As the director of the Berlin Museum of Now (MON), Denis Leo Hegić works outside the established framework of museology. MON is a traveling house that does not limit its activities to the interior but understands the whole city as a living museum. With the advent of the pandemic and the closure of cultural sites, this understanding of outdoor art and culture has become extremely important. The art and culture that took place in urban spaces were – for long periods – the only cultural content that the public had the opportunity to experience. Here, we recognize the importance of art and culture as indisputable parameters in the sustainable planning of the intelligent city of the future. With a lecture and workshop “Culturetown”, an unusual museologist from Berlin invites us to think together about how to activate the city. Cultural life in urban space must not be conceived in an additive way but must be rooted in the DNA of urban development. Denis Leo Hegic will share his project experiences from the pandemic year, as well as tools, tips, and skills on how to engage with and in the city space.
CULTURETOWN keynote & Q&A “Never waste a good crisis” (Denis Leo Hegic) Experience of 14 months of stagnation of the well-known and 14 months of continuous improvisation of the new: the influence of culture in times of crisis.
The Museum of Now is participating in this year’s Mixer Festival through the Black Box competition, which aims to animate the young art scene. This year’s theme “Principle of Hope” invites artists to answer the questions: What kind of future do you want and what are you doing to achieve it? How to overcome skepticism, defeatism, discouragement of the individual and society as a whole? Can your work inspire optimism and move others into action? How would you, with your intervention, turn the observer into an actor and arouse him to think about reality, not necessarily as it is, but as it could be? A word, a sound, a performance, a symbolic sign in space, creating a place of contemplation of the future or a meditative point in nature, a model of your utopia, marking real space with “totems” of hope?