WHAT IS MITWELT?

Mitwelt describes a shift in perception: away from the idea of an environment as an object toward a field of relations in which humans, spaces, materials and actions are co-constitutively linked.

Mitwelt is not a theory in the classical sense but an artistic stance. It describes a practice in which art does not stand outside the world but operates within it as an active component of relations.

At the core of Mitwelt is not participation as involvement in predefined structures, but cooperation as a shared production of knowledge, form and space. Expertise is not hierarchically distributed but situationally activated.

In this understanding, places are not backdrops for art but active laboratory fields. The Tanzsaal in Berlin-Tegel is such a starting point: a space where movement, rehearsal, dialogue and spatial intervention interweave.

Mitwelt understands knowledge not as a stable entity but as situational emergence. It arises in the interplay of bodies, materials, spaces and discourse.

Artistic practice in the context of Mitwelt is not representational but operative. It generates conditions under which new forms of perception and action become possible.

Mitwelt is not a state but a continuously shifting assemblage of relations.

Mitwelt emerges in the context of multiple crises: ecological, social and urban transformations. These reveal the limits of a way of thinking that treats the world as an external “environment”, something to be observed, used or protected without reflecting on one’s own entanglement within it. In this context, Mitwelt shifts the perspective: the human is not positioned against the world but is part of an assemblage in which actions, materials and spaces are interwoven.

Art takes on a specific role here: it creates situations in which these entanglements become perceptible and negotiable.

Mitwelt responds to:

• the fragmentation of social spaces

• the separation of knowledge, practice and perception

• the reduction of participation to symbolic involvement