this page is underconstruction
please come back around the end of August 2026
Living School: the archive is alive
Lebendige Schule: Das Archiv lebt
[googleform link]
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.
This project proposes to extend that transformation into a living, speculative archive, in collaboration with participants from the local community. From its basement floor, and with the 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.
What if the archive is not empty, but structured by absence, and those absences are sites for reclamation, refusal, and re-making?
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.
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 show 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, some at the Community Garden in the Bulgarischen Kirchhoff and at Casino for Social Medicine.
During the weekdays, the workshop will run from 18 to 22 circa.
During the weekends: 15-19 circa
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.
Das Projekt wird gefördert vom Berliner Projektfonds Urbane Praxis sowie von der Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Gesellschaflichen Zusammenhalt.
Workshops Facilitators (tba)
Vernissage:
Finissage:
Special public event:
Any questions? Please contact us!
altesfinanzamt@googlemail.com
this page is underconstruction
please come back around the end of August 2026
Living School: the archive is alive
Lebendige Schule: Das Archiv lebt
[googleform link]
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.
This project proposes to extend that transformation into a living, speculative archive, in collaboration with participants from the local community. From its basement floor, and with the 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.
What if the archive is not empty, but structured by absence, and those absences are sites for reclamation, refusal, and re-making?
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.
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 show 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, some at the Community Garden in the Bulgarischen Kirchhoff and at Casino for Social Medicine.
During the weekdays, the workshop will run from 18 to 22 circa.
During the weekends: 15-19 circa
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.
Das Projekt wird gefördert vom Berliner Projektfonds Urbane Praxis sowie von der Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Gesellschaflichen Zusammenhalt.
Workshops Facilitators (tba)
Vernissage:
Finissage:
Special public event:
Any questions? Please contact us!
altesfinanzamt@googlemail.com