Organising Culture – Student Work at Theater Lüneburg

Cultural organisations have to face social, political, and financial challenges and are constantly developing new ways not only to meet them, but also to shape them. In the ‘Organising Culture’ learning laboratory, students therefore learned theories and concepts to critically examine how new forms, processes and practices of cultural organising arise and work. On this basis, the participants carried out their own empirical projects and presented their results in an artistic way. ‘It is very impressive how the students conducted their own research into very different cultural organisations, reflected on them in depth and translated them into small exhibitions,’ explains Dr Maximilian Schellmann, who led the seminar together with Prof. Dr Timon Beyes.

One group designed a board game that led players through a model of the cultural centre ‘mosaique’ in Lüneburg to analyse spatial atmospheres of inclusion. A local bookshop found itself tied into a network of local partners by ribbons and adhesive tape – an organisational principle also used by independent booksellers. Students who had been working on a Hamburg art house cinema showed film sequences in front of a heavy velvet curtain. Their question: How can the black box of the cinema be transformed into a collective cultural space? Other groups presented sculptures, drawings, theoretical reflections or mappings – their objects of investigation: child-friendly museums, digitality in exhibitions, urban space developments or cultural and social centres in and around Lüneburg, Hamburg, St. Petersburg, and Lamu.

In a kind of ‘vernissage’, the more than 50 visitors to the public exhibition enjoyed an impression of the various works. The students were available at the ‘art research works’ for explanations and discussions. The exhibition of student artworks marks the beginning of a collaboration between Theater Lüneburg and Leuphana's Innovation Community Arts and Culture. ‘We are extremely pleased about this,’ says Maximilian Schellmann, ’because it gives us the opportunity to make university work and content accessible to a broader public with and through the theatre as a central cultural institution in Lüneburg. At the same time, we are discussing and developing new ideas and concepts together.’