South of Berlin, a former coal-fired power station built over a century ago has been converted and restored into a cultural arts centre in order to produce electricity once again, but this time generating energy using renewable sources.
London's Tate Modern, Shanghai's Power Station of Art, Istanbul's Santralistanbul: the history of converting power stations into art galleries is long and varied. What sets E-WERK Luckenwalde apart, however, is a pioneering ecological and economic model that produces renewable art electricity - called ‘Kunststrom’ - and feeds it into the building, contemporary art programme and national grid. As a not-for-profit institution, E-WERK reinvests all income from energy generation in its contemporary art program. Even better, the E-WERK has switched from historical coal to contemporary carbon-negative energy and now burns wood chips donated by local businesses.
In 2017, the German artist Pablo Wendel and his British partner, curator Helen Turner, happened to stumble on a derelict power station in the small town of Luckenwalde, 50km – 40 minutes by train – south of Berlin. The entrance has a magnificent barrel vault (there is a light bulb in each niche) and a stained glass window showing a fist clutching a sheaf of lightning bolts. The power plant, built in 1913, had ceased to exist after the end of the Cold War and the GDR with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
In 2012 Wendel founded the enterprise Performance Electrics gGmbH that created and enabled art projects and installations that also produce ‘Kunststrom’ power. But it was here at E-WERK, that his vision of reviving a former fossil fuel power station into a sustainable art power plant, both feeding electricity into the national grid and acting as a large-scale centre for contemporary art, was finally possible, an opportunity to create an art centre - and do something for the environment at the same time. Working with a team of local volunteers and the E-WERK team, Wendel and Turner took on the building and reused and adapted the original machinery. German customers can even support E-WERK directly by buying their energy from Bürgerwerke, a company that sells renewable energy generated by civic and community projects like E-WERK.
As part of POWER NIGHT 2019, Performance Electrics gGmbH officially switched the power back on in the former factory. Since opening in 2019, E-WERK Luckenwalde has offered a diverse programme of exhibitions, workshops, performances and events, such as Sun and Sea by Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, Vaiva Grainytė and Lina Lapelytė, the acclaimed beach opera that won the Golden Lion for Lithuania at the 2019 Venice Biennale. The four-storey building also includes workshops and subsidised, low-cost studios for artists who can no longer afford Berlin rents. ۶Ƶ recently partnered with the organisation in 2022 for POWER NIGHTS: Being Mothers, an interdisciplinary exhibition, championing slow curating and sustainable exhibition making, spanning 9 months and curated by Lucia Pietroiusti, Helen Turner, Katharina Worf and Adriana Tranca.
Wendel and Turner say, “Over the last few decades there have been urgent alarm bells ringing about our global energy problem as well as the need for a more sustainable model for the art world - concrete action is needed. What we have at E-WERK Luckenwalde is an opportunity to harness the two together. We are able to use renewable energy to support the creation of art and also encourage people to use a more sustainable type of energy in their homes, businesses and own cultural institutions. There is still an incredibly long way to go in this journey but through ‘Kunststrom’ we hope to begin to take that leap, and to encourage and to advocate for others to do the same”
