Click here for workshop calendar
To register: https://forms.gle/yVoD2kYRCucrzCuN6
What if the archive is not empty,
but structured by absence,
and those absences are sites for reclamation,
refusal, and re-making?
LIVING SCHOOL
Living School invites communities to reclaim, share, and activate their own knowledge, memories and stories at Altes Finanzamt. Through peer-to-peer learning, embodied practices, and collective experimentation, we bring people together across different experiences to build connection, solidarity, and knowledge.
ARCHIVE IS ALIVE
WORKSHOP SERIES
“The archive is alive", our first class series running from September 2026 to January 2027, is a space to experiment with how the division between subjects is political, and how solidarity grows through encounter, with each other and with the city we share.
The Altes Finanzamt building was a structure once dedicated to classification, regulation, and the administrative ordering of lives. The building holds a symbolic weight: it represents the bureaucratic logic through which people were reduced to files, numbers, and legible identities.
Altes Finanzamt collective has already begun transforming the building into a vibrant artist community through workshops, reading groups and hosting other artists’ events. Living School proposes the transformation of our building into a living, speculative archive, in collaboration with participants from the local community. From its basement floor, alongside participants, we will reimagine the building not as a site of control, but as a space of creative resistance, memory-making, and alternative knowledge production.
How can we collect and share our stories, memories, knowledge, and experiences?
Participants will enter the Altes Finanzamt not as passive learners, but as researchers, storytellers, and collaborators. Through oral history, autoethnography, and creative practice, they will “activate” the building, treating it as a site where suppressed or unrecorded histories can be imagined, reconstructed, and expressed.
The aim is to make the site more public, accessible, and collectively shaped, enriched by the intersections of the communities connected to it.
Importantly, this archive will not be static. It will be living and continuously growing, shaped by each participant who contributes to it. Rather than organizing knowledge through rigid categories or divisions, the project foregrounds connection: we are not divided by land, borders, or classifications, but brought together through personal narratives that allow us to transcend these boundaries.
The project draws on queer-decolonial and interdisciplinary methodologies, combining artistic research, somatic practice, political education, and collective experimentation.
Topics are approached not as fixed disciplines, but as interconnected fields emerging through embodied practice and collaboration.
Workshops combine theory and practice through movement, reading groups, artistic exercises, writing, discussion, and collaborative production. Knowledge is understood as arising from lived experience and collective exchange rather than hierarchy.
The classes are not separate units; they leak into and feed each other, interwoven with the intent to shape a living archive of hacking tools and feminist practices for daily life.
By the end of the program, Altes Finanzamt will hold a participant-generated archive of alternative histories and futures, one that continues to grow beyond the school's duration.
🔧PRACTICAL
The school runs 12 workshops and 2 guest-speaker events, roughly every two weeks. It will start with a Vernissage, and it will close with a Finnisage to showcase our work at the end of January.
The classes are free for the participants upon registration. We'd love for the participants to join as many as possible, ideally the full program.
Most of the classes will happen at Altes Finanzamt, and some at the Community Garden in the Bulgarischen Kirchhoff. After class there is the option to go to Casino for Social Medicine to enjoy a tea together.
During the weekdays, most of the classes will run from 18 to 21~
During the weekends: 15-19~
Living School is initiated by Derek MF Di Fabio and Noa Gokul and hosted and organized with Altes Finanzamt, a queer-feminist project space run by a collective of 21 artists.
Any questions? Please contact us!
altesfinanzamt@googlemail.com
Das Projekt wird gefördert vom Berliner Projektfonds Urbane Praxis sowie von der Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Gesellschaflichen Zusammenhalt.
Click here for workshop calendar
To register: https://forms.gle/yVoD2kYRCucrzCuN6
What if the archive is not empty,
but structured by absence,
and those absences are sites for reclamation,
refusal, and re-making?
LIVING SCHOOL
Living School invites communities to reclaim, share, and activate their own knowledge, memories and stories at Altes Finanzamt. Through peer-to-peer learning, embodied practices, and collective experimentation, we bring people together across different experiences to build connection, solidarity, and knowledge.
ARCHIVE IS ALIVE
WORKSHOP SERIES
“The archive is alive", our first class series running from September 2026 to January 2027, is a space to experiment with how the division between subjects is political, and how solidarity grows through encounter, with each other and with the city we share.
The Altes Finanzamt building was a structure once dedicated to classification, regulation, and the administrative ordering of lives. The building holds a symbolic weight: it represents the bureaucratic logic through which people were reduced to files, numbers, and legible identities.
Altes Finanzamt collective has already begun transforming the building into a vibrant artist community through workshops, reading groups and hosting other artists’ events. Living School proposes the transformation of our building into a living, speculative archive, in collaboration with participants from the local community. From its basement floor, alongside participants, we will reimagine the building not as a site of control, but as a space of creative resistance, memory-making, and alternative knowledge production.
How can we collect and share our stories, memories, knowledge, and experiences?
Participants will enter the Altes Finanzamt not as passive learners, but as researchers, storytellers, and collaborators. Through oral history, autoethnography, and creative practice, they will “activate” the building, treating it as a site where suppressed or unrecorded histories can be imagined, reconstructed, and expressed.
The aim is to make the site more public, accessible, and collectively shaped, enriched by the intersections of the communities connected to it.
Importantly, this archive will not be static. It will be living and continuously growing, shaped by each participant who contributes to it. Rather than organizing knowledge through rigid categories or divisions, the project foregrounds connection: we are not divided by land, borders, or classifications, but brought together through personal narratives that allow us to transcend these boundaries.
The project draws on queer-decolonial and interdisciplinary methodologies, combining artistic research, somatic practice, political education, and collective experimentation.
Topics are approached not as fixed disciplines, but as interconnected fields emerging through embodied practice and collaboration.
Workshops combine theory and practice through movement, reading groups, artistic exercises, writing, discussion, and collaborative production. Knowledge is understood as arising from lived experience and collective exchange rather than hierarchy.
The classes are not separate units; they leak into and feed each other, interwoven with the intent to shape a living archive of hacking tools and feminist practices for daily life.
By the end of the program, Altes Finanzamt will hold a participant-generated archive of alternative histories and futures, one that continues to grow beyond the school's duration.
🔧PRACTICAL
The school runs 12 workshops and 2 guest-speaker events, roughly every two weeks. It will start with a Vernissage, and it will close with a Finnisage to showcase our work at the end of January.
The classes are free for the participants upon registration. We'd love for the participants to join as many as possible, ideally the full program.
Most of the classes will happen at Altes Finanzamt, and some at the Community Garden in the Bulgarischen Kirchhoff. After class there is the option to go to Casino for Social Medicine to enjoy a tea together.
During the weekdays, most of the classes will run from 18 to 21~
During the weekends: 15-19~
Living School is initiated by Derek MF Di Fabio and Noa Gokul and hosted and organized with Altes Finanzamt, a queer-feminist project space run by a collective of 21 artists.
Any questions? Please contact us!
altesfinanzamt@googlemail.com
Das Projekt wird gefördert vom Berliner Projektfonds Urbane Praxis sowie von der Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Gesellschaflichen Zusammenhalt.