Engagement Minifesto  

deutsche Version /// version española

1. Our practice is socially and politically motivated.

2. It is also driven by our own curiosity tofind a collective, aesthetic expression.

3. We often work with young people who live in a residential home for refugees. Their lives and everyday experiences in Germany are marked by racism and other forms of discrimination. Through our projects, we work with young people to find ways to take a stand and develop tools to live within these structures and fight against them.

4. Through our practice, we try to cultivate relationships with people and places. Sometimes this works better than others. Due to our individually different work in other areas and our dependence on funding conditions, we do not offer regular programmes, but move from project to project. Over the last three years, however, we have managed to carry out repeated actions in the same places and to work with the same people, in some cases over several years.

5. In our work, we are constantly confronted with the question of how and whether it is possible to place projects in a social context while giving equal space to our own creative desires and to the needs and wishes of the people with or for whom the projects are designed. This remains a process of negotiation. We constantly try new approaches to allow the artistic and the social to work together rather than against each other.

6. One of our goals in this regard is to jointly appropriate cultural institutions.

7. We want different spaces for art and culture; spaces that include different people and ideas about art, spaces that truly belong to everyone and can be designed in a radically democratic way. We fight for this by repeatedly shaping social interaction in different ways and allowing it to penetrate institutions, whether through film actions, presentations or performative actions.

8. This interaction is affective, spontaneous, chaotic and therefore unpredictable. Based on this understanding, we explore and experiment with a practice that gives space to the unpredictable, that gives meaning to the non-conformist, the dysfunctional, the funny, the lustful and the cheeky. A practice that deals with the sensitive, the cautious, the doubtful and that aims to unlearn.

9. We try to create spaces in which social practice itself becomes an artistic form, in which questions can be asked boldly, defiantly and without fear, or ideas can be expressed that go against the established norm. Sometimes, almost incidentally, magical situations arise that are aesthetically, socially and politically astonishing.

10. We call what makes us happy and drives us in our work, even if it is not always fun, Doing Social Magic.

rampe:aktion
with Christian Limber, Christian Diaz Orejarena,
Miriam Trostorf, Lara Dade  
January 2025