Werkstatt DER BEVÖLKERUNG

In summer 2024, Oliver initiated Werkstatt DER BEVÖLKERUNG together with Marius, Sarah and Sonia.

The aim is to ensure the long-term communication and sustainable documentation of all constituency contributions, as well as all public, national and often international publications and exhibitions related to the artwork. The workshop also promotes the discursive, lively and culturally diverse linking of DER BEVÖLKERUNG within the thematic horizon of the present. In contrast to its controversial beginning, the art project is now a platform used by many hundreds of MPs from all parliamentary groups for direct and indirect encounters with their constituents. The parliamentarians use the art project as an opportunity to creatively thematize their role and their self-image as elected representatives of the population.

To mark the 25th anniversary of DER BEVÖLKERUNG in 2025, the workshop is planning an interdisciplinary and decentralized event format.

Oliver Schwarz

Formerly Hans Haacke’s assistant on projects such as Endlichkeit der Freiheit (Finitude of Freedom), Berlin 1990, or Germania in the German Pavilion, Venice Biennale 1993, Oliver Schwarz is co-initiator of the art project DER BEVÖLKERUNG (The Population) in the Reichstag building. As a partner of Hans Haacke, he has been supervising the development and documentation of the long-term participatory project since 2000. Part of the artwork is the online documentation and communication he designed to make the lively transformation of the artwork and the diverse resonances accessible to the public outside the Reichstag building.

In 2020, Oliver Schwarz curated the exhibition 20 years of DER BEVÖLKERUNG at Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (exhibition catalogue). The focus here was on the controversial history of the project and the first twenty years in which over 400 members of parliament, mostly with citizens from their constituencies, participated in the artwork. Haacke’s artistic works from the 1960s, in which natural resonance phenomena form the central focus of his interactive experimental arrangements, were examined as a historical background to this.

Sonia Hilpert

Editor of transform magazine and co-initiator of the Werkstatt DER BEVÖLKERUNG. The freelance scenographer and interior designer plans living, working and stage environments and passes on her knowledge to students as a lecturer. In her studies of spatial communication, she specialized in places that promote democracy, while as head of the Cradle to Cradle Building Alliance she works on sustainable and recyclable architecture. The diverse approaches to spatial design and knowledge transfer are her focus within the Werkstatt DER BEVÖLKERUNG.

Marius Hasenheit

Publisher of transform magazine and co-initiator of Werkstatt DER BEVÖLKERUNG. The entrepreneur and sustainability consultant supports organizations in developing and implementing sustainability strategies. He is also co-chairman of a cooperative that creates affordable housing in Berlin and the surrounding area in an environmentally friendly way. He contributes his experience in the fields of media, business and society with regard to exploiting transformation potential to Werkstatt DER BEVÖLKERUNG.

Dr. Sarah Alberti

Journalist and art historian in Leipzig. The subject of her doctorate is art as a mirror of contemporary German-German history, using the example of the exhibition project ‘The Finitude of Freedom’, which took place in the summer of 1990 as a direct reaction to the opening of the Wall in East and West Berlin. Hans Haacke also took part in it. As a founding member, she is involved in the Saxon network kompliz* for culture and democracy. Together with Hans Haacke, she realised the hanging of his documenta 14 banner ‘We (all) are the people’ in various cities in the new federal states in 2018/2019. She works as a freelance author for magazines, artists and institutions such as the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden and the Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart.