Imagining spaces for future cultural collaborations within the framework of Vorspiel.

Vorspiel is an initiative by transmediale and CTM Festival that for over 10 years has aimed to showcase the richness and diversity of Berlin's independent project spaces and artist initiatives active in music and sound, visual, and media arts, as well as connected hybrid fields.

Pulling from hybrid networked formats, BETWEENstitute invites Vorspiel participants and interested Berlin cultural organizers at large to speculate on new models of cooperation and networks and to discuss possible infrastructures and platforms that promote collaboration and co-creation.

Ongoing challenges—such as gentrification, the commodification of culture, shrinking public funding and a lack of structural resources while legislative and production standards increase, deepening polarisation and accelerating processes of desolidarisation —create the need and urgency to reimagine sustainable perspectives by exploring new models for future cultural networks. How can Vorspiel help reinforce and enable initiatives and infrastructures that are already in place? How can Vorspiel help spark impulse in the Berlin community and potentially beyond? The networks around CTM and transmediale have the experience and skills to respond to such challenges.

Today, we are witnessing a hybridization of cultural-artistic practices in multiple dimensions: with different art forms merging in a single project, with artists contributing to transdisciplinary research, and with cultural programs anchored in physical places while distributed, negotiated and shaped in digital realms. Yet, in Berlin these forms still lack the recognition, visibility, and support they deserve.

How can we develop hybrid, networked formats and distributed transdisciplinary programs that are deeply rooted in the city? How to strengthen community-building around and between cultural initiatives and institutions? What kinds of infrastructures and platforms might be useful to actively engage both online and on-site audiences, and foster processes of co-creation? And how can we support the creation of more sustainable, inclusive, and equitable futures—spaces that inspire dialogue, empathy, and a genuine sense of community?

The program is curated by Hybrid Space Lab, on invitation by transmediale and CTM.