Integrative Art and Culture at Kopfstand 09
Hellena Harttung, Ulrich Fuchs, Elisabeth Braun
“Kopfstand 09” spotlighted the integrative cultural festival “sicht:wechsel” on June 24.
Featured guest was Hellena Harttung from Bremen’s Atelier Blaumeier. Atelier Blaumeier has been a mainstay of Bremen, Germany’s cultural landscape for 21 years. This integrative art project provides facilities for artistically inclined people with and without handicaps to engage in acting, musical activities and painting, and to create and play with masks. Up to 250 people a week take advantage of the atelier’s recreational offerings. Blaumeier’s activities involve no therapeutic approaches and make no such claims; after all, the atelier was set up in the 1980s as part of the anti-psychiatry movement in which Bremen gained the distinction of being the only German city to do away with long-term psychiatric facilities. Here, people who society normally segregates from one another can establish contacts, encounter new ideas and jointly pursue artistic projects.Hellena Harttung handles management and organizational duties at Blaumeier. She related how everyday experience constantly reminds her that, in artistic work and especially in the theater, there are no hard and fast boundaries between “handicapped” and “not handicapped” people, and this is one of the concepts that has made the atelier’s integrative work so successful. She also emphasized that Blaumeier has always sought to establish a public presence and has regarded its productions as cultural offerings, and they, in turn, have made the quantum leap to the status of an established feature of the cultural landscape. “Integrative art has to carve out a niche for itself and establish a clearly defined image,” said Elisabeth Braun, artistic director of the “sicht:wechsel” festival. At the same time, she and Hellena Harttung agreed that the cultural establishment would be well advised to start a barrier-free search for quality that doesn’t ascribe an exceptional role to art by people with handicaps.
