Maake Magazine

ARTIST-RUN

NEW FEARS

Reichenbergerstr. 114
10999, Berlin

July Weber
Joana Lucas
Jose del Palo

www.newfears.net
Instagram @newfears_gallery

After biking past a large, very stylish crowd lingering outside a project space titled New Fears in Kreuzberg on multiple nights, my interest is piqued. When I learn that a group show featuring my friend’s work on the topic of “girlhood” will take place at this same space, I make it a point to show up (in my coolest boots). When the main organizer of the space, July Weber, agrees to an interview, I’m thrilled. In our conversation, July tells me one of their previous projects was called Pollution, a comment on the amount of project spaces clogging up the city. At once humorous and sincere, July talks with me about bridging dance and visual arts, competing for attention (and funding), and carving out a space that can do what institutions can’t. 

Interview with July Weber of NEW FEARS
By Miranda Holmes

Miranda Holmes (MH): Can you tell me about your background and why you wanted to start a project space? 

July Weber (JW): I studied choreography and dance at the University of the Arts (UdK) in Berlin and before that I also studied visual arts. That's why I'm interested in combining all three. But next to doing my own work, I was always interested in some kind of expanded idea of curating and inviting people [to events]. So I had projects in different spaces before, but New Fears started in 2020. 

At first we were nomadic, we put on events at different locations. And then I found this space in [the neighborhood] Wedding. I was there for 3 years doing it completely on my own. And then when we moved here to [the neighborhood] Kreuzberg half a year ago. Two of my friends, Joana Lucas and Jose del Palo, joined me, but I'm kind of the driving force. 

MH: So with your background in dance, you’re mostly interested in curating performance and choreography-adjacent work? 

JW: We are quite open, there's hardly anything that I would exclude in terms of disciplines, but there is a strong focus on body-related practices. 

MH: What made you want to start putting on events and shows? 

JW: There was always a drive and a joy in creating frameworks and inviting people to them, and then seeing how they deal with these frameworks. There was always this curatorial interest that would run parallel to my artistic work; I’ve had other spaces before I started New Fears. It was always about bringing people together who normally wouldn't meet, not only people, but also disciplines, materials, ideas… 

I really wanted to have something that is a bit more continuous, and where you can really build a community. The word “community” is often overused and in this way  emptied out… I have a hard time with all these terms that are so tokenized. But I still wish that there was a space that could stay longer term, where things could grow. 

Artistically I move between the theater and the gallery/museum world. With New Fears I try to combine these two institutions, theaters and museums, and their basic ideas and structures. In theater, you always have this short, project-based event. If you get funding, you work like crazy for three, four months and develop a work, have a premiere, and then Ciao, everything is over. The team you were working very intimately with disappears and continues doing other projects. So there was a wish to have more continuity, for example with a gallery where you are connected to a space for a longer period of time. 

I wanted to provide facilities for dance and movement, like a dance floor and a changing room, but also have the possibility of working with materials and machines… this is my ideal working space.

MH: That's interesting to start a project space based on your own needs since you saw a gap between theater and the visual arts. 

It can be so difficult to run a project space. Now that you’ve been running New Fears for a while, are there different motivations for continuing it?

JW: Yeah, I didn't only see it for myself. If not, I would not have started it and done all this work. I saw that this hybrid space was in high demand. I had worked on other projects that combined performance and visual art where I was able to see the problems and the friction when these disciplines meet. 

I like to create spaces which can contain a conceptual framework. I like seeing how people take over, live in it, deal with it. Basically every weekend we have events because people want to do it. We also partly rent the space now because we need to pay the rent. Every week I come into the space and there's a whole different scenario, a whole different world. It makes me happy to see how everyone uses it in a different way.

I come up with a lot of different formats. We’ve done this event with a lot of artists doing just one minute performances. The idea came from experiencing this fast culture of next, next, next like in social media, our attention span is shrinking more and more. We thought, Oh, let's bring that back into real life and make these one minute performances, like an Instagram story or a scroll. How would that look if we brought it from the digital into an actual physical space? It was so much fun. We had 40 people doing one minute, and you're just getting thrown into all these different worlds. The setup is super simple, very accessible. That’s just one example of how I enjoy creating formats and seeing how people use it. It’s the main drive of New Fears. 

But back to your question, why am I doing it? I'm asking myself that a lot… I basically have a full-time job and I'm not paid for it.

MH: How do you fund your space?

JW: We still have a bit of funding from the Berlin Senat (City Council), but it’s not enough. And there are big funding cuts happening now. There will be 10% of the culture budget cut. Rent and everything else is also getting more expensive. We’ve been talking about this for years now and it feels like the walls are coming in closer… it might be that we don't exist next year. If we don't get any funding, I think we cannot pay the rent, even if we do an event every weekend. Because I also try to keep the rent low so artists can afford it. The artists who show here pay rent and then they can keep the money they collect from the entrance fee. Usually that can pay their costs. So nobody earns anything, but still, it's not enough to pay the rent. 

