Salon Populaire

The event space Salon Populaire in Berlin Schöneberg invited each week one or more guests to interpret its spatial appearance, experiment with formats and shape an audience. Its self-organized structure, the blurring of hierarchies between host, guest and audience as well as the flexible props created in collaboration with raumlabor berlin challenged the representative character of the former bourgeois representational space located at Kunstsaele Berlin. The events ranged from small conversation groups to open discussions, from cinema evenings to film installations, performances and concerts. Besides one-off events a number of series were devoted to individual themes over a longer period of time. The thematic dinner evenings Can you pass the Salt, please? developed in collaboration with Fotini Lazaridou-Hatzigoga experimented with the dinner party as a conversational format. In the course of discussions about the connections between Berlin institutions the series Bethanien Residents evolved in collaboration with Künstlerhaus Bethanien.

Initiated by Ellen Blumenstein and Tanja Schomaker in 2010 Salon Populaire was co-organized with Fiona Geuss, Ulrike Bernard, and Bryndis Hansdottir.
www.salonpopulaire.de