Kunst gegen Kälte

“Kunst gegen Kälte” is an exploration of various perspectives on a space self-managed by homeless people. The starting point was a week-long intervention by Christoph Schlingensief in 1997: In a former police station near Hamburg’s main train station, the “prototype of a new train station mission” took shape. What began as an artistic installation evolved over 25 years into a collective reality—featuring a soup kitchen, a cultural program, downtown events, the founding of an association, and self-managed structures.
The “Mission” served as both a stage and a refuge, a place of everyday life and the extraordinary, straddling the line between art and responsibility, visibility and repression, integration and resistance. Markus Scholz’s photographs, taken from the heart of the action, accompany the publication and document a long-standing relationship with the practice and the people on the ground.
The publication explores questions about the role of art in the social sphere: How does a city respond to visible homelessness in its center? How were homeless people able to escape their role as “recipients of charity”? What remains when artistic initiators consciously step back? Is art allowed to be “useful”—and for whom?