcultural, culinary, trading, and political integration of an
extremely diversified and numerically significant Turkish immigrant population. The
recent political and ideological shifts in contemporary Turkey have further reinforced
the need for Moabit to help provide an effective refuge for Turkish artists and artisans in
Berlin.3
One of the largest district management areas (Quartiersmanagement) in Berlin was
established in Moabit in 1999 and later elicited additional federal financial support for the
social revitalization of declining urban areas (Stadtumbau West). This social programme
contributed to a broader urban development plan for former railway lands, designating
open space as compensation for increased densities elsewhere. In Moabit, industrial
railway land previously owned by Deutsche Bahn and occupied until 2007 by industrial
tenants was made available for redevelopment. A collaborative planning process trans-
formed this site into a public park, playground, community garden, and an arts hub
centred on ZK/U (Bain and Landau Forthcoming). While it took 3 years for the artist
collective to secure a 40-year site lease and to obtain funding for its renovation, the
Güterbahnhof buildings have since become ZK/U – a material and discursive space for
artistic experimentation and discussion that reflects critically upon the intersection
between art, the urban condition, and neighbourhood development. In many ways, ZK/
U is a long-term, socially engaged participatory art project to activate and animate the site
through arts-led event programming.4 In what follows, two of ZK/U’s signature events
and an emergent project that ZK/U’s co-founders participate in are discussed to illustrate
how these artist intermediaries make use of interscalar strategies of self-organization in
order to achieve socio-spatial anchorage.

ZK/U events
Gütermarkt
In 2013, ZK/U responded to an open call by the Robert Bosch foundation to apply to the
Actors of Urban Change (AUC) pilot programme and was selected as 1 of 10 European
initiatives for funding. AUC focuses on mutual learning and international exchange about
urban issues. It fosters new models of participation and cross-sectoral collaboration that
bridges the cultural sphere, civil society, public administration, and the private sector. In
Moabit, ZK/U partnered with the Quartiersmanagement Moabit West and an arts and
performance production studio to constitute the Moabiter Mix of which Gütermarkt was a
 Urban Research & Practice 255

key project component. The AUC programme prioritizes culture as ‘an enabler of, and a
driver in, the sustainable development of cities’ and for ‘its potential to facilitate citizens’
participation, intercultural dialogue, mutual understanding, social inclusion, and innova-
tion’ (Schwegmann and Surwitto-Hahn 2015, 4). All of the projects profiled in this
programme are framed as ‘giv[ing] citizens the opportunity to participate in the co-
creation of innovative solutions for specific urban challenges’ and as ‘exemplifying a
collective effort for the common good’ (ibid). The Gütermarkt is a hybrid flea market in
which do-it-yourself goods, crafts, and services are traded.
Initially held biweekly, the Gütermarkt has been downsized to a monthly event as a
cost-saving initiative. At the outset, the founders of ZK/U proactively approached local
businesses to introduce themselves and to encourage their participation in the Gütermarkt
as vendors. Many businesses took up this offer and now constitute the core of regular
vendors who rent tables in conjunction with artists-in-residence who share their art work
or offer free repair or consultation services. A table rental discount is provided to vendors
who share knowledge or skills with the community. Flea market customers are perceived
to constitute ‘a good mix of residents and people from other parts of the city’ (local
administrator, interview), demonstrating the local and city-wide resonance of this event.
For a ZK/U co-founder, the Gütermarkt is ‘an entrance gate to the neighbourhood.’ A ZK/
U intern also highlights its inclusionary potential, describing it as ‘the best platform for
people to join and get engaged.’ Nevertheless, practical experience has shown that there
are some significant limitations to inclusion that the ZK/U co-founder acknowledges: ‘We
have a big Arab and Turkish community around and I see them entering the park. But at
no point do they enter our activities, not even the Gütermarkt which could potentially be
culturally interesting for them.’ This interview quotation emphasizes that barriers continue
to exist to community engagement despite active outreach. Furthermore, expectations
differ between the event founders and funders about the degree and range of social
inclusion this event can facilitate.
With regards to long-term objectives, the local neighbourhood redevelopment agency
(Quartiersmanagement Moabit West) anticipates that the Gütermarkt should become
economically self-sufficient and cater primarily to the local population. An announcement
of the event on the agency’s website characterizes the flea market as providing ‘a local
platform for knowledge exchange and neighbourhood development’ (Moabit West 2016).
In this description, the Gütermarkt is expected to support local alternative modes of
knowledge production and consumption. However, a local administrator remarks that

the outreach to the local neighbourhood is not ZK/U’s main priority, we understand that.
Their priority is that the residencies are full and that the space is running. But, if we invest
funding from Soziale Stadt,5 we have to make sure that the local population benefits.

