S27 is a Berlin-based art lab for young people who want to change the world.
Constructing, tinkering, designing the future: together with artists we sharpen our senses and try out utopias. Because everyone can shape the world! This is why we love craftsmanship, workshops and construction sites, where plans are transformed into a physical form.
Come around and have a look!
Together with cultural workers from all branches and creative minds of craft and science, we develop innovative educational concepts and spaces for experimentation that rely on the inventive qualities and potential for creative change in young people.
The content orientation of the S27 is divided into thematic program fields, which are easily combined in our courses and projects: social transformation, democratic development and decolonisation | Changes to the city’s spaces – Urban practice | Culture of craft and the worlds of work | Circular processes, recycling and re-design | Time / history and culture of remembrance
In the various arenas of reflection and design, we rely on artistic experiments that adopt and reinterpret curricular concepts from Montessori and Bauhaus pedagogy, and in particular from the historic Black Mountain College.
The variety of activities and offers from the S27 range from temporary workshops and project weeks to multi-year programs. In the ARRIVO training workshops and the open work school, ‘Bildungsmanufaktur’, we offer young people and youths with refugee backgrounds, who may have special needs for stabilisation and orientation, many lively years that can act as a bridge towards professional vocational training. The programs in the creative design workshops are accompanied by German lessons, social work and round tables for political education. Developing new, unique and surprising things together, sharing different traditions, knowledge and recipes from all over the world which end-up in a huge collective melting pot at lunchtimes – all of this helps one to quickly feel at home and rebuild lost everyday structures.
As an extracurricular educational facility, we initiate participatory processes of appropriation and design of common space in Berlin quarters with the involvement of various neighbourhoods, NGOs, schools, universities, initiatives and communities. Our diverse engagement programs lead to open laboratory sites and grounds for manufacturing new ideas. A few examples are the sites of the JUNGEN PÄCHTER, der Feldtower JUNIPARK, the “Gärtnerei” and COOP CAMPUS in Neukölln, KREATIVE STADTWERKE (initially in Marzahn) and various pioneering projects in the Haus der Statistik (House of Statistics) at Alexanderplatz.
Our local partners include numerous Berlin art and cultural institutions, social organisations, Berlin schools with various profiles, the Berlin Science Center for Social Research (WZB), the Prinzessinnengärten, the Art+Community Network Berlin Mondiale, the Weißensee art college, raumlabor berlin, Werkbundarchiv / Museum of Things, the Berlin City Museum, StreetUniverCity, the refugee counselling center bbz, the Neukölln Opera, Berlin libraries, Bridge – Berlin networks for the right to stay, the Berlin Chamber of Crafts, etc.
Our house is funded by the State of Berlin (Senate Department for Education, Youth and Family). In order to realise our projects, we receive valuable support from our friends‘ association and from numerous private and public foundations and promotion funds.
The project teams, trainees and colleagues look forward to new impulses and guests from the neighbourhood and all over the world – everyone is welcome!