History of Werkleitz Gesellschaft

The True History of the Werkleitz Society or: How One Can Learn To Love Pragmatic Utopianism (short excerpt)

by Peter Zorn

Everyone who ever paid a visit to the Werkleitz Society has his or her own tale to tell. Werkleitz is a village on the River Saale in Saxony-Anhalt: this is a statement on which probably everyone can agree. When it comes to explaining the phenomenon “Werkleitz Society” however, one soon hears contradictory statements: it’s some kind of cultural association, a workshop for media arts, an artists’ colony, the regional media centre of Saxony-Anhalt, organiser of the Werkleitz Biennale, a venue for international artists’ residencies, a local institution, a laboratory for collective experimentation, an institution for people who work in the media, an institution for artists, a meeting place for political activists... and so forth. Depending on whom you ask, you will be given one or the other of these answers, or perhaps even a quite different one. And all of them are somehow true – and yet somehow also not.