Together, these two quotations offer diverging perspectives on, and expectations of, social
inclusion. They highlight gaps between the envisioned, expected, and experienced parti-
cipation of local ethnic communities and constraints upon artists’ intermediation capa-
cities imposed by external funders’ (mis)perceptions of artists’ priorities and a narrow
understanding of the local scale. Hence, social inclusion is interpreted differently by local
administrators and artist intermediaries. The former frame the Gütermarkt as a local event
for the local population while the latter use it as a socio-spatially practice of both
embedding themselves into the locality, and embedding local stakeholders on site as
producers and consumers. By involving local residents, Berliners, and international
artists-in-residence, ZK/U strives to collectively socially construct an understanding of
256 A. L. Bain and F. Landau

‘the local’ through the Gütermarkt. In so doing, they extend a neighbourhood event’s
reach beyond its bounded spatial frame to weave dimensions of the global and the urban
into the meaning of the local. The Gütermarkt illustrates that ZK/U’s practice of cultural
intermediation serves not just to integrate existing communities into a pre-existing under-
standing of what the local is, but rather to extend a broader invitation to various
individuals and social groups frequenting the space to inscribe their own vision of the
local into and onto this event.
The Gütermarkt is realized through a combination of ZK/U’s autopoietic and dissipa-
tive self-organization behaviours. By obtaining external private and public funding to run
the event, ZK/U is deploying a survival strategy to secure its own self-reproduction as an
organization. This strategic autopoietic behaviour is complemented by the dissipative
outreach to reconfigure and subvert how the local can be understood and enacted in
urban governance and in everyday life. ZK/U’s role in the AUC programme involves
interscalar strategizing that interweaves local connections with an international network of
cultural and urban actors. Their capacities to leverage interscalar relations are continually
renewed through repeated validation processes that affirm their authority as ‘effective’
artist intermediaries. ZK/U’s international partnerships have helped to bolster the organi-
zation’s political standing within ongoing urban and cultural policy discussions in Berlin.

Artists-in-residence OpenHaus
The OpenHaus is a monthly event in which the private live/work studios of artists-in-
residence and the communal performance and outdoor spaces at ZK/U are opened up to
the public in order to show the work-in-progress and the creative interests of visiting
artists. Art studios are important sites through which artists connect with broader networks
of artistic production and consumption (Sjöholm 2014). As part of wider artistic networks,
studios are treated by ZK/U as an important interscalar space for interconnecting interna-
tional artists and visitors from the neighbourhood, Berlin, and beyond. In what follows,
the studio open house event is treated as a creative and material outcome of the artist-in-
residency programme at ZK/U. Organized by interns who work at ZK/U between 3 and
6 months, the OpenHaus profiles the work of visiting artists who are required to
participate at least once during their residency. Since this programme was established in
2012, ZK/U has hosted over 150 fellows with an average length of residency of 3 months.
These resident artists, as profiled on ZK/U’s website, come from all over the world, but
predominantly from Europe (38%), North America (24%), South East Asia (12%),
Australasia (9%), and Latin America (6%), and the primary language of communication
is English.
Notably, the OpenHaus is also hosted in English. The event usually attracts between 15
and 50 attendees, mostly young people from the Berlin art scene, arts-interested tourists as
well as current artists-in-residence, their friends, and contacts. A ZK/U intern and OpenHaus
organizer clarifies that the ‘clientele’ also includes ‘people from the neighbourhood who are
curious and come by … and older people.’ The intern notes that locals and elderly who often
attend by accident stand out ‘because they don’t fit the look and the atmosphere … and they
see ZK/U as a mysterious place … so [we] start talking to them in German.’ While English is
perceived by the artist intermediaries as a means of inclusion, a local administrator is critical
of this mode of communication: ‘Their website, which is exclusively in English … excludes
the people from Moabit and we have told the guys from ZK/U, if they want to receive funding
from us, that they need to appeal and direct their programs to the Moabit population.’ For a
ZK/U co-founder, however, a local focus is already central to the organization’s mandate as
 Urban Research & Practice 257

