Paz Ponce: Dialogue process Berlin > Athens

Art comes from making art.

These three basic convictions sparked the “City Tax debate” in Berlin over the last decade: an open cultural policy dialogue on the situation and future of the production and mediation of contemporary art in Berlin, between independent and institutional actors of the contemporary art scene and the Berlin Senate(*). This cultural-political discussion involved also other groups, initiatives and institutions active in urban, social and cultural policy with an eye toward concepts and realities of work, productivity, and the commons. This joint effort culminated in the creation of a new funding pillar, the “Spartenoffene Förderung” [Multi-sector funding], which today covers part of the sector's needs.

Supporting the creation of art is just as important as supporting the presentation of art.

I am taking the Berlin City Tax Debate as a case study to perform an analogous research in Αthens, seeking for independent and institutional actors to join a dialogue on cultural policy and a preliminary study on the potential implementation of European Tourist Tax (City Tax) to support the local art sector. While no magic formula applies to different contexts in the same way; while histories, biographies, spaces, needs, resources, desires and political wills differ from place to place, I am interested in the transfer of knowledge between two contexts that are constantly prototyping contingent solutions to combat similar pan-urban phenomena, protecting the city against total economic exploitation, and claiming for a fundamental cultural-political reorientation in the arts sector for long. What forms of imagination can we produce beyond survival to collectively thrive? I wonder.

The working and living conditions of artists are closely tied to developments in city policy.

This new research project entangles fields of activism, cultural policy, comparative art history and curating (observed from the definition of “curating as a redistribution of power”), and relates to a question/desire that guides my practice: how can the curatorial revert back to the local scene?

[*] Information on the Berlin City Tax Debate is based on the papers produced by Haben und Brauchen, bbk Berlin, Koalition der Freie Szene.