Countercult case studyEXPERIMENT Residency · 20252 September 2026

What happened when Countercult’s network went offline

Across two 2025 cohorts, EXPERIMENT Residency brought ten artists together in Da Nang and fifteen in Berlin. The result was not one exhibition. It was a field test for what a creative network can become when it works locally.

By the Countercult editorial team, with source material from EXPERIMENT Residency co-founders Kora Kwok and Sho Neary.

A network needs somewhere real to meet

Countercult was built to make artists, independent spaces, and local cultural knowledge easier to find. EXPERIMENT Residency tested the next question: what happens when that network moves from a digital map into a shared place?

EXPERIMENT is a Countercult program co-founded by Sho Neary and Kora Kwok. Its residencies are artist-led and place-based. Residents arrive with their own practices, but the program asks them to meet the people, businesses, spaces, and conditions already shaping a location.

The pilot was not designed to bring a finished cultural package into a city. It was designed to see what artists and local partners could make together.

Da Nang: building from no network

The inaugural residency ran in Da Nang, Vietnam, from 16 January to 13 February 2025. Ten artists with roots in Ireland, Thailand, England, Hong Kong, the United States, and Germany worked across more than ten disciplines.

The public recap does not attach every output to every resident’s full name, so this account keeps the archive’s original level of attribution rather than filling in gaps.

• Lulu, also known as Ohhi Ohno, and Sho worked with local organizations and businesses on seven murals, including walls connected to GreenViet, Not Pop, ChuAn Coffee, and Pins Cafe.
• Angelica hosted two open figure-drawing workshops at different spaces in the city.
• Jeremy and Monika Jiang hosted a movement-and-writing gathering that moved from ecstatic dance into guided journaling.
• Monika Jiang launched Oneliness Voices, an audio project about loneliness and connection.
• Katie photographed the street style of Da Nang residents on film.
• Kora Kwok completed a first full book draft, while Rachael completed a proposal about women and Mexico’s agave culture.
• Kora and Marijana built a sculptural installation titled Untitled (Year of the Snake).
• Lulu, Marijana, and Kora showed work in Space Garden’s Year of the Snake exhibition.

Across the cohort, the archive also records five tattoos, four essays, three artist interviews, three free workshops, seven murals, a sculptural installation, a photography series, an audio project, a book draft, and a book proposal.

The local relationships were part of the work

Not Pop, GreenViet, and Space Garden were not scenery around the residency. They helped the artists find walls, host events, meet people, and place work in the city. Rob at Not Pop-who also runs the local Nam Jam street-art festival-guided muralists through Da Nang. Jemma and Tram at Space Garden gave the cohort a home for gatherings and an exhibition.

The residency also documented its own limits. Without an established network in Vietnam, integrating local artists into the first cohort was difficult. The team identified Vietnamese-language access and translation as areas to improve. That honesty matters: responsible place-based work includes recording what was missing, not only what photographed well.

Berlin: fifteen artists, seven spätis

The second edition ran from 30 July to 30 August 2025. Fifteen artists developed projects with Berlin spätis: neighborhood corner shops that operate as informal living rooms, cultural archives, and late-night third spaces.

The month culminated in a three-day Späti Art Walk across seven shops. Instead of bringing the projects into a neutral gallery, the exhibitions, performances, workshops, and parties stayed with the businesses and neighborhoods that shaped them.

• Yael Haskal created a shadow-puppet show and mini-museum about a späti owner’s story and family history.
• DJ Panama Mama built a Caribbean and Latinx music program with singers and art performances at a shop near Schlesisches Tor.
• Frederic Marschall sketched portraits of späti visitors and exhibited them alongside a performance by Panebasa.
• Ian Edwards choreographed a dance work in the garden of Zuhause Kiosk Späti.
• Marina Manoukian turned waste collected from spätis into collage work shown at Gula Sor Späti.
• Beats & Bytes and Rush Berlin produced a mini-festival at Berlin’s first anti-racist späti, with DJs, performers, participatory artwork, and work by resident Yasemin.
• Danaja launched a podcast from inside spätis, interviewing artists about their work and creative lives.
• Shona led a paste-up workshop that invited local people to make public art.

The archive reports fifteen artists in the cohort while describing projects through individuals, collaborators, and collectives. Weekly office hours gave residents space to troubleshoot and influence each other’s work, so the finished program was deliberately more collective than a row of isolated commissions.

From creative output to paid opportunity

The public archive proves that the cohorts happened and records the work, locations, and named partnerships. Countercult’s founders additionally confirm that relationships formed through the Vietnam pilot led to paid follow-on work from a local arts festival for both EXPERIMENT as a program and individual artists from the cohort.

The public archive does not yet document the contractual details, so this article does not name the festival or imply that every resident was hired. The important point is narrower: a locally embedded residency created a path from meeting and making to further paid cultural work.

What the 2025 pilot proved

EXPERIMENT did not prove that every artist network should become a residency, or that arriving in a new place automatically creates meaningful exchange. It proved something more useful: a network can become practical when it gives people enough time, local context, shared responsibility, and a reason to make something together.

In Da Nang, the network began without an established local base and built relationships through walls, workshops, stories, and shared space. In Berlin, it worked through familiar neighborhood infrastructure and invited the public to move through the city differently. In both places, the residency made the Countercult proposition tangible: discovery matters more when it leads to participation, and participation matters more when local people and places shape the result.

This case study summarizes Countercult’s public program archive. Resident names and project attribution follow the wording available in those posts; where the archive reports collective totals without naming an individual, the outcome is credited to the cohort.

This piece was informed by Shona Neary’s writing, conversations, and thinking around independent culture, artists, and place.

editorial process: Our Journals are pulled from our writings over the years to get information out as quickly and as widely as possible, and to get to what matters: finding each other and claiming our seat in the circular economy. Some ideas overlap between Shona Neary's work on cultural infrastructure and their artist practice as Sketchy Shona. AI is a tool for infrastructure, not for creating Journal writing or artists' work. We welcome original reporting and pitches from journalists and independent publishers.