The general idea of an artist in a studio is becoming scarce in the population hubs of Europe, as suitable spaces are being repurposed for whatever reason – usually renovations for office spaces, apartments, or simply raising the costs above what the artist can pay. But this doesn’t mean that spaces for creation are not there. As part of the Creative Europe project Tiny Spaces Deep Connections, we had a chance to talk with Natalia Irina Roman about her relationship with repurposed small spaces to create new art in, her fascination with trains, and the co-housing discipline of Projekthaus Potsdam, where she both works and lives.
TB: So, first of all, I would like you to introduce yourself and tell us a bit about where we are right now.
Natalia: Hello everyone, my name is Natalia Irina Roman and I’m an artist, a curator, and a researcher. And as it so happens, I live in a co-housing, and this is where we are at this very moment, MuFu-1. MuFu-1 actually means MultiFunctional room number one, because having common spaces is part of what co-housing is.
Can you tell a little more about the different buildings that are part of this complex and what activities take place here?
We are Projekthaus Potsdam, but that’s a little bit misleading, since we actually have three houses, plus workshops and space for offices and groups to host – that’s already quite a lot. A co-housing is basically a self-organized community taking care of the property for the generations to come. That means that we are basically owners without being owners. We are members in an association for the duration of our living here. This association is the owner of two houses that were bought by the people living here, and one house was built by the people living here, and we also have wood, ceramics, textiles, metal workshops… We also have a whole floor in this very house that, at the moment, is being rented to three separate organisations.
So, what is co-housing? It can mean various things, but two things are very important: one is that you own the property in the sense that you don’t pay rent to the property owner, but you basically manage this property in order to take it out of the rent market, and preserve it for the generations to come, and offer the chance of affordable rent. The other important factor is that people living here all know each other – we are collectively taking care of this space. We have an assembly every second week, talking about what we have to take care of or other things. We’re meeting every first Saturday of the month to work on the infrastructure and in the garden – we have a very large garden as well, where we had the fire today! We met around the fire, to say goodbye to this place, because tomorrow the big journey of Tiny Spaces will begin.
The mechanics sound a little complex, there is a project group and a housing group, among others. How does Tiny Spaces link into all this?
Projekthaus Potsdam has had a big vision since its founding. In 2005, when it was founded, a group of people envisioned a place for working and living, everything together – hence the workshops and the structure that we have. This project has grown over the years so much that the people living here were not able to realize the projects by themselves, as they did many years before. The so-called “big separation” started, sounding more dramatic that it is – it’s about a way of organizing ourselves. There’s a group of people living here, like myself, taking care of these properties and organizing ourselves, and there’s a group of people working here, and there’s a bit of overlap. So, with Tiny Spaces Deep Connections, I am officially in the overlap, because I run the project. In the project group there are about 15 employees, mostly not living here. This is the easy way to describe the separation, so to say.
Getting to Tiny Spaces Deep Connections, this is one of the projects now that I am currently coordinating, and we have a ton of potential space, and a part of this property is a small wooden trailer in the back of the yard, surrounded by trees, literally in the shade. It’s a place so tiny and so forgotten at times that it came to my attention that it could be so much more. So, the Tiny Spaces project with the vision that this tiny space, by being connected to our many networks and our larger infrastructure could be so much more than just a forgotten tiny space in the shadow in the back of our yard.
It was someone from the Projekthaus who contacted us at TaikaBox because of our tiny space – the recycled fishing hut in Northern Finland.
Yeah – so, I’ve been working as an independent artist now for almost ten years, and around 2019, it so happens that I had an intern, whom I asked to look online for other cultural organisations that have some sort of a tiny space. I wasn’t really set on any specific kind of a tiny space, but just that there must be tiny spaces of some sort out there. Luckily for us, she found you, with your fisherman’s hut, while she was looking for potential partners. Then we began this odyssey together, trekked through the project design and application phase, to actually be able to now sit together in MuFu-1 in this project house.
Why tiny spaces? You have so many kinds of spaces, big and otherwise, as well here.
I guess it’s a question of context as well. For us, we are in a big city, close to an even bigger city, where the scarcity of space for arts has been increasing steadily over the years. I encounter every now and then a lot of artists who have lost their ateliers and studios, who have had to change to a smaller studio, further away. This is a very up to date topic at the time being, the lack of spaces for arts. This is what I do in my work as an artist and curator as well. Tied to this project, I work on creating spaces for art out of disused railway spaces, creating spaces for arts for railway passengers – creating spaces has been a long-term interest, and also a passion in a way. So, when it comes to us, in our context, tiny spaces – this Tiny Space – shows tremendous potential for creating new places for arts, and creating opportunities for working artists.
In a way, this place is kind of a bubble. When you think of Potsdam as an area and this place, they feel very different. At a glance, Potsdam seems like a really rich area, and this arty community is surrounded by all that. How does the interaction with the area work?
We are indeed in a very residential area with a lot of history and great architecture, a house by Mies Van Der Rohe around the corner… A lot of history, a lot of presumptuous residences around us. If we wouldn’t be a co-housing project, we probably would not be here. I’m basically the only artist in this project house. We are a very interdisciplinary group in the sense that we have an architect, and almost half of us in the housing group work in education.
The trains are also a great example of tiny spaces – we are talking about the wagons as tiny spaces, this is what we are talking about in Tiny Spaces. But about the geography, we are in Potsdam, yes, and we are so close to Berlin as well, we are in the so-called ABC Berlin area, the transport area. We are literally just one S-Bahn train stop away from Berlin, so we are a little in between. I’ve been living here for many years now and it still feels like I would be in Berlin.
