Energy is what gets spent, extracted, and sometimes replenished in the daily reality of para-institutional cultural work. I write from my own experience as one of the people behind the ReferenzBibliothek for Art in Public in Hamburg (and beyond), a project I co-initiated with Dörte Habighorst, Malin Kuht, and Sarah Savalanpour as part of para-education e.V. in 2025. What follows is my perspective on a condition I believe many fellow projektarians[1] share.
The ReferenzBibliothek traces individual and collective (her)stories of art in public space in Hamburg from 1981 to the present, and beyond. We collect publications, ephemera, oral histories, and materials donated by artists, activists, and cultural workers—not to preserve them in archival stillness but to reactivate them through contact with new users, new contexts, and new questions. We are interested in what happened alongside and through institutions, not only within them.
From the outside, we are perceived as a stable, fully funded structure. Our website is professionally designed and makes no mention of the precarity behind it. We openly invite the public to submit references for the collection, which implies the capacity to process what arrives. Our funding appears substantial—but the bulk of our working hours are absorbed by care-work, structural labor, and communication rather than content development. The reality is that there are four of us, entangled across multiple simultaneous projects, juggling artistic self-employment, budget cuts, and personal lives. The guilt for the unanswered emails sits in my body.
I should say clearly: this has been one of the most rewarding experiences of my freelance career. It synthesizes aspects of my practice that had previously been separated (and rarely compensated) in one place—mediation, curation, artistic production, and the organizational labor of collective work. The invitation came through my studies (Master's in Arts Facilitation) at HFBK Hamburg. The project is possible there in ways it could not have been in Berlin: Hamburg's off-scene is smaller, better connected, and has a dedicated institutional structure to support public art continuity that Berlin lacks. But precisely because I care, I want to be honest about the structural conditions under which this project operates. What Kuba Szreder identifies as the central paradox of the projektariat applies here: enthusiasm is not merely a personal disposition, but a resource that project-based capitalism generates and captures. The trap only works when you care.
The pressure I feel is a by-product of what I call the institutional gap: the condition in which a project is expected to function as an institution while operating with the resources of a DIY practice. A para-institution does not stand against the institution; it stands alongside it, in deviant relation. The Greek πάρα means beside, next to, or along. We exist because the institutions that should care for what we gather—the diverse (her)stories of Hamburg's art in public space—have not done so.
The Behörde für Kultur und Medien Hamburg (BKM) has maintained a dedicated office for Kunst im öffentlichen Raum since 1981—a funding line, an administrative contact, and, since 2013, the curatorial position of the City Curator (Stadtkuratorin). But the program’s character has changed. In a conversation with our working group, Achim Könnecke, who headed the program during the 1990s, described that era’s guiding questions: to whom does public space belong, and who has the right to the city? These questions animated projects such as Park Fiction (1995 – ongoing), rooted in the Hafenstraße occupation movement.[2] That the BKM could fund a project born from community resistance suggests a degree of artistic agency that subsequent administrations would not maintain. The shift coincided with Hamburg's “Metropole Hamburg – Wachsende Stadt” strategy (2002), a McKinsey-shaped framework that recast the city as an entrepreneurial competitor.[3] The neoliberalization of public art is not only about budget cuts—it is about the replacement of artistic agency with managerial efficiency.
The Stadtkuratorin Program illustrates the selectivity of who receives structural protection. Previous City Curators appear to have operated within precarious employment structures. The BKM and Kunsthaus Hamburg have since restructured the Program so that the current Stadtkuratorin and her team can access working contracts with social benefits—a meaningful fix, but it is a solution that raises a question: why is this protection available for one layer of the ecosystem and not the next? When an institution outsources labor to a para-institutional project without contracts, without security, without continuity, the gap does not close. It cascades. Expectations flow downward. Resources do not.
Here is where energy enters the analysis. Szreder, drawing on Gregory Sholette, describes the invisible creative labor that holds the art world together as dark matter: structurally unseen yet essential.[4] Enthusiasm is the key resource that project-based capitalism extracts from its workforce. The system operates by transferring constraints from external organizational mechanisms to people’s internal dispositions.[5] You internalize the deadline, the visibility imperative, the fear of exclusion, and your body does the rest.
