Pink Spy Presents: My Stay at “The Floor” Art Residency
A visual diary of a month in Berlin: The Floor, Da Swamp, Spati, drag shows, artist connections, and learning how a residency can open a city up.
In July I had an incredibly cool opportunity to go to Berlin for a month thanks to my internship. During this time I stayed at "The Floor" art residency together with other artists (special shoutout to Shona) and had the chance to see the life of an artist, which before this had been an incomprehensible concept considering the fact that in art school the teachers just tend to advise you to go teaching after finishing the art degree.
Either way, I experienced behind the scenes of creating an exhibition called "The Swamp", got to see incredible works from the art festival "48 Stunden Neukölln", with the help of other artists and Späti workers, and my friend had the opportunity to create our exhibition as well. I got to see and be a part of Berlin's culture and, with the help of others, I was able to experience Berlin from a locals perspective.
A residency is more than a room.
Pink Spy's month moved through shared living, artist introductions, production, exhibitions, local spaces, and the ordinary routes that make a city feel available. That is the part of the Countercult residency experience we want to keep building: a real way into a place through the people already making it.
Meeting the artists
I almost immediately was able to feel welcomed and at home at "The Floor" art residency and I would say that it didn't feel like living with strangers but more felt like living with family members. I like to look at it as my family members from the art world. Shona was the first artist that I met in Berlin and I really appreciated the honesty and understanding as well as the guidance and help that I received from this artist.
Shortly after I met another artist, Lulu from Ireland and later because of the Swamp I was able to meet Niamh, also an artist originally from Ireland (I want to go to Ireland now). These connections are so important to me because they made me realize how important it is to have community and safe spaces for open and honest discussions about art in this time and age and life, ideas and more.
Da Swamp
The Swamp was a really swampy exhibition and I am so glad that I got to experience the process of creating a space for art and people. We had to make decorations for the space with materials that the artists provided us with (by us I mean me and my friend Mona who was also working together with me) and it really pushed us to use the creative parts of our brains to figure out how to make the best possible outcome, that being swampy decorations, by the materials that we had and at the end we did a really great job. Apparently, we received positive feedback and I went to bed feeling really happy and loved that night. I also had the pleasure to meet and have conversations with other creatives and art enthusiasts.
Also, I would like to mention that for Swamp me, Eliza and Shona made rat tales to represent Rathouse Yoo!! Here is a photo by @soyboy.photographer on Instagram.
Here are two pictures of Ratmona aka Eliza in the process of creating decorations for the outside. I had so much fun with helping :D
Other whereabouts
We did some thinking about the ways in which artists can promote and make money off of artworks and after this coffee shop date that we had we got lost in the repetitive and similar streets of Berlin that go on and on and on, but it was still interesting. I want to give a special shoutout to Eliza for always guiding me and taking the responsibility of Google Maps because without her I don't think that I would've made it to "The Floor" in the first place.
Berlin kept opening up
In the middle of Swamp and after the Swamp we were heavily whearing about Berlin. We went out to see other exhibitions that were apart of "48 Stunden Neukölln" festival and we also visited other artist's studios, helped out with another project and in the middle of us helping out we suddenly got an opportunity to see a drag show.
The drag show was amazing but at first I thought that it's only gonna be presented in German so I tried to manipulate myself into thinking that I understand what is going on but sooner or later I realized that after the German part follows an explanation in English as well so all was good. I also got a cool poster for free and I was happy to learn about drag kings because in my country I usually hear only about drag queens. Either way I love everybody and special shoutout to Eva!
Spati exhibition :D
The Spati exhibition was one of the most important tasks of my internship that included all of the necessary components that are needed to make a project happen. Firstly there had to be something to exhibit and that is why I started to explore my love for collage and different colour combinations. Parallel to that me and Eliza started filming clips with the goal to make a short and abstract video considering the fact that it would go well together with the collage.
We had fun with the process and after that we had to find a place in which we could exhibit our works. We had to communicate with Späti workers and owners to find the right spot, figure out the logistics with the shop's interior, also we had to create posters and work on social media to spread the word about our exhibition and where to find it.
Thank you Berlin
This experience gave me more than a month in another city. It gave me a way to meet artists, work with people, make things in real spaces, and understand how much a residency depends on the relationships around it. I am very grateful to Berlin and to "The Floor". See you soon!
Written and designed by Pink Spy during their Countercult / The Floor internship and published with the author's permission. The copy has been lightly formatted for the web; the first-person voice and visual diary remain Pink Spy's.
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.