How can we enable real connections and collective learning without space, without contact? Weekly meetings, online in the group in 2D and on-site in flesh and blood, adapting to the contact guidelines of the German government, open a space that questions, or perhaps performs, forms of appropriation in the collective.

Exploring working collectively, physically, on site, virtually, in bed. We enter the last dimension, we claim the canvas as our own. We take, sit, stand, put, fall, smell, cry, exist, cease.

Appropriation is an act, it is a means, it is positive, negative, it is a prototype. It is both object and method.


Understanding appropriation of urban spaces around us by enacting the method with our imaginations, our bodies, ourselves. Visiting 5 spaces in Berlin of varying intimacy and ownership realities, from public to privately owned public spaces: the A100, (Media)spree, Berlins Ringbahn, Reuterplatz andMercedes-Benz-Platz. Following different protocols decided upon by rotating host-groups, each participant appropriated a specific space through an individual action. By handing over a spraycan, a logbook, a flag, … all actions were recorded to form a collective body of tools of appropriation.

Through fictional writing in the second half of the Semester, individually dreamt up realities were collaged to a text concerning six excesses and desires of our 21st century western civilisation (as seen in the interpretation of the garden of earthly delights by Studio SMACK) consumerism, selfishness, escapism, the lure of eroticism, vanity, decadence. Each fiction initiated an action. Composing statement and plot together into 6 movies, intermingled realities were produced to be implemented back into public space during a collective screening once the pandemic contact guidelines were loosened.

Download the collectively written text-collage Appropriating Fictions and see the video outcomes of the Acts of Appropriation that were later shown in a Video Installation underneath the highway overpass of A100. 



SeminarSeminar is a format initiated at the UdK Berlin in the Summersemester 2020. Within it, SpätiSpäti tries to gather the distributed energy of students and offers a structure where this exchange can take place outside the walls of an institution.

In SeminarSeminar we try to stay physically engaged in the spaces that surround us. We organize and work with(less)out hierarchies. We try our best to remain transparent and accessible to everyone interested. If you want to appropriate this format at your institution see our SeminarSeminar 101 doc!