Last week, the art:OUT partners met in Berlin for our first in-person meeting. Over three days, we explored Outsider Art, disability inclusion, and what ethical creative practice looks like in shared spaces. Galerie ART CRU Berlin hosted the meeting. They run the city’s first gallery dedicated to art by artists living with psychiatric or mental disabilities. Partners joined from femLENS (Estonia), Intras (Spain), No Gap (Italy), and Thalpos Mental Health (Greece).
What art:OUT Is Building
art:OUT brings together organisations working at the intersection of art and mental health. Together, we are developing inclusive artistic methods and a shared Toolkit. Specifically, the project focuses on ethical practice, assisted art contexts, and exhibition-making that respects artists living with psychiatric or psychosocial disabilities. In other words, it is about rethinking how the art world includes and supports these artists at every stage.
Visiting Studios and Support Models
The programme moved between different spaces and formats. First, we visited Atelier Blumenfisch and Kunstwerk Blisse. Both are long-term Berlin studios that support artists living with disabilities in sustained creative practice. Next, we spent time at the open studio at St. Hedwig Hospital. There, art operates inside a clinical setting and forms part of daily life. Seeing these contrasting models helped us build a shared language around support, assistance, and artistic autonomy.
Outsider Art, Disability Inclusion, and Exhibition Practice
We also visited Kunsthaus Achim Freyer. Its collection holds over 2,300 works, placing Art Brut, Outsider, naïve, and mainstream practices side by side. This raised useful questions about how diverse artistic traditions can coexist within one exhibition. Furthermore, artist Torsten Holzapfel led a session grounded in his own long-term practice within assisted structures. His input brought our discussions back to concrete questions: process, display, and what genuine support looks like. Meanwhile, workshops at imPerfekt gave us space to test inclusive and cooperative methods hands-on.
What Comes Next
By the end of the meeting, we had shaped the structure of the art:OUT Toolkit. We also agreed on communication principles and clarified each partner’s role in the next phase. As a result, all five organisations now share a common foundation around inclusion, assistance, and artistic value. This will guide local workshops and exhibitions in each country. The next meeting takes place in June in Estonia. At that point, femLENS will host a three-day Peer-to-Peer Training on Inclusive Communication, covering ethical storytelling, consent, trauma-informed language, and accessible media practices.
More about the project: femlens.com/artout