#openpavillon is a sociocultural construction site at the juncture of art and crafts.
Since 2017, it annually gathers a diverse group of people to live, work and learn together over two weeks at the Other Music Academy [OMA] in Weimar. Every year, the community defines a new task to be tackled in co-creation and learning-exchanges. The group consists of international artists, craftswo*men, children with and without special needs, exchange students, senior citizens, newly arrived and longtime neighbors of the construction site.
I created this project out of my own need to engage with the crafts, combining it with artistic and social dimensions. The basic principle is: everyone learns! Throughout the process, experts turn into students and vice-versa. Every member contributes their own life experiences to the various workshops.
In the process of co-creation we aquire traditional techniques of craftswo*manship and relate them to contemporary artistic practices and methods. Through working and living together we learn above all to understand and utilize the diversity of the group as its creative potential.
As artistic director and project manager of #openpavillon, I believe that bringing very different paths of life and education backgrounds into interaction is a fruitful contribution and a hands-on intervention to the current polarizing debates in our society.
In 2020, the #openpavillon was set to take place for the first time outside of OMA in Weimar – heading over to Altenburg, in the East of Thüringen. We are becoming a mobile infrastructure of learning between arts and crafts!!
In 2025 and many adventures along the rivers, the #openpavillon came back to its original home in Weimar – we worked on gardens, diversity, indigenous and the core question: what can we learn from a garden about resilience? As always in a diverse temporary learning community of people with many different walks of life!
