What does a sustainable, future-oriented promotion of art and culture look like? This question is being addressed by the City of Freiburg’s Department of Cultural Affairs in the form of a multi-layered participatory process that is intended to result in a realignment of Freiburg’s cultural policy and funding. Addressing the issue of sustainability and sustainability transformations in the field of art and culture is not only limited to a cognitive and linguistic level, but also involves a very practical approach in the form of experiments. The framework for this multi-layered examination is the “Kulturlabor” (culture lab) – a real-world lab in the field of art and culture, which has been created specifically for this purpose in cooperation with the Karlsruhe Transformation Center for Sustainability and Cultural Change in 2021 and is being implemented from 2022 onwards.

The culture lab is clearly oriented towards cultural practice and is divided into three fields of action: “experiments”, “discourse space”, and “culture code”. These three fields of action are closely interlinked.

“Experiments” in the culture lab refer to experimental work in the planning and realization of modified artistic formats and events, new focuses in the creation, distribution, and presentation of art and culture, which take up and implement one or more aspects of sustainability.

In the “discourse space”, topics relevant to cultural policy will be explored and negotiated in suitable event forums with those involved in the culture lab and the interested public.

The findings from the fields of action “discourse space” and “experiments” form the basis for the culture code. The new “code” (= “written down as a document”) will contain sustainable cultural policy principles and funding policy measures that will provide a binding framework for funders and recipients, i.e., for cultural practitioners, administration, and politics.

The new code is intended to establish sustainable art and culture funding with sector-specific principles and practice-oriented handling for the funded cultural sector in Freiburg.

The participants of the culture lab consist of artists, cultural practitioners, cultural activists, cultural administrators, and other actors from the culture-related educational and social sector.

With its experience and expertise in real-world lab work, the Karlsruhe Transformation Center played a key role in the development of the culture lab (2021) and is involved in its implementation from 2022 as part of the steering group. Furthermore, it organizes the (formative) scientific support of the experiments, on the one hand to accompany the experiments in their examination of the topic of sustainability, and on the other hand to translate findings from the experiments into impulses for the emerging culture code.

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