Berlin`s landscape of funding for both cultural institutions and independent projects and actors has always been heterogeneous. From the 1990s to the early 2000s, the ways the cultural scene has been funded, blended historical residue from a once-divided city with two cultural administrative departments and traditions, and different episodes of post-Wall Berlin. This made conceiving Berlin’s image a vast playing field for artists and creative entrepreneurs to squat, experiment, and develop in widely available and affordable spaces. This era was followed by the emergence and aspiration of the “creative city” narrative, a managerial mindset coined by economic geographer Richard Florida, proposing to treat creativity as a resource for urban and regional development and popularizing ambivalent approaches such as the temporary use (Zwischennutzung) and the naming of a “creative class” and “creative entrepreneurialism”.
The “creative city” narrative was shaped by a funding allocation partially explained via long-cultivated traditions of funding for individual cultural institutions that have a recurring item position in the bi-annually allocated cultural budget, a so-called “Haushaltstitel”. Other cultural actors or initiatives, which are either “younger” institutions to begin with, or which came into being in very different socio-spatial conditions in Berlin’s creative city script, do not receive longer-term recurring funding but are instead reliant on competitive project funding. Debates in Berlin’s cultural and creative (industries) policy meander between arts and culture-related aspirations on the one hand, and economic development rationales on the other. Hence, cultural policy and funding in Berlin consist of differently-minded administrators, policymakers, and, artists, to discuss, design, and distribute forms of subsidy and support for the arts.
From Squats to Strategies: Mapping Berlin’s Cultural Funding Infrastructure
Since the 2010s, collective organizing within the independent arts scene has significantly influenced cultural policy debates. This became evident with the formation of groups such as Haben & Brauchen (2011) and the Koalition der Freien Szene (2012), as well as mobilizations for cultural spaces including the Alte Münze and Haus der Statistik (both since 2016). These and other artist-led initiatives actively engage with political stakeholders to secure and preserve spaces for artistic production and presentation. Prominently, the Koalition der Freien Szene has acted as a trans-disciplinary action platform for artists and independent cultural producers from multiple artistic genres, articulating collectivized voices to represent political and funding-related claims. While the Koalition is not without its difficulties in representing the “whole” of Berlin’s hugely diverse creative scenes – including diasporic, refugee, and non-German speaking cultural groups and actors – the Koalition has vocally claimed the City Tax to leverage additional funds for the independent production and presentation of art and culture. While the Koalition was exemplarily consulted in the design of distributing the first incoming City Tax [1] funds back in 2015/16, a decade later, the status quo of such collaborative policy-making stands at a worrisome point.
It is also in this last decade of cultural politics that diversity-sensitive initiatives such as Stiftung für Kulturelle Weiterbildung und Kulturberatung (the Foundation for Cultural Education and Cultural Consulting, est. 2020) were founded, laying the groundwork for diversity-centered cultural consultation and programming, as spearheaded by Diversity Arts Culture (est. 2017), the cultural education hub kultur_formen, or the Institute for Research on Cultural Participation (Institut für Kulturelle Teilhabeforschung, est. 2020).
When it comes to the breadth of cultural funding in the city-state of Berlin, for the past 10 to 15 years, the overwhelming majority (90 to 95%) of the provincial budget (amounting to around 600 million Euros as of 2020) has been going to institutions such as opera houses, orchestras, theatres, collections, and museums. Respectively, independent cultural actors in fields such as visual arts, performing arts, literature, poetry, jazz, and new musical forms, and cross-disciplinary structures such as cultural centers, cultural education hubs, programming for children and young people, and artist-run project spaces have received the remaining percentage of the budget.
In short, the days of “poor but sexy”, announced in the early 2000s by then-mayor Klaus Wowereit of the Social Democratic Party, are, once and for all, over [2].
While we all knew that, with the announcement of a historic 11.6 % cut to the cultural budget (totaling about 130 million Euros) to come into effect as of January 1, 2025, precarity in Berlin’s cultural sector has been taken to another level. In the most absurd ways of receiving the news from the newspaper, some cultural initiatives that focus on inclusive, children and youth-related, and diasporic cultural programming will be forced to close down by the beginning of the new year. The ways they are affected by “cuts” actually do not equal scaling back, or receiving less funding, but the complete dissolution or erasure of their existence.
The political mobilization of the independent scene from roughly the last ten years can be captured via a conflict-oriented approach to cultural policy, and to cultural politics more broadly [3]. The emergence of the Koalition, mentioned above, shows that multi-stakeholder governance between cultural administrators, politicians, artists, and artist advocacy bodies can work together despite differences about the concrete purpose and scope of funding the arts. Some conflicts about the social meaning and value of art, the need for inclusion, intersectional thinking, and/or participation in the arts, as well as the contentious norm of artistic excellence/quality, will persist amongst different stakeholders. In light of this, it is important for cultural policy and politics to actively invest in formats of cultural funding and cultural political dialogue that hold space for degrees of disagreement and conflict, rather than breaking off conversations altogether and ending in stalemates and silos.
