Freedom monument: denk!mal FREIHEIT

How free do children and young people feel? What do they understand by their own freedom and the freedom of others? With these questions in mind, researchers from the WZB, togetaher with artists, visited twelve schools in socially disadvantaged neighborhoods between April and July. Under the motto “denk!mal FREIHEIT” they invited students to develop their images of freedom and build a modern monument to freedom. The project was part of the Science Year, which in 2024 was dedicated to the theme of freedom.

“denk!mal FREIHEIT” was aimed at children and young people who had had little contact with science before. In workshops, they were able to learn how scientists work and how research functions. But the researchers also wanted to learn from the students' perspectives and gain inspiration for their own research.

These freedom labs focused on questions of freedom and lack of freedom in relation to central research topics at the WZB, such as education, mobility, democracy, and migration. The medium for these approaches came from artists who guided the students in developing animated films in which they shared their ideas and dreams about freedom.

A “denk!mal FREIHEIT” monument does not build itself. For this project, the WZB cooperated with partners from the arts and civil society. Artists from the mobile language lab Trickmisch worked with researchers to develop the concept of the freedom labs. The foundation Ein Quadratkilometer Bildung recruited schools from its local education networks in various federal states for the project. The S27 – Kunst und Bildung association is accompanying the construction of the Freedom Monument, a large installation in the workshop of the Falscher Fisch city laboratory.

The first two workshops took place on the Rütli campus in Berlin-Neukölln and in Dortmund. Freedom Labs will follow in Meerane (Saxony), Fürstenwalde, Neubrandenburg, Brandenburg, Flensburg, Potsdam, Herten, Wuppertal, and Schwerin.

To conclude the project, we invite you to Berlin-Neukölln on September 20, 2024. At S27's “Falscher Fisch,” the students' animated films will be shown as an artistic installation and assembled into a panopticon, a modern monument to freedom.