MH: How do you choose the artists and performers that come into New Fears? 

JW: A lot of people who approach me already know the space and the vibe  from other projects we have done here in the city which produces a certain sphere. I also like the idea of showing things that you probably wouldn't see that much. Next to exhibitions and public events we also have workshops going on, or sometimes people rehearse there in the basement with music or upstairs with movement stuff. I'm very open. I usually try to make it possible if there is the capacity. Every time there's a different group coming in, the [people who are interested in New Fears] multiply. Then people approach me who are a bit more out of our bubble. For example, tomorrow we have a death metal concert. It's absolutely not my scene!

Jose organizes an open stage on Monday afternoons. Anyone can come and try out something. And then we sometimes do markets, like flea markets or design markets. 

MH: How does your organizational structure work with Joana and Jose? 

JW: I do nearly all the communication with the artists and all the paperwork. They are around helping with openings, working on technical challenges and tending to the bar, and the Monday event is fully theirs. We are also simply friends who support each other and fight each other.  But they have two kids, and Jose works in a kindergarten, which of course creates different dynamics, so we complement each other quite well.   

Another thing that’s important to me, and it’s a big motivation to do the space. I’m sometimes frustrated with this institution system, even though there is also something beneficial about institutions. They provide structure and facilities and all of this, but they can be exclusive, and they can be very slow to work and change. You apply for funding, and it takes two years to get it, but then the whole world changed in these two years and you are still stuck with this concept that you wrote a long time ago. So all this creates one specific way of working and that can be problematic, and that's why I wanted to have a space where you can do stuff that’s more intuitive and short notice. If you have an idea and you want to try something out in the moment, you can still have an audience. 

MH: Are you in contact with other project spaces in Berlin? How do you see New Fears within the larger scene of project spaces? 

JW: I am quite close in contact with this place called Fortuna in Neukölln. It's a former casino, and our scene overlaps a lot.. Most of them are performers/dancers. They are a really big collective, between 15 to 20 people. So it works quite a bit differently because they really use it as their studio. But also in the last two years it really became one of the places for this kind of DIY, underground, self-organized events, parties, fundraiser spaces. We share the same principles of this intuitive, DIY, making things possible. And we are in the same boat; they don't know if they will get funding again. 

Everyone in Berlin, everyone in the world, fights for the limited resources that are there. This system just imposes a competition on us. 

Actually we're gonna do another event with the one-minute performances. This time, there will be a topic. In light of all the budget cuts, more and more precarity, and to growing competition, we’ll do this event. It's an open call. Everyone can take part, and the topic is artistic death. So everyone will perform how their art, their artistic language, would die. So it's gonna be like a collective death and how to kind of finance it. 

It’ll be a fundraiser, so we'll ask the audience for an entrance fee, and then we'll split the entrance money. Half goes to New Fears, and the other half is prize money. The audience can vote for their favorite “death”. The winner will get half of the entrance money. I'm excited about it.

MH: Yeah, it seems very topical, it’s what your space is having to deal with and what artists are having to deal with. 

Has there been anything surprising or anything you learned that’s come out doing this work? 

JW: Don’t trust anyone! It’s, like, half a joke, because it annoys Joana and Jose, they try to be positive. It can be very surprising how things go if you don't make it clear, if you don't make contracts. And yeah, and it can go both ways. It can be very positively surprising and can be negatively surprising. So you never know.

Trying to find this balance of how things have to be formulated and be clear and written down so that everyone is safe in the agreement, and then still also trying to trust and say, hey, yeah, people are going to take care and be respectful.

MH: What does the name of your space, New Fears, mean to you?

JW: It came out of a joke a long time ago. It was New Years Eve, and we said “Happy New Fears”, instead of “Happy New Year”. I think there’s a lot in this stupid joke. Fears usually block us, limit us, don't allow us to be the people or have the lives that we want to have. 

But it could be a bit like Aikido where you use the force of your opponent and make it work for you. So making even these fears useful, making them work for you… they can become material for your artistic work.

We even did a workshop with a therapist on this topic of fears. There is this thing of envisioning, or giving an image or character to your fears as a way to take them out of you. You can talk to them, and they are not just controlling you. So then you can ask the question, Where do you come from? What do you need? Why are you so angry? 

With the participants in the workshop, they would describe how their fears would look. Then we had a designer who designed their fears as characters and we made a poster series out of it and we hung them in the street. So in this way, the fears literally became artistic material. 

The name comes from this idea, there will always be new fears. But we try to dance with them a bit at New Fears.

Find out more about New Fears on their website and Instagram @newfears_gallery