A cultural and educational practice out of postmigrant perspective
The akademie der autodidakten am Ballhaus Naunynstraße, founded in 2007 by Shermin Langhoff, supports the cultural self-empowerment of people aged 16 to 27 with the aim of motivating them to participate culturally and democratically and to promote their intellectual and social skills. Their practice combines approaches from the performing and visual arts, postcolonial theory, gender studies, and applied critical arts education to open new cultural perspectives in schools.
Participants search for new aesthetics – with their greatest possible participation and self-empowerment as the goal. In this way, the academy of autodidacts offers especially black people, people of color, queer and post-migrant, access to self-development and professionalization. They can participate in projects for theater, dance, music and film productions. The Kiez-Monatsschau, a film and video project for which postmigrant youths, under professional guidance, go out as video reporters and report on topics relevant to them in the supposed „hotspot neighborhood,“ has now established itself as a fixed component of the Ballhaus program with 30 episodes.
The projects are led by directors, artists and journalists from the Ballhaus Naunynstraße network (including Laia Ribera Cañénguez, T. Vicky Germain, Jasco Viefhues, Hengameh Yaghoobifarah, Tarik Tesfu, Silvia Ospina, Marcelo Omine, Raphael Hillebrand, Isabel Gonzalez Toro und Christine Seraphin, Salome Dastmalchi, Simone Dede Ayivi, Simon(e) Paetau, Jair Luna, Janine Jembere, Theresa Henning, Adrian Figueroa; Innocent Peteke and many more).
Some of the autodidacts‘ projects were invited to the Theatertreffen der Jugend and adopted into the regular repertoire of Ballhaus Naunynstraße: For example, the project Urban Sounds Clash Classic in 2013, Female Gaze in 2015, One Day I went to *idl in 2016 and Sesperado – Revolution of Color in 2017.