I saw the first images of the Volksbad while I was away from Berlin this summer. I actually thought that maybe I should come back for a couple of weeks and swim there. There is something undeniably appealing about having a swimming pool suddenly appear in front of the Volksbühne.
As an art project, though, I found it difficult to take seriously. The gesture felt both very familiar and strangely inflated. A swimming pool is placed in front of a theater and immediately acquires the language of participation, accessibility, public space, another kind of audience, another understanding of what a theater might be.
But a swimming pool is already all of those things.
In 2001 Dirk Paschke and Daniel Milohnić built the Werksschwimmbad at Zollverein in Essen out of two shipping containers. It was free and public and belonged very specifically to that moment in the Ruhr when deindustrialization was being processed through culture, leisure, heritage, and contemporary art. I remember the project through Florian Waldvogel, who was working at Zollverein at the time. Twenty-five years later, the pool is still operating.
I don’t mean this as a direct genealogy of the Volksbad. It is simply hard not to notice that the gesture already has a history.
I have known Matthias Lilienthal for a long time and have enormous respect for him as a theater dramaturge. One thing I have sometimes noticed in his work is a tendency to encounter something that exists in art as a quite specific gesture and understand it