The mechanism of this capture is administrative, reputational, and cumulative. The ReferenzBibliothek operates under the logos of its partner institutions—the Stadtkuratorin Program, Kunsthaus Hamburg, the BKM. These logos grant legitimacy, but legitimacy is not a one-way gift: our partners can list the ReferenzBibliothek among their own outputs as evidence of a thriving public art ecosystem. Our Open Labs appear in their calendars. Our archive feeds their narrative. The teams involved do try to credit us appropriately—we communicate public statements back and forth before publishing, which itself produces unpaid coordination labor. But the most vital participants of the project did not arrive through institutional channels. They came through word-of-mouth, through trust networks that para-institutional work builds precisely because it is not institutional. Meanwhile, the labor that makes all of this possible—websites, accounting, care-work, relationship-building with practitioners sceptical of larger institutions and their curatorial modes of production—is absorbed by our team at freelance rates, without contracts, without the infrastructure salaried positions provide. The enthusiasm is ours. The capital it generates circulates asymmetrically: for our funding institutions, the output sustains credibility; for us freelancers, it sustains the next rent payment.
Isabell Lorey calls this condition self-precarization: cultural producers tolerate exhausting conditions because of the belief in their own freedoms and autonomies.[6] But Lorey's analysis risks flattening something important. The care is genuine. We were asked to create this project and we jumped into it. Our investment grew with its duration and responsibilities. But care alone cannot cover what the work demands. The scope of the ReferenzBibliothek is larger than ourselves—we are building structures for future artists and cultural workers. For that to be possible, the state must reciprocate with structural commitment: long-term funding that relieves us from yearly applications.
During our first Open Lab—three weeks at Hinterconti in St. Pauli—we turned its walls into a map of Hamburg's public art history. People brought ephemeral materials from decades of artistic and performative practices, many responding to the rise of right-wing violence in Germany. Participants from the Wohlfahrtsausschüsse, the anti-fascist alliances that organized under the banner Etwas Besseres als die Nation in the early 1990s, contextualized connections between actions that had previously seemed separate. The energy in those encounters was not something we produced. It was something we created conditions for.
But making dark matter visible is not always a gift. We received a poster reading Freiheit für Irmgard Möller from a participant. I decided to display it at Kunsthaus Hamburg without context. The artist Margit Czenki, who took the original photograph, reached out that night: she knew the people depicted, and Irmgard Möller, still alive, has expressed her reluctance to see these materials resurface. Why did you not ask Irmgard Möller’s permission? The question cut through every assumption I had made. The poster became a thinking-object that forced us to confront a fundamental tension: just because cultural work goes dark does not mean bringing it to light serves everyone involved. Some people have earned their invisibility. The omission as care is an ethical position that any practice dealing with anti-fascist, anti-racist, and feminist cultural work must learn to hold. The troubles we face as cultural workers in Germany are real and worsening—but the energy we invest is energy we are free to invest. That freedom is not universal. It carries responsibility: to hold stories carefully, to share the microphone with those whose visibility comes at greater cost, and to build structures that outlast our own exhaustion.
To my fellow projektarians: take the pressure off. This is not self-care advice. It is a political act.
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- Cover Image:
Open Lab of the ReferenzBibliothek at Hyper Cultural Passengers (HyCP), April 2026, © AnneLinke
Footnotes:
[1] I borrow this neologism from Kuba Szreder's The ABC of the Projektariat (2021). The projektariat describes workers who survive by moving between short-term, project-based jobs, acting as self-entrepreneurs who use each project to build reputation and future income.
[2] On the Hafenstraße occupation, see Peter Birke, “Right to the City — and Beyond,” in Urban Uprisings, eds. M. Mayer, et al. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). On Park Fiction: Christoph Schäfer, “The City Is Unwritten,” in Making Their Own Plans, eds. B. Bloom and A. Bromberg (Whitewalls, 2004).
[3] Freie und Hansestadt Hamburg, Leitbild: Metropole Hamburg – Wachsende Stadt (Staatliche Pressestelle, 2002). See also Anne Vogelpohl, “McKinseyisierung oder Regierungsprojekt?,” Raumforschung und Raumordnung 75, no. 1 (2017)
[4] Gregory Sholette, Dark Matter (Pluto Press, 2011), 1; Kuba Szreder, The ABC of the Projektariat ( Manchester University Press, 2021), 78–79.
[5] Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism (Verso, 2005), 80.
[6] Isabell Lorey, “Governmentality and Self-Precarization,” in Art and Contemporary Critical Practice, eds. G. Raunig and G. Ray (MayFly Books, 2009), 86–87.