their organizational ‘goal is to use artistic projects about the city to open discourses for a
neighbourhood and to help residents understand the stakes that they have in the city and help
get them politically active and have a position in urban planning and changing the future.’ Yet,
a review of ZK/U’s online artists-in-residence archive reveals that only 1% of the fellows’
projects have explicitly addressed local issues and/or engaged local residents during their time
at ZK/U. This disconnect can be attributed, in part, to the short duration of residencies, as one
South Korean artist states: ‘two months is too short to create anything new, so I will just
absorb and explore.’ Furthermore, individualized creative priorities and a language barrier
between visiting artists and local residents might be additional reasons for the lack of
embeddedness of visiting artists into the local socio-spatial fabric.
A former ZK/U fellow, still living in Berlin, has critiqued the residency programme as
resembling an ‘artist hostel’ while another artist-in-residence describes it as an ‘artists’
holiday camp.’ These artists’ observations speak to the gap between artists’ expectations
and encountered realities in residency and show how ZK/U’s intermediation capacities are
internally perceived. The co-founders’ vision of embedding parts of the global art world
into the local is in fact inhibited by temporal and linguistic challenges:

It is hard to get artists-in-residence actively involved in the neighbourhood when they are
here for such a short time. It takes at least half a year to understand the neighbourhood and
language barriers remain. The engagement with the neighbourhood is shallow because of
limited time and language. It takes assistance and engagement from our side to connect
them … but we don’t push or request engagement, if the artists want to do this or that, we
give them assistance.

The co-founder’s acknowledgement that a process of neighbourhood involvement requires

a long-term investment of time and energy sits uncomfortably with the average duration of
residencies and internships. The actual enactors of intermediation – the interns and not
ZK/U co-founders – lack sufficient social capital to effectively intermediate because they
themselves are not adequately locally embedded. Although the co-founders and interns
express a willingness to provide assistance, some artists’ expectations to be connected to
commercial galleries and other arts networks exceed ZK/U’s mandate and capacities.
Despite the shortcomings of language, time, and local embedding, according to the co-
founders, 20–30% of artists-in-residence at ZK/U remain in Berlin after their residency,
often nearby in Moabit. As a consequence, it is fair to characterize ZK/U’s interscalar
strategies as indirectly embedding international artists into the locale. ZK/U’s intermediation
strategy of bringing the global into the local maintains the organization by extending its
international networks while also generating valuable studio rental income to help cover the
operating costs of salaries, property maintenance, and programming. This autopoietic
survival strategy interweaves the global and the local in a synergistic way. An emergent
project is now briefly discussed to illustrate how ZK/U has reflected upon its organizational
shortcomings with regards to the interweaving of the local and the global spatial scales.

Eventful emergence: initiative Haus der Statistik

The Haus der Statistik, vacant since 2008, formerly housed the federal statistics office. It is
located in an area undergoing revitalization near Alexanderplatz in the borough of Mitte. In
the context of organizing the Initiative Haus der Statistik (IHdS), which advocates for the
258 A. L. Bain and F. Landau