Over the past year, cultural politics have been deeply influenced by a volatile geopolitical landscape, ranging from conflicts such as the October 7 Hamas attacks, the ensuing Israeli total war on Gaza, and other ongoing wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, to domestic national controversies such as the debates surrounding anti-Semitism during documenta fifteen. These tensions have reverberated locally in Berlin, where shifts in cultural administration — along with personnel changes and coalition realignments — are increasingly intertwined with artist-led advocacy efforts. In this climate of fear-driven politics, characterized by cancellations, delays, and the exclusion of dissenting voices in cultural discourse, Berlin has seen alarming withdrawals of funding from pluralistic cultural spaces such as Oyoun, as well as looming restrictions on artistic freedom, programming, and freedom of speech. These conflicts form a complex web that cannot be reduced to a critique of Joe Chialo, the current State Minister for Culture and Social Cohesion (CDU). However, it is significant that Chialo has failed to honor his promises to strengthen infrastructures including Diversity Arts Culture.
fig. 1
While it may be tempting to focus on Chialo’s rhetoric — such as his remark about “strong shoulders carrying weak shoulders” — doing so risks amplifying the condescending notions around which cultural players are considered “strong” or “weak”. What is more pressing, however, is an analysis of the political culture that such statements evoke: a troubling narrowing of pluralism and a retreat from defending artistic spaces, precisely when they are most vulnerable to the spillover pressures of geopolitical and societal conflicts.
In embodied solidarity with the many statements and critiques currently circulating in writing, and vocal protests in front of the Abgeordnetenhaus (provincial parliament), and in complementarity to these voices, in the remainder of this commentary, I present critical scholarship around infrastructure to unpack both the “cruelty as well as promise” [4] of specifically cultural infrastructures. After a time of setting up diversity-sensitive cultural funding (i.e. allegedly a time of promise), Berlin has now clearly entered the era of revealing the cruel face of infrastructure and divestment – while larger national, European, and international cultural funding initiatives, and policies, are strongly focusing on inclusion and care such as the Culture of Solidarity Fund. My tentative diagnosis is that the drastic cuts display a case of “infrastructural violence” [5].
infrastructural funding decolonizes people, places, and the spectre of artistic excellence
infrastructural funding decolonizes people, places, and the spectre of artistic excellence
infrastructure never dies
againing as an exploitative verb - you gain nothing, this time
the pulse of vulnerability races through infrastructural lines
your right to exist has been decreed upon
you end now
WTFWTFWTFWTFWTF
If you cannot ever fully kill cultural infrastructure, have you tried divesting it to death?
The (broken) promise of infrastructure
Almost five years after my first reflections on individual and collective infrastructures of vulnerability and cultural institutions, the appeal to consider differently embodied, intersecting forms of human(e) vulnerability is as pressing as ever. Yet, cultural infrastructures, or infrastructures of cultural funding to be more precise, such as Diversity Arts Culture, or diasporic and multi- or trans-disciplinary, intergenerational initiatives, places, festivals, platforms of culture, etc., are currently trundling into the exact opposite direction of infrastructural support and care – infrastructural violence.
But what exactly is “infrastructure”? And why has it gained such traction within academic and activist discussions that seek to disentangle this complex messy world?
In what has been referred to as the “infrastructural turn”, scholarly attention has been dedicated to molding the thinking about infrastructure as not merely technological, technocratic, digital or information-related relations between humans, places, and things. Rather, infrastructures shape, and are shaped by, affective, poetic and embodied aspects, leading to an overall political understanding of infrastructure. In other words, infrastructures are never neutral – neither in their presence or existence, nor in their absence or elusiveness. Those who make decisions about infrastructure are often those in power and they have a say in what is being maintained or renovated – or not. In short, infrastructural reparation and investment are just as political as infrastructural divestment, dismantling, or erasure – the latter sadly describing the status quo of Berlin’s cultural funding at the moment.
Abdoumaliq Simone has coined the notion of people as infrastructure, enacting or resisting greater systems of infrastructural power [6]. But people (i.e., artists and activists, in our case) cannot resist those hegemonic structures that deny infrastructural support, via drawing from their resources by compensating or self-exploiting forever.
how to start from brokenness, again?
broken again, start again, never again, who again
againing as an exploitative verb - you gain nothing, this time
we scream against againing
because who is gaining what from againing?
your strong-shoulder-metaphor biologizes discrimination against community strength
In their book The Cultural Infrastructures of Cities [7], the geographers Alison Bain and Julie Podmore (2023, p. 15) describe cultural infrastructure(s) as “a combination of buildings, facilities, spaces, practices, funding and legal frameworks, personal and institutional networks, and social media sites that support a common localized urban culture.” Dennis Rodgers and Bruce O’Neill (2012, p. 402), who have coined the term “infrastructural violence” see the latter as “an ideal ethnographic site for theorizing how broad and abstract social orderings such as the state, citizenship, criminality, ethnicity and class play out concretely at the level of everyday practice, revealing how such relationships of power and hierarchy translate into palpable forms of physical and emotional harm” [8]. Hence, precisely because the existence or withdrawal of infrastructures reveals what cultural senators, administrators, and budget-makers prioritize, both the presence and absence of infrastructure are telling.
