The interior courtyard of Kunsthaus ACUD harbours a ramshackle energy that might have been native to this corner of Mitte 35 years ago. These days, it’s more remarkable – a kind of living fossil whose pockmarked brick walls form a semi-permeable border to the neighbourhood surrounding it. Set back from the street as if to draw less attention to itself, the Kunsthaus stands among upscale cafes and high-rent apartments. It maintains a certain magnetism, pulling in a steady stream of passersby. ACUD’s tiered compound houses (take a breath) includes a cinema, theatre, art gallery, nightclub, literary event space, music and art studios and schools focused on the finer points of sound and machinery. On its 35th anniversary, the sheer scale of ACUD’s project shows it has birthed something bigger than the sum of its parts.
The house itself has… I don’t know, it has a soul.
“The house itself has… I don’t know, it has a soul,” attempts Johannes Braun, co-founder and general manager of the initiative ACUD MACHT NEU, which coordinates programming across the club, studio and gallery. “People get attracted to it, and then they get sucked in somehow.” Braun should know. He came to ACUD in 2012, at a moment when the building faced imminent foreclosure and the whole enterprise teetered on collapse. A light and video artist who had spent the previous decade working in Berlin clubs, he saw a crumbling alternative art house on the wrong side of gentrification as something worth sticking his neck out for.
More than a decade later and against long odds, ACUD MACHT NEU continues to offer what Braun describes as a “counter-model” to the too-familiar cycle of development and displacement. If wider cultural currents are bent on consuming and commodifying what makes Berlin great, ACUD proposes an alternate path. It’s one that values the wide-open artistic possibilities of the city’s past, while nurturing the diversity of its present. “When we started, the question was, ‘How do we save this concept of an alternative art house?’, which is a very 90s idea,” says Braun. “How do we rejuvenate it, remodel it, and still keep the soul?”
A Very 90s Idea
In Berlin, the past can feel like a foreign country. Braun himself was only 16 when the original founders of ACUD took over two dilapidated apartments on Rykestraße and opened a gallery space, and he’s reluctant to wax poetic about an era that predates his own involvement in the project. Fair enough. But the conditions of that era continue to shape how the present incarnation of ACUD positions itself. Plus, one gets the sense that those running the Kunsthaus conceive of 90s Berlin in terms that transcend mere fetishised nostalgia.
It was always important to make the scope of ACUD much wider than ourselves – to mirror Berlin’s underground and queer scenes by basically keeping this as an open space.
The Berlin that birthed ACUD was, in Braun’s telling, a city that had stumbled unwittingly into the type of conditions that tend to foster good art: lots of physical space, very little money and a general sense that the future was about to blow wide open. “There were a lot of ruined spaces and old, abandoned factories,” he recalls. “At the same time, you had this ‘boom’ mindset of, ‘Okay, within 10 years this will be a five-million-inhabitant mega city.’”
While much of that initial excitement dissipated with the economic crisis of the mid-90s, what remained was all that space – and the anything-goes creative vision of a young generation that had run out of reasons to say no. Nobody had any money, sure. But you didn’t really need money to build something from all that nothing. The four original founders of Galerie ACUD embodied this liberating truth, each lending the first letter of their name to a project that soon outgrew its home on Rykestraße. When the Wohnungsbaugesellschaft Berlin-Mitte offered up a dilapidated house in Veteranenstraße, they leapt at the chance, rats and shoddy plumbing be damned.
The Road From Ruin
What gets called a ruin depends on who’s looking and what they’re looking for. The Wohnungsbaugesellschaft may have seen little use for an empty, run-down building just a stone’s throw from the former Wall, but ACUD saw its own future. That future would unfold in prismatic shapes over the next 20-odd years, though the initial state of the building precluded full use of the upper floors. That left enough room for a drum and bass club downstairs, plus a smattering of other cultural offerings that were greatly expanded when the necessary renovations were completed.
ACUD’s second decade of existence brought the space closer to its current form. By 2004, the building housed, not only a nightclub, but also a daytime café, various gallery spaces and a Kino with impressively off-the-wall programming. A theatre, cantina and second Kino were added in short order, and the modern version of ACUD’s alternative arthouse dream began to emerge.
But a different type of development was taking shape concurrently in the spaces adjoining ACUD. After all, it wasn’t just artists benefitting from all the abandoned structures suddenly available across Prenzlauer Berg and eastern Mitte. Developers from across Germany and the world were also rushing in to claim their slice of the pie. “If you look back to that era in the 90s and early 2000s, Mitte was really the hub in Berlin for artists,” says Braun. “At the same time, all these free spaces were also being commercialised or turned into Eigentumswohnungen.”