adaptive reuse of the building through alliances between artists, cultural producers, refugee
new Berliners, and old Berliners (https://hausderstatistik.org), two networking events were
hosted at ZK/U in Initiative Haus der Statistik 2016b. As part of the initiative, about 400
refugees could be housed in a model project in Kreuzberg (Initiative Haus der Statistik
2016a). The IHdS is a partnership between Berlin-based social and cultural players, institu-
tions, and foundations out of which a non-profit organization called ZUsammenKUNFT
Berlin (ZKB) has been formed to lobby the City of Berlin to buy the building and support the
IHdS concept. The organizational name ZKB is a word play on coming together
(Zusammenkunft) and future (Zukunft). The interplay of lower and upper case typography
alludes to the name of the founding artist collective of ZK/U, KUNSTrePUBLIK (which
translates as both ‘art republic’ and ‘art regarding the public’), implicitly demonstrating their
co-authorship of the project. ZK/U has played a central administrative and intermediary role
in the inception and development of IHdS. This initiative showcases ZK/U’s involvement
beyond the local into the urban scale through the development of a new self-organized, cross-
sectoral structure conceived to engage with pressing contemporary urban social issues – such
as the place and voice of refugees in Berlin. Self-envisioned as an exemplary inclusive urban
project, IHdS seeks to enable ‘affordable living space for refugees and working space for the
arts, culture and education. Meeting areas, co-living and co-working approaches create mutual
synergies of integration between the protagonists and the neighborhood’ (http://www.zku-
berlin.org/de/konzept/).
ZK/U’s involvement in IHdS illustrates an attempt to address organizational chal-
lenges identified in the discussion of the two ZK/U-led events, Gütermarkt and
OpenHaus: the lack of social inclusion of local non-artist minority communities and the
lack of embeddedness of international artists-in-residence in local urban issues and net-
works. These challenges have not gone unnoticed by a ZK/U co-founder (26 June, 2015)
who articulates feeling as if ‘ZK/U isn’t adequately part of the Berlin art community,’ in
part because their administration duties consume a significant amount of energy – result-
ing in a ‘corrosion of creativity’ (McRobbie 2002).
The time and energy artists need to self-organize is demanding. Self-organization
involves the ‘management of self and image as well as an investment of time outside the
working day, ensuring that creative practitioners feel like they are always ‘on,’ whilst at
the same time … they spend less and less time on the ‘creative’ elements of their [artistic]
practice’. (Hawkins 2017, 76) Paradoxically, ZK/U’s engagement in the IHdS initiative
means the investment of even more administrative labour; yet, it has allowed them to
temporarily place one of their sculptures, Tor Des Westens (2014), directly in front of the
Haus der Statistik, which has reinforced their spatial artistic presence in Berlin’s city
centre. ZK/U’s emergent and ongoing engagement with IHdS reveals their organizational
capacity to be self-reflexive and to identify and learn from their shortcomings and
potential failures. Survival as self-organized artists necessitates the intermediation capa-
cities to reflect upon and adapt to conflicting public and private stakeholder expectations
as well as to remain politically connected with urgent urban issues beyond the art world.
Thus, to act as artist intermediaries demands not only the interscalar bridging of the local,
urban, and global dimensions of the art world but also the ability to flexibly deploy artistic
authority and self-acquired administration skills to achieve socio-spatial embeddedness.

Discussion: interscalar Verstetigung as embedding strategy

ZK/U’s unique enactment of embedding resonates with Berlin’s urban and cultural
political discourses of Verstetigung. In official neighbourhood revitalization strategies,
 Urban Research & Practice 259

Verstetigung appears as a community-produced assessment tool for transitioning from a

