This time I met Ulrike Ludwig, who spoke on behalf of the artist collective behind the Kreuzberg Gallery Scotty Enterprises. She is currently having a solo show at their space, what means that I also met the artist and saw her work, two birds with one stone.
Raumbuch is an innovative project in Ulrike's career, and it will be on view until November 5th at their gallery space in Oranienstraße 46.

Scotty Enterprises was stablished as an association in autumn 2006. The crew of this spaceship goes from sixteen to eighteen members, all coming from very diverse fields: painting, sculpture, photography, installation, film, performance, video, gardening art...
The team includes, at the present time, and from B to W: Alfred Banze, Charlotte Bastian, Birgit Cauer, Christine Falk, Kiki Gebauer, Simone Häckel, Juliane Laitzsch, Katrin von Lehmann, Karen Linnenkohl, Ute Litzkow, Ulrike herself, Christine Niehoff, Isabel Pauer, Frederik Poppe, Birgit Ramsauer, Claudia Schoemig, Karin Schroeder and Linda Weiss.

They focus on single and double exhibitions at their space, confronting artistic positions and often following a topic. They are also used to work in collaboration with other spaces, like Zentrifuge in Nürnberg, where some of their artists will take part of Landschaft / 2D, a group show opening on November 4th.

What was the main concept and goal behind your project before starting?

The founder members met while doing a workshop at the Career Center at the Udk.
They came up with the idea of finding a place where to make artistic experiments, to organize exhibitions and invite other artists to present their projects.
It was also conceived to held activities like lectures, screenings and other events

How is working in such a huge group of people?

We all have our parallel projects apart from Scotty, but we are still very well organized. We meet on a regular basis to discuss everything, from the exhibition schedule, possible collaborations and guest artists to the very simple tasks.
We are curators and artists at the same time. That means that we assume any kind of tasks: we develop thematic concepts, write the press release texts and make the whole curatorial work by ourselves

Is there any inspiring model or references for the constitution of this space?

There is a big influence from the way in which galleries were organized during the seventies and the eighties. Space projects and galleries were bursting. Then there was the Mitte boom around Linienstr. Now that kind of spaces are coming back again

How do you finance your project?

We are partly self-financing this project, while we also try to secure some deals from other parties. And there is also the landlord, who is kind enough to maintain the rent cheap for us.
Actually, we try to develop alternative strategies. We are commercial in the sense that we sell the art that we show, but here we organize ourselves and have more freedom, not like in other regular commercial galleries.

How is it to be present in art fairs like Preview?

It's been quite succesful. We were showing our works for a big audience, and that's contributing to sell and to be noticed. It could take our works somewhere else, either participating in other exhibitions or being invited by some curator. We are happy this year, we sold some works and got a good response

What is Raumbuch about?

Das Schloss is my first “space book”. I chose a big public building and made drawings of every room, each in one page.The main intention is to make aware of our perception towards space. How we build, see and understand rooms. All buildings tend to distribute squared rooms organized in an ortogonal system, one after another. They are distributed this way in Das Schloss.

The space is the main topic of my artistic production. I've been taking photographs of empty rooms for a long time now. For this work I'm approaching them in a different way, a different method, but the subject is still the same

What are your favourite spaces in Berlin?
It's great the fact that it's so assorted here. From off spaces, low-budget galleries, ateliers or rooms in private apartments. That kind of places are really inspiring. For instance Kurt Kurt, the house where the poet Kurt Tucholsky was born in Moabit.
There is also well stablished places, reference names in the city, like Kunst-werke or Grimmuseum


Where will you and the space be in 5 years?
The members will have changed for sure. There is always new people arriving in the city and we are open to new ideas and points of view. Scotty is a very active platform. But I guess that we already found a very nice place here in Oranienstraße 46. And the art scene seems to be moving all around. Some years ago everything was in the area Linienstr. In Mitte. Now is more diversified. And there are more things going on in this area, like the Prinzesinnen Garten or the brand new Aufbahaus.