They stand behind apartment blocks, by the train station, along the city outskirts or in the wasteland: garages. Strung together in lines they lead to urban marginal existence. They are everywhere, used for all sorts of things but yet almost invisible. Besides their actual use as a parking spot they act as better basements, workshops and storage spaces, offices, ateliers or music studios, laboratories, party rooms and summer homes. Separate from living spaces and beyond the aspiration for representational needs, you can act out here what wouldn’t be tolerated in other spaces or for which there is not enough space. Particularly in Berlin, where affordable space in the inner city is becoming sparser, garages are desired as never before.

“Women have hobbies, men have garages.” As a cliché ridden place they are seen as a bastion of reactionary, pronounced heterosexual manliness – cars, sports and pin-up girls. Upon closer examination however, worlds reveal themselves: garages are the meeting points for a variety of people, a place for self-realization and the improvised, for secrets and intimate things – all the way to illegal things. But what exactly makes these few square meters so attractive? Are they the last retreat for visionary thinking, for the forbidden and the free spirit? The Sophiensaele will open up the garage and present a performance festival between clichés and new perspectives about a very special cultural space!

With Burmester + Feigl, Cora Frost, copy & waste, Grayson Millwood, Henrike Iglesias, Lötscher/Schmidli/Lötscher, Lovefuckers, Lwowski-Kronfoth Musiktheaterkollektiv, Markus&Markus, Sahar Rahimi (Monster Truck), Social Muscle Club, students of European Ethnology - Humboldt-Universität Berlin

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Artistic Direction Franziska Werner Concept Cora Frost, Christiane Kretschmer, Franziska Werner Pproduction management Lara-Joy Hamann assistence Henrike Kohpeiß TECHNICs Eugen Böhmer

A production by SOPHIENSÆLE. Funded by Hauptstadtkulturfonds. Media partner: Missy Magazine, Siegessäule, Zitty, taz.die tageszeitung

foto © Katja Renner, design: Jan Grygoriew