Untrained and otherwise uninterested in the art of property investment, the team behind ACUD soon ran into financial trouble. They risked losing everything they had built. It was a sickeningly familiar script playing out at breakneck speed: the scrappy cultural centre gone the way of every other that had dared to circumvent the steady flow of capital into Berlin’s former East. Nobody was coming to save ACUD. Nobody, that is, until ACUD MACHT NEU showed up.
The Counter-Model Come to Life
Braun describes the founding of ACUD MACHT NEU in terms that reflect the stark economic reality faced by Mitte’s artistic community circa 2012: “We were artists who had been forced out of our previous offices because the rents were basically doubled.” Rather than capitulate and begin a long game of investor cat-and-mouse that would likely see them pushed to the city’s outer fringes, Braun, co-founder Julie Gayard and a smattering of other local artists decided to stay and fight.
The Kunsthaus on Veteranenstraße made for a suitable stronghold. It was a place they were already familiar with, but also one they saw a reflection of themselves in – charmingly ramshackle, alarmingly insolvent, but above all resilient. And so they founded the initiative ACUD MACHT NEU, choosing a name that both honours the project’s past and calls forth a new chapter in its history. That chapter’s beginning came to fruition in fits and starts over the next several years, but Kunsthaus ACUD was finally saved from foreclosure and reopened in 2014.
Much was indeed new, but much was still the same. Striking a balance between the two has been an ongoing theme for the constellation of people who coordinate and run the various spaces, of which ACUD MACHT NEU is only one part. Others include independent operators, such as the first-floor literary events space Lettrétage (run by co-founders Katharina Deloglu and Tom Bresemann), the second-floor Kino (run by longtime Vertreter Dagmar Kaczor, whose involvement with ACUD dates back to its early days) and the ACUD-Theater (run by directors Felix Goldmann, Jelena Bolsuna and Grit Lindau).
“Nobody from the outside really understands how this whole thing functions,” Braun admits when pressed to describe how these various organisations navigate the intricacies of working together and apart. And yet this diverse and open structure is pretty much the point. “When we started, the idea was to keep what was already here, but add new things,” says Braun. “It was always important to make the scope of ACUD much wider than ourselves – to mirror Berlin’s underground and queer scenes by basically keeping this as an open space.”
A Kunsthaus for All
As ACUD has settled into its latest iteration, that drive toward openness continues to manifest in unexpected ways. The crowd is far more international than it once was. Lettrétage regularly hosts bilingual literary readings. Tenants like the Berlin School of Sound and School of Machines give intensive courses for summering out-of-towners. The programming at the theatre and Kino draws in visitors of all ages, and it’s not uncommon for children to be watching a film upstairs while a queer club event fills the downstairs with patrons in drag. Sure, friction can arise when bass from the club makes an unwelcome appearance at a poetry reading, but a bit of chaos is the proof of concept.
I’m optimistic it will still be here in 35 years.”
And it’s not as if these various spaces don’t want to see each other succeed. On the contrary, commercial venues like the club and in-house taqueria pay higher rent to compensate for the artistic spaces – a sort of solidarity model based on the premise that ACUD’s diversity of purpose is what makes it special. “For 35 years, people have been working here without much thought of financial compensation,” says Braun. “It’s this idea of everybody really working together for this artistic space and for the arts.”
A Pride of Resilience
Even so, there’s an open question of how long this model can be sustained, and how far Kunsthaus ACUD could go if their supplemental cultural funding from the government was cut. This funding has been crucial to the project’s survival thus far, but Braun understands that fiscal pain is always just a Bundestagswahl away. “In the past years, we’ve seen how the arts can get politicised or cut down,” he notes. “Right now especially, it’s important for us to not be existentially dependent on decisions made by the city or government. You can’t depend on what a jury decides in December before knowing if you can run your gallery program next year.”
As Kunsthaus ACUD nears its 35th anniversary, ACUD MACHT NEU is characteristically looking toward the future. The next logical step may be to launch a Förderverein (supporting association) or explore other models of funding by the public, such as a programme subscription coordinated between the spaces. But for now, Braun allows himself to bask in the variegated glow of ACUD’s 35th anniversary open house on Saturday, June 20, knowing that such an event was never a given for a Kunsthaus that had to scrape and claw its way through a foreclosure, pandemic and untold other challenges just to survive. “It’s a pride of resilience,” he reflects. “The house has gone through different crises, but it has always bounced back and reinvented itself, and the hunger for community has never been stronger. I’m optimistic it will still be here in 35 years.”
Find events at ACUD at acudmachtneu.de and keep up to date on IG @acudmachtneu
