#1 | #2 | IFFR#33 | #3 | #4 | #5 | #6 Munchen | #7 | #8 | #9 | #10 The Interviews | #11 | #12 Berlin | #13 Dresden | #14 | #15 | #16 Copenhagen | #17 IFFR | #18 Riga | #19 Conceptual Art | #20 The Swiss Issue | #21 Aktie! | #22 Rotterdam Art Map 1.0 | #23 Bruxelles | #24 Maasvlakte 2 | #25 Douala | #26 Rotterdam Art Map 2.0 | #27 Tbilisi | #28 Budget Cuts NL | #29 Italian Issue | #Side by Side | #30 Rotterdam Art Map 3.0 | #31 It’s Playtime | #32 Rennes Free Edition | #33 Rotterdam Art Map 4.0 | #34 Arnhem Art Map | #35 Existentialism | #36 Pascal Gielen | #37 The Swiss Issue revisited | #38 What Life Could Be | #39 The Void | #40 Over ziek zijn/On Being Ill | #41 Side by Side (2020-2021) | #42 Shelter for Daydreams | Colofon

Editorial
Berlin is once again Europe’s cultural centre, above all for those who live there. Berlin is a cultural hub and is buzzing with international artists. Here you can plug yourself in, and then out again, with great ease. Berlin is a city where everyone can find their own niche: for a gallery in Cologne it is a ‘schaufenster’, for artists with an international career it is the ideal city for working in an enormous hangar with a handful of assistants, and for those who do not seek a career there is room enough for experimentation and artistic exchange. Berlin ist flach und breit (flat and wide).
We are cultural migrants now, albeit adventurers with a European passport and a stipend for three months in our pocket. From 1 October to 31 December 2005 we were installed in the ‘Project Studio Berlijn’ funded by the Fonds BKVB (The Netherlands Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture): a residency with a luxury apartment on the Frankfurter Allee and an enormous studio in the S-Bahn arches of the Jannowitzbrücke, between the galleries Carlier | Gebauer and BüroFriedrich. Our plan: to make Fucking Good Art – International edition/Berlin.

This is the second time we have produced a paperback instead of our trusty A3 folded to A5 pink pamphlet with observations, critiques and reviews. We are curious, the city is big, three months is a long time and it certainly won’t fit on an A3 sheet. This edition explores the art world from a Berlin perspective, from the local point of view. We have invited contributions from Berlin-based artists, filmmakers, curators, architects and friends. Local questions are the same the (art) world over, and Berlin is very specific. Berlin poses an enormous number of questions. Why are there so many international artists here and more than 300 commercial galleries? If the city is really bankrupt, where does the money come from? There are ‘good’ and ‘bad’ collectors and dealers. They don’t sit on the fence here. There is still a serious left-wing newspaper and a bookshop that specialises is leftist theory and art. There are more than 40 Do-It-Yourself project spaces and artists and curators’ apartment galleries, some of them subsidised or supported by a commercial gallery. Alongside the conventional typologies, a new model is developing – the ‘Produzentengalerie’, a pragmatic hybrid of the idealistic project space and the commercial gallery. Here everything is on show, but not how it works. The biggest lie about Berlin is that all the cultural workers spend their days in a cafe with their laptop and a latte macchiato surfing on a free wireless internet connection; the cafe is their airport. The reality, however, is rather different. Most of them call themselves patch workers and invest their talents in a variety of ways, often for very little financial return. Following our residency we had a desk for two months at Zentralbuero. This is a new studio model: the ‘Creative Office’, where artists, architect, designers, curators, writers, translators, etc. rent shared office space and work themselves to death.

The artist as super-tourist, as journalist or reporter, as amateur anthropologist and sociologist. That’s what we are.
Henri Michaux wrote: “I was in China for a week and I could write an entire book about it. I have lived in Paris for thirty-five years and I couldn’t write a single page about it.” We are giving the voicebox to others and keeping our mouths shut. We put one story next to another and hope that they make music.

^Rob Hamelijnck & Nienke Terpsma, March 2006

The Suitcase Artists by Michael Baers in close collaboration with the artists/editors of Fucking Good Art – Rob Hamelijnck and Nienke Terpsma. A Meta-Comic – a critical graphic essay on the nomadic artists like us traveling from residency to residency.










^ © 2006 / The Suitcase Artist, by Michael Baers in collaboration with Rob Hamelijnck and Nienke Terpsma.

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Berlin Art Guide 2006
In our Berlin issue we publish a 9 pages list of 40 Berlin independent artist and curator - run project spaces compiled by our friend and artist Catherine Griffiths. This mapping of project spaces in Berlin began as a project for Sparwasser HQ, and was extended and updated for Fucking Good Art.

Download here!


Colophon
Fucking Good Art HQ – Rotterdam / Berlin
Artists / editors: Rob Hamelijnck and Nienke Terpsma
Publisher(s): episode / Fucking Good Art
Design: Nienke Terpsma / Joanna Katte
Price: € 10,-
ISBN: 9059730437
160 pages / 147 x 210 mm / softcover
English / German Edition
March 2006
Financial support: Fonds BKVB Amsterdam

interviews / conversations
Curators Berlin Biennial 04
Waling Boers
Harm Lux
Manfred Pernice
Thomas Scheibitz
Lutz Nessing
Jeroen Jacobs
Klaus Mertens
Edwin Carels

novel
Stirbt der Mensch als Künstler
Dany Müller / Starship magazine

meta comic
The Suitcase Artist / by Michael Baers, in collaboration with Rob Hamelijnck and Nienke Terpsma

artist contribution
Lutz Nessing
Hester Oerlemans
David Shrigley
Helmut & Johanna Kandl
Felix Stephan Huber
Andreas Koch
Dida Zende
Future7
Rob Hamelijnck
Antje Schiffers
Christine Würmell

^