Arsenal on Location

However, this does not mean that Arsenal will be interrupting its cinema practice. The past years and decades have been characterized by a lively exchange with Berlin audiences, and with a worldwide network of filmmakers and artists, festivals, cinemas, cinematheques and archives, curators, authors, art and cultural institutions, as well as activists from a wide range of social areas.

In 2025 Arsenal will go on tour and pay visits to some of those, with which it has made cinema history in recent decades. In close cooperation with Berlin's cultural institutions and arthouse cinemas, as well as communal cinemas nationwide and the Goethe-Institut and partner institutions around the world, Arsenal on Location will be creating programs that explore the question of what cinema can do.

At the heart of Arsenal on Location is an assessment of the situation at a time when the freedom of artistic spaces has become the subject of public debate and positioning is needed more than ever. But what is the relationship between the immediate geographical and cultural surroundings of a cinema and the global places (and hotspots) to which films take us? Which films should we show today, in which spaces and how? What does “cinema as a social and societal practice” mean – in Berlin's Kreuzberg, Nuremberg, Leipzig, Lagos or New York? And what can we learn from this for our future in Wedding, Berlin?

Arsenal would like to make use of the coming year without its own cinema to focus on social issues by co-creating a program with its partners, on and for their sites. There will be no limits to the thematic range: it will be a matter of the concrete form of cinema practice, understood as social practice, at the respective sites.

After 30 years in a very close-knit and queer neighborhood of Schöneberg and a subsequent quarter of a century at Potsdamer Platz, Arsenal is moving to an area that is undergoing a major upheaval. What will the surroundings mean for an institution that has a global outlook and network? Arsenal on Location wants to learn from others and at the same time give something back.

Nationwide, Arsenal will be working with the Bundesverband für Kommunale Filmarbeit; the first participants are City 46 in Bremen, Filmhaus Nürnberg, Filmmuseum Potsdam, Filmclub 813 in Cologne, Cinémathèque Leipzig and KinoCenter Kehl.

Internationally, numerous Goethe Institutes are taking part in Arsenal on location, as well as partner cinemas and cinematheques in around 20 countries.