funded to a non-subsidized neighbourhood initiative (e.g., Planergemeinschaft für Stadt
und Raum eG 2017). A local policy document entitled Aktionsplan Verstetigung, for
example, presents Verstetigung as self-organizational skills that promote ‘sustainable
anchoring’ into the neighbourhood (Quartiersmanagement Wrangelkiez 2014, 2). In this
policy formulation, Verstetigung is intended to strengthen existing networks and project
structures so they can exist independently. Its goal is to ‘enhance cooperation with strong
partners in the area’ and to ‘hand over of responsibility’ (Quartiersmanagement
Wrangelkiez 2014, 6). This language of cooperation, partnership, and responsibility
speaks to an instrumental understanding of the purpose of Verstetigung. On the one
hand, such a framing is geared towards the longer term responsibilization of civil
stakeholders, but on the other hand, it also empowers them as protagonists within existing
networks and communities. Self-organized urban actors share some of this vision to
institutionalize in order to address their oft-precarious organizational and economic status
(Bain and McLean 2013). Thus, there is a partial overlap between this formalized
articulation of Verstetigung and the multiple and more informal practices of embedding
by artist intermediaries. ZK/U’s repertoire of intermediation strategies has brought them
close to a self-enacted version of Verstetigung. Their understanding of Verstetigung differs
however, in that it reaches beyond the local scale to value interscalar connections to the
urban and global as constitutive of artist intermediation. By combining autopoietic and
dissipative self-organization behaviours at different spatial scales, ZK/U extends the local
administration’s understanding of Verstetigung and adds a degree of improvisational
flexibility. In so doing, it reveals a potentially promising model of organizational survival
inside and outside of the art market for other artist intermediaries, but one that also reveals
ongoing challenges for meaningful and sustained inclusion of socially diverse local
residents in programming.
The two ZK/U events and one emergent project discussed in this paper demonstrate
that artist intermediaries are often engaged at many different spatial scales and, through
this interscalar interweaving, refine their self-organizational capacities, including project
management, political and community mobilization, and organizational self-reflexivity.
Moreover, the analysis has demonstrated how artist intermediaries are inextricably bound
up in interscalar spaces and networks that have different and sometimes competing
expectations about the quality and extent of social interactions. The practice of embedding
by artist intermediaries was revealed as a co-constitutive process: involving reaching out
and growing into a neighbourhood while also inviting local residents, stakeholders,
citizens, and international artists to embed themselves on site. Beyond this co-
embedding, a further important dimension of anchorage is exposed – namely, that
embedding is not just used instrumentally as a means to an urban development end but
is also a general and a radically open condition or creative practice of artist intermediaries
themselves. This illustrated mode of cultural intermediation does not seek to control or to
predict the outcomes of creative, eventful, and community-engaging processes that are
initiated as part of broader urban redevelopment initiatives but rather seeks to propel
beyond such preconceptions. Nevertheless, where artists may thrive on the unknown
possibilities and potentialities of projects, municipal administrators, policymakers, and
funding bodies still increasingly require ‘clear deliverables against which to measure the
impact of their investment’ (Berthoin Antal 2012, 64). Tensions persist between a creative
and processual openness to not knowing, an occupational resistance to economic and
spatial precarity, and a bureaucratic need for accountability and predictability.
260 A. L. Bain and F. Landau

Instead of resigning themselves to spatial transience and a provisional sense of stability

reinforced through repeated relocation, artist intermediaries asserted their authority to act upon
their own circumstances. Through interscalar strategies of self-organization, they have chal-
lenged neoliberal urban development logics that instrumentalize creativity and have produced
instead a permanent collective space for sharing experiences that fosters relationships between
artists and non-artists. The resulting preliminary spatial security cannot, however, be equated
with financial security. All of the events discussed in this paper demonstrate that artist
intermediaries must continually compete and justify their worthiness for project funding.
Securing funding to develop and sustain events demands not only efficiency and administrative
competency but also spontaneity (Forkert 2013). Artist intermediaries survive both creatively
and organizationally because of their strategic, and sometimes improvisational, interscalar
responsiveness to changing policy, funding, and working circumstances.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding
This work was supported by a Minor Research Grant and an International Collaboration Grant from
the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies at York University as well as by a Joint
Sabbatical Leave Fellowship from the York University Faculty Association.

Notes
1. Fieldwork was conducted between June 2015 and July 2016 by both co-authors. Interviews
were undertaken in both English and German and were recorded using a digital voice recorder
and selectively transcribed. Quotations from German-language interviews and policy docu-
ments were translated by the German-native co-author.
2. The German artist collective KUNSTrePUBLIK was founded in 2006 by three Berlin-based
artists who, in addition to working collectively, also work independently as curators, educators,
and organizers (http://www.kunstrepublik.de/en/).
3. We extend our thanks to an anonymous reviewer for the reminder to acknowledge the
importance and necessity of the wider urban policy context of social integration in Berlin.
4. For more details on the politics of placemaking by artists at ZK/U, please see Bain and Landau
(2017).
5. Soziale Stadt is a neighbourhood redevelopment programme administered by the Senate
Department for Urban Development and Environment and financially supported with federal
and European Union funding.

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