Ben J. Riepe Company – Der Freiraum 2022–2025: local, global, digital

Co-financed by: Land Nordrhein-Westfalen, Stadt Düsseldorf, Kunststiftung NRW

Ben J. Riepe Company

Since its launch in January 2020, the FREIRAUM has become a support facility that, through its free, non-hierarchical approach, has been creating opportunities for successful artists, graduates, activists and advanced students in all artistic and art-related academic disciplines to work in equal measure on their own concepts and practices. The work to date will form the basis for further thinking on the key priorities for the FREIRAUM up to 2025: in one FREIRAUM community, the (post-) pandemic opportunities for different meeting and exchange formats emerging from all affiliated actors are giving rise to a solid network that is expanding the effectiveness of individual or joint projects on an interdisciplinary basis. This community, which sees itself as the FREIRAUM’s ‘safe haven’, also assumes a responsibility for society, wishing to devise and try out sustainable models of new forms of collaboration for it, e.g. by asking questions about production economies and new work in art, or through public summer schools on relevant topics that are conceived and located at the FREIRAUM, the aim being to choreograph multi-sensory experiences in hybrid formats and facilitate new forms of joint learning. A further area of work is emerging from the digitalisation processes coming out of the FREIRAUM and aims to draft a virtual work, archive and presentation platform that can expand the analogue FREIRAUM. Possible digital expansions could also facilitate global link-ups of collaboration projects in the real FREIRAUM, or its digital equivalent, in the future.