The Boys Club Berlin

|Germany | Berlin | https://www.instagram.com/theboysclubberlin/ | Designers - Illustrators | When we founded the Boys Club, we didn't all know each other, but we were connected through the Ladies Wine and Design network in Berlin. We shared a similar impulse: to create a space where we could work, but that shouldn't be just a work space, at least not in the usual sense. It became a space where you're not professional without also being personal, and where work and play merge. It's a space of community - between the six of us, but also for the much larger network of people who come to this space for drawing parties, roundtables, conferences, charity events, magazine and book launches. Or who just drop in for a cup of coffee. 

It is a democratic space without hierarchy. Everyone is in a position to make decisions and therefore feels equally responsible and encouraged to take initiative. If you are in a more introspective phase and you are not able to take initiatives, then someone else will. On the other hand, when you have an idea and a desire to do something, you usually get a lot of support and encouragement from the rest of the group. That makes it a dynamic space. There's a lot of strength in that space and in our network and our shared skills. It can sometimes feel like a magic machine, you put a few coins in and you get a double return. We use it to facilitate knowledge sharing, activism and community building. We're still just discovering the potential of this type of collaboration, it's an exploration. 

One of the most recent initiatives was born out of a sense of concern and helplessness over the urgent situation of the bushfires in Australia. We decided to organize a market to sell works donated by various creators and to donate the profits to fire relief funds.

We also use our platform to showcase the work of others we find important or interesting, for example by organizing the launch party for the book Notamuse - A New Perspective on Women Graphic Designers in Europe.

Sometimes we also collaborate with creative projects. Last year we made a fanzine, combined with a group exhibition, which was presented for the first time in our own space, as part of 48h Neukölln, and later we were invited to exhibit at Wømb - Symposium for gender equality in the creative industry. We called the group exhibition "Club Boys Club" and it was an interactive exhibition that re-imagined the patriarchal power structure of traditional "boys clubs". Undefined or defined networks and groups are constitutive elements of our self-identification as well as the democratic model and seem necessary to create opposition and propose new ideas. But the essence of a group is also that it has a kind of boundary - an "inside" and an "outside". So, starting from our own "club", we questioned how this boundary is defined.