Interview with OUT COLLECTIVE with Alexia Aleksandropoulou, Elías López, Fairouz Nouri, Karoline Ketelhake, Khadouja Tamzini by Bettina Pelz.
Published on 27 JUN 2025.
Can you briefly introduce yourself? What themes or questions do you generally deal with in your curatorial work?
We are the OUT COLLECTIVE, a group of five emerging international curators who met during the LICHTROUTEN Festival in Lüdenscheid in 2025 and decided to continue working together beyond that context. We come from diverse backgrounds, but share a common interest in curating across borders, disciplines, and geographies, with a strong focus on accessibility and social engagement.
As a collective, we’re particularly interested in creating curatorial formats that explore co-creation, translocal dialogue, and public interaction. We explore how mapping, memory, and storytelling can serve as curatorial tools to reflect on the spaces we inhabit, both physically and digitally. Our collective is still in formation, but what brings us together is a commitment to process-based curating, care practices, and experimental methods that challenge traditional institutional frameworks.
How did you get involved in the MEDIA ART LAB project, and what attracted you to take part?
Right after the LICHTROUTEN Festival, we sought ways to continue working together as a collective and build on the experience we had just shared. That’s when Bettina Pelz, our mentor and someone who has continuously supported our development, introduced us to the MEDIA ART LAB project and encouraged us to participate in it.
What attracted us to the MEDIA ART LAB is its positioning: it’s framed within an academic context, yet it also unfolds in public space. This intersection feels very aligned with our curatorial values, especially the idea of making art accessible, collaborative, and grounded in lived environments. We were also drawn to the initiative’s openness. It gives space to emerging artists and cultural practitioners from different backgrounds to meet, work together, and share knowledge in a setting that encourages experimentation and exchange.
How did you develop the theme, and what are your curatorial guidelines?
The theme Invisible Cities grew out of personal experiences and the realities we each encounter in our contexts. As curators from diverse regions and backgrounds, we’ve all witnessed or experienced forms of invisibility in our cities: people being pushed to the margins, stories left untold, movements restricted, and environments neglected. This isn’t abstract for us, it’s something deeply felt and widely shared, not only by us but by many others in our communities.
Rather than starting with a fixed concept, we approached the theme as a shared space of reflection: a way to open conversations about what remains unseen in the cities we inhabit. Invisible Cities is about the silences, the erasures, the overlooked daily struggles, but also about resilience, memory, and reclaiming space. Our curatorial parameters are intentionally open and inclusive. We’re interested in practices rooted in lived experience, whether personal, political, or collective, and we value works that create awareness, spark dialogue, and invite new ways of seeing. It’s a space we’re trying to hold open, to give visibility to what often remains hidden.
Can you describe some of the artworks that you selected?
For Invisible Cities, we curate a diverse selection of works that respond to urban life beyond the visible surface, engaging with systems of power, memory, displacement, and emotional geographies. The formats of the works range from digital installation and generative visuals to performance-based video and glitch aesthetics. Thematically, many of the artworks highlight how cities are shaped by invisible structures, such as economic systems, historical trauma, bureaucratic barriers, and social exclusion. Others explore more intimate and emotional layers of urban life, like the cycles of exhaustion and movement in contemporary routines, or the psychological toll of navigating restricted mobility. Several artists work with the language of the body, architecture, and digital distortion to reveal fragmented realities, highlighting the tension between visibility and erasure in public space. Others imagine the city as a space of fluid identities, resistance, and migration. We were also mindful of constructing a balanced program in terms of form, perspective, and representation; the final selection also took into account geographic diversity, with gender and regional representation actively considered throughout the process.
How do you experience life in the city of Bremen? What do you think ABOUT Bremen’s Domshof as an exhibition venue? What kind of audience do you hope for?
As we are five members of the collective, and only two of us live in Bremen, we could say that we’ve all experienced the city through different eyes, but also different stories. We got to meet each other by sharing a common space opened by the art scene, and it is inevitable to open a conversation where we introduce the city that the two of us study in. By sharing experience, as daily life studies, festivals, or exhibitions that happen in Bremen or where we all get to connect, which is the University of Arts.
The usual approach to art by a non-artistic background is galleries or museums where everything keeps some specific formats, from the mediums of what is being exhibited to the behaviour expected from the visitors. This is why we take this venue in Domshof as a new opportunity to share, experience, and be surrounded by artistic projects, not only for us as part of the art community but also for the people who live or maybe visit Bremen and are used to go through this space as pedestrians.
The weekend that we will be hosting this artistic program will bring up a mixture of people, not only from several zones around Brmene or Germany, but also people from all around the world. This is why we expect to host all these small communities that are generated by the students and professors from the University of Arts and their circle of friends, which expand to people who don’t come from the institution. As mentioned before, the Dosmhof space is used by pedestrians to get train connections, get to their jobs, and have a meal in the restaurants in the surroundings, so we want to give them a reason to make a pause and experience what we are preparing for them.
Where do you see inspiring artworks? What would help to make the local media art scene even more attractive?
One of the key hotspots for inspiring media artworks in Bremen is the University of the Arts. Students there are already exhibiting internationally, and their approach is notably experimental and driven by curiosity. The boundaries of media art are being constantly expanded through their work. In Bremen, there are several spaces supporting this dynamic scene. For example, Umzu provides exhibition opportunities right in the heart of the city, making it much more accessible for creatives and the public alike. Additionally, through Zwischennutzung (temporary use of vacant buildings), there are chances to transform unused spaces into exhibition venues. A standout example of this is a unique exhibition organized by Digital Media students in a former pathology institute, an extraordinary use of space and concept, made possible by such initiatives.
These opportunities play a major role in growing and developing the local art scene, while also lowering the threshold for public engagement. There are also exciting alumni who have gone on to form creative studios, such as Studio Julian Hölscher and Xenorama. Media art, particularly in the form of VJing, also has a visible presence in Bremen’s club scene, where visuals are closely linked to music. Events like the Moin Moin festival highlight this synergy, bringing together art, music, and culture.
To make the scene even more attractive, increased funding would be a major help. This would ensure fair pay for artists while keeping exhibitions affordable or ideally free for the public. Although there is already some local funding, as in most art scenes, it’s not enough. Better support would allow artists and collectives to truly focus on their work without needing multiple side jobs just to afford rent.
Lastly, more events focused on networking and idea exchange within the local scene would be highly beneficial. Creating more spaces for connection would strengthen the existing community and help attract new talent and interest.
What is next on your collective curatorial path?
As a young and growing collective, we’re still in the process of shaping our curatorial path but what connects us is a shared desire to work across contexts and disciplines, and to engage with urgent social, political, and environmental questions through art. After the exhibition, our next step as the OUT Collective is to contribute to the curatorial program of SEE DJERBA 2025 in Tunisia where we’ll continue working around the intersection of natural and cultural heritage. This offers an opportunity to deepen our reflections and ground them in a different geographic and cultural context. Beyond these projects, we hope to keep growing the OUT Collective as a platform for experimentation, translocal dialogue, and long-term collaboration. We see curating as a form of care and connection and we want to continue creating spaces where overlooked voices, stories, and places can be seen, heard, and felt.
FEATURED IMAGE
OBK. LICHTROUTEN Lüdenscheid 2025. Photo: Jennifer Braun.