The project space Changing Room was founded by Tatiana Echeverri Fernandez in October 2018 and is located in a former horse and carriage stable that once served the mills along Müllerstraße in Berlin-Wedding. This area later became known as the “African Quarter.”

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Located at the center of the African Quarter, we have established an open platform for dialogue and exchange. Engaging the local community of the African Quarter was our primary motivation in realizing the event series Territories Under My Skin, which took place from May to September 2020. Through performances, film programs, and interventions, the project reflects on and examines the history of the African Quarter and the years-long renaming process of Cornelius-Frederiks-Straße (formerly Lüderitzstraße), Anna-Mugunda-Allee (formerly Petersallee), and Manga-Bell-Platz (formerly Nachtigalplatz), all of which were originally named after German colonial figures.

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Changing Room’s program follows a decolonial approach and specializes in performance, sound art, and workshops. Methodologically, the project space is shaped by an interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, and transcultural practice, grounded in a research-based orientation. At its core is an engagement with various aspects of everyday and social life, including interaction and participation, inclusivity, pluralism, and tolerance. These form the foundation of an exploratory approach whose performative and analytical artistic practice provides a platform for expanding and challenging perception.

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For the invited artists and participants, Changing Room serves as a site of reflection for artistic research and practice based on connection and solidarity. This is reflected, among other things, in the regular availability of the space for the development of group or individual projects.

Collaborations—such as with the collective Research and Waves or Night School Berlin—have evolved into long-term and recurring partnerships.

Through participatory workshops and lectures, Changing Room fosters an environment of shared exploration, inviting audiences to engage actively with the processes. The Berlin Ensemble of the Rat Choir by Gunnhildur Hauksdottir is one example of this practice. In an open call, the artist and Changing Room invited interested individuals to join the choir and rehearse regularly in the space over several months. The choir subsequently presented its work to a larger audience at Changing Room in February 2023.

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Changing Room invites visitors to step beyond the position of spectators and to participate actively in performances and events. Participants are encouraged to discover new approaches to art. Within the project space, art consistently functions as a site of knowledge production—intervening in established forms of knowledge-making with its own parameters and advancing emancipatory forms of theory and understanding.

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With new aesthetic and perceptual methods, we aim to create an experimental environment that sharpens empathy and collective awareness, moves beyond the affective moment of sensual experience, and simultaneously expands the concept of art.​​​​​

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