We are very sad to share with you that none of our fundings from the Berlin Senate for Culture for the Flutgraben Performances Residencies program will be continued. We submitted an application to the Tanzresidenzprogramm for the coming three years and received a negative response – without any explanation, as is always the case in Berlin. Simultaneously, our application for the Flutgraben Performances festival “Practices of Kinship” planned for 2025, was rejected at Spartenoffene Förderung. This puts an unexpected and sudden end to the continuous work we have been doing as artists collective organising events and residencies since 2014.
For more than a decade in different configurations we have built a network of artists, peers, colleagues and visitors, as well as an infrastructure with equipped spaces and organised channels of communication, trying out new formats of artistic collaboration and participation. All of this is now lost for Berlin and its artists. This is not only a brutal reality, it is also economic nonsense.
Throughout the years we have experimented with various ways of inviting and working together with artists, sharing resources and access. We did this to find alternatives to a system of curating and jurying that lacked care, sensitivity as well as a future-oriented, sustainable perspective. We questioned a selection system left to its own devices, a system of arbitrary replacements, hierarchies, and institutional bureaucracy. In some ways we feel we succeeded in our efforts to allow for something unexpected to see the light, and we are confident that our contributions will live on in other ways. Nevertheless, given the city’s politics lack of respect for our work and its value, it no longer makes sense for us to continue seeking alternatives to keep our organisation afloat. Our situation as artists is further threatened by disruptive political cuts being implemented, and the lack of any significant future perspective for Berlin. As a result, we will reorganise our efforts in other directions.
We find it important to note that our initiative, like many others, embodied the Berlin spirit of artistic self-determination, co-creating an infrastructure, based on principles of self-organisation, care and equity. We observe that, along an ongoing gentrification, this type of work by is no longer supported by the city. Institutions are now predominantly receiving grants, and with the wave of financial cuts, only the most established venues are the ones to receive funding, leaving artist-run initiatives on the brink of extinction. We call on all policymakers and jurors to reconsider this approach – it is this type of work that made Berlin a place for artistic innovation, and canceling it destroys in a short time what has been built up over years.
Institutions and funding bodies in Berlin tend to view artists as replaceable resources meant to be cycled through the system. Over the years we have witnessed countless dance artists—many with significant and well-known work—disappearing from the city due to a sudden lack of support. These decisions often appeared unjustified and random. As a residency program made by artists for artists we worked against this idea, for a more sustainable approach based on exchange, connections and building up networks.
We believe the current situation does not stem from malevolence but rather from a constellation of actors organised in ways that encourage anonymity and a political stance that refuses to commit to a growing field. The infamous metaphor used by the Senate of a “bus system” was even created to express this idea: “artists can get on the bus of being supported, but they will have to get off at some point”, without considering the options of these artists or, in our case, our organisation, after they have been disembarked. This is particularly evident in the way grants are awarded or denied. It is a repetitive loss for Berlin. As a residency and event venue we have looked for other ways to invite artists and share resources.
The level of urgency created by the recent financial cuts and the short-sighted lack of continuity provided to dance artists over the past decades have reached a point where it is no longer possible in this field to just go on. We call for an in-depth reform of the whole dance and performance art funding infrastructure of Berlin that respects the work and includes the knowledge of the artists and cultural workers concerned.
We call Berlin’s cultural infrastructure and institutions to support and commit to the artists of Berlin and to develop together new ideas for the future of dance.
Goodbye Flutgraben Performances! 💕
Clément Layes + Moritz Majce + Adam Man