The expulsion and marginalization of the independent cultural scene as collateral damage of the speculative bubble on the Berlin real estate market is one of the numerous symptoms of gentrification – one where the so-called creatives are not completely uninvolved: threatened, yet always mobile, flexible, ready for new efforts, alliances and temporary use, as Fred Dewey critically notes. The slogan “Wir bleiben alle” (“everyone of us stays”) is alien to this scene, which ultimately has little choice but to get support in the name of business development and city marketing. It was a peculiarity of General Public to always reject on this state between appropriation and autonomy, to show a public attitude and to initiate discussions. It may have to do with this peculiarity that the group was unable and unwilling to adapt to the imposed nomadism of the cultural scene (and its displacement to other parts of the city) in the end.

Working on the General Public Archive means collecting oral histories, artefacts and documents, with the desire to preserve the ephemeral history of the space and make it accessible to a wider public. In addition to archiving, it is a matter of classifying this multi-part practice within the microcosm of self-organized spaces in an urban culture marked by valorisation and expulsion; a political, aesthetic and now also historical self-assurance. The backbone of this book is a transcribed conversation with the members of General Public, a fictitious collage of conversations composed of numerous individual interviews. It depicts the collective experience and its polyphony, while searching for those aspects that were essential and emblematic for this time, for this space and for this scene. 

A detailed chronology lists the various activities and collaborations of General Public`s ten year existence. However, this publication focuses less on the documentation of individual artistic presentations or events, and more on an in-depth reflection on the nature of the collective agreement that shaped General Public: to create a space for spontaneity that was not prefigured by a particular programmatic concept, where very different audiences could come together and where a core of regular visitors would often gather.

Open space, space for spontaneity, experimentation and friendship – what sounds simple can be better grasped in its difference to today’s paradigm of the Curatorial. The practice of General Public consisted of a multitude of curatorial and artistic ideas that existed rather incongruously side by side. Some of the projects were quite elaborate, while others would be realized overnight, without much preparation. Nevertheless, these different formats often took place simultaneously in the space, with- out any relational concept. This was done simply because parallelism and the “bearing” of the programs by the other members were part of the basic accords at General Public. This collective non-aesthetic – or to put it more positively: the sharing of space and solidarity with colleagues’ work – is something that can hardly be reinterpreted and institutionalized as collective or relational aesthetics. It is something that refutes posthumous theorization and still remains characteristic for this kind of spatial practice.