In Berlin’s current swingeing budget cuts, leading to the complete erasure of some cultural infrastructures, infrastructural violence appears as both active or passive; while the cuts are blatantly active, they have passively rampant implications, too. Active effects of infrastructural violence, for example, become apparent in the direct and immediate reduction, or complete removal, of funding for cultural institutions, leading to the closure of initiatives like Diversity Arts Culture, or the reduction of programming at SAVVY Contemporary. These cuts are intentional, and illustrate specific actions aimed at withdrawing support for pluralistic cultural spaces, leaving artists and communities without critical resources to self-organize, network and institutionalize. Passive effects of infrastructural violence, or the long-term consequences of these cuts, may not be immediately visible or tangible, but are cumulative, wide-ranging, and multiple. For example, the reduction of funds for accessing affordable work and exhibition spaces via facilities such as the atelier or project space program or KulturRaumBerlin, will gradually erode existing infrastructures, and will force artistic communities and projects to the margins of the city or into less visible, less accessible, and even more precarious conditions of production. This represents a slow but profound destruction of Berlin's diverse cultural ecosystem, one that is not overtly active but is deeply destructive over time.
Overall, this erratic managerial-administrative behavior is now clothed in arguments of austerity, with strange assumptions about relative strengths and weaknesses within the cultural landscape, and the implications of funding cuts. What is more, such short-sighted “decisions” to cut (which are then partially tweaked and revoked [9] as partial and insufficient responses to the ongoing and fervent protests, for example, lessening cuts at the Schaubühne, Philharmonie, or Berliner Ensemble) breed a culture of insecurity for all cultural actors, be they defunded this time or not. Now, everyone is afraid of who will not be receiving funding next time. Who is safe for another budget round? What are the parameters of maintaining funding, and what exactly are the reasons for falling prey to cuts/erasure? Which types of cuts will allow cultural organizations and spaces to keep functioning or (when/how/why) will they be “kaputtgespart”, i.e., (de)funded to death?
Cultural Life in a Post-Infrastructural Age
The inherently relational concept of infrastructure unfolds in partially unforeseeable ways – it can bring about new alliances, networks, and solidarities. But infrastructure is also consciously built to divide, neglect, or destroy. With both active and passive implications of violence, the groundwork of Berlin’s diversity-and-inclusion-sensitive cultural infrastructures has nourished generative and relation- and bridge-building soil over the past years which will not vanish overnight. Indeed, many initiatives and communities have long worked together in solidarity, before, without, or despite funding. However, the current rupture within the cultural funding landscape not only facilitates, but almost sickeningly opens the gates for infrastructural violence to flow through the newly established infrastructures of inclusive, diverse, and intersectional care that the cultural sector needed, and continues to need.
The removal of essential infrastructural elements — such as offices, personnel, and both digital and physical spaces — leaves behind the lasting marks of infrastructural violence. Berlin will not forget Diversity Arts Culture, nor will it overlook the absence of Mondiale. The city will mourn the reduced programming at venues including SAVVY Contemporary, Schinkel Pavillon, Silent Green, and Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik. The list goes on. We will remember. Or perhaps, as the saying goes: Infrastructure is never truly gone. Whether this idea feels like a threat or a glimpse of justice and hope reflects your stance in the ongoing struggle for an intersectional cultural policy and practice—a fight that is never fully over. Not now. Not ever.
//
- Footnotes
[1] A 5% tax levied on net tourist overnight stays since 2014, and for professional travels since 2024.
[2] 15 Jahre „Arm, aber sexy“-Spruch: Und heute? Reich, aber öde! | taz.de
[3] Agonistic Articulations in the 'Creative' City: On New Actors and Action (accessed December 9, 2024).
[4] Seeing Like a City (accessed December 9, 2024).
[5] Urban life in the shadows of infrastructural death: from people as infrastructure to dead labor and back again: Urban Geography: Vol 42 , No 9 - Get Access
[6] People as Infrastructure: Intersecting Fragments in Johannesburg | Public Culture | Duke University Press (accessed December 9, 2024).
[7] Title Detail: The Cultural Infrastructure of Cities by Alison L. Bain (accessed December 9, 2024).
[8] Vol. 13, No. 4, December 2012 of Ethnography on JSTOR (accessed December 9, 2024).
[9] Berlin: Kulturszene darf doch auf mehr Geld hoffen | tagesschau.de (accessed December 13, 2024).
Image credits
Cover: "Different feet in the same struggle, we are all affected by the cuts in different ways". Photo by Friederike Landau-Donnelly
fig. 1: "Through the clouds that carry our protesting voices, we stay infrastructured together in solidarity". Photo by Friederike Landau-Donnelly