This week, we also talked about how people view co-housing. What would you say to people who think you are careful, or even prejudiced?
I think there are a lot of misconceptions. In my work I deal with a lot of people from various groups or backgrounds. The recurrent questions I get are whether we all are students, or if we all are living in the same room, or are we all artists – there are a lot of these kinds of questions coming up in a genuine kind of way. People just don’t exactly know what co-housing really is, and they try to make sense out of it with the notions that they know well. I have to smile when I hear such questions and answer that, well, we are just regular kinds of people like you or me, we are an interdisciplinary group, some have regular jobs, some are students although they are not the majority, some are living here and working here as well. So, definitely, there is a lot to learn about the co-housing model, but it’s definitely worthwhile. I see a lot of problems in our big cities, rents are too expensive, there is the problem of isolation – co-housing caters to these problems in the longer term. I see a lot of potential for co-housing as a solution for our big cities, generally speaking.
This is really interesting, because I was kind of surprised when you said you were the only artist here, but I see a lot of art. Maybe it’s because of the workshops that are held here, it gives a feeling that there are a lot of artists here.
There’s a lot of crafts, yes. There’s pottery upstairs in the ceramics workshop, a lot of woodwork, metalwork… We’ve had some artists visiting in the past, and some have left some art behind. It all has been growing, establishing itself as a cultural organisation as well over the past years.
So, what are you looking for from international cooperation? Not just as a part of our project, but in general. This is not the only international project of yours, and you have international connections.
Well, thinking about this question, I would start locally. We look beyond our localities in Germany, so we’re associated with the Mietshäuse Syndikat, a house building syndicate with over 200 co-housing projects in the whole country, all over Germany. We’re definitely looking for knowledge sharing, extending our networks about not just the knowledge about how to set up co-housing, but everyday problems that always arise – what about the heating system that’s too old and you have to change it, such stuff. It’s very useful to be part of such a network to get hands-on advice on how other co-housing projects have handled such issues and so forth.
But if we’re scaling up and looking at cooperations with organisations in other countries – we have done a project with Erasmus+ and Horizon Research as well, and now we are very happy about this collaboration as well, it’s our first Creative Europe project – and what we are looking into is learning from each other, sharing and spreading and disseminating our know how with other organisations, groups and individuals about co-housing. But also, there are so many other ways of interacting with networks. We are very open and interested in establishing more co-operations. I’m looking very much into our tomorrow embarkment on a slow travel from Germany over Austria and Italy by trains and ferries towards Athens, where our kick-off will continue with our very first public talk.
Now, specifically about Tiny Spaces Deep Connections project, what do you wish to gain and continue doing after the two-year project?
It would be ideal if we could find more potential partners and continue a larger co-operation after this one. I very much look forward to our trip tomorrow, because we are planning to work on various things, to explore the use of the train wagons in a different way than they are usually used as a functional means of transportation. So I’m definitely hoping for knowledge for new experiences in this sense, also together with the artists to research ways to work creatively while using means of public transportation and connecting our tiny spaces to a larger network of larger infrastructures.
So, that’s actually art in trains, and that’s a very big thing in your practice. Can you tell us a little more how it all started?
That’s a life-long story. I’ve always been a very passionate railway traveller. When I was a little kid, I was visiting my grandmother in North Romania, and I had the impression that the train was talking to me – the Romanian train was making such a noise, te duc, te duc, te duc, and that in Romanian actually means something “I’m taking you there, I’m taking you there.” So, as a little girl, I was sitting there, thinking “Oh, this train is talking to me!” That was so nice.
Then, growing up, my passion for railway travel has evolved beyond personal inspiration. I’m definitely very inspired when I’m on a train. When looking for a new idea, someone might take a shower to clear their heads – I’ll hop on the train – usually on the Central Line on the Ringbahn – and have a little notebook with me and get a lot of ideas, and I’m having a lot of fun and feeling very inspired.
This passion has poured into my current research at Bauhaus University Weimar, looking into the potential of disused interlocking towers to be transformed into art spaces for the train passengers to be seen from the train. Imagine going to work or to school and you look out the window and see something that catches your eye; after a few stations you see something else, and you connect these images in your imagination and create a work of art during your everyday routine, making you more present and aware of your city, more curious about it. In this context, as an artist and a curator, I’ve developed various formats, and I’ve been teaching classes in trains, too – transforming train journeys into art, at Bauhaus University and Berlin University of Arts. So, let’s see where such initiatives will take me. In Tiny Spaces Deep Connections, the Deep Connection part can be thought of as the railway connection among our spaces, beyond borders – we can think about connections between the people. I’m very curious to see what connections we’ll discover together while on the move.
The idea of the trains talking to you is really wonderful, it really appeals to me.
Yeah, and on my Instagram channel I use the name Site Specific Ideas – I regularly post stories and content on the trains, saying “hello” to trains. I’ve discovered a lot of scenarios along the tracks, because I do travel quite a lot. I’m on the train quite often, as an independent artist I work in various cities in Germany and beyond, and travel has been quite a big part of my life.
Is there a passion for the sustainability side when you are travelling on the trains? Is that any kind of a reason for you to be using trains, or is it purely artistic?
For me, trains have been such an inspiration and passion. Of course, when we look at train travel today, I think there is a revival going on. Using the railway has gotten much attention lately, and I hope this attention will grow. Definitely trains are a very ecological way of travelling and also a means of slow travel. It’s definitely a peak point in sustainability and addressing climate change topics. Rail infrastructure can definitely make a change in that respect, it’s a big topic.
Natalia was talking with Tanja Råman in Projekthaus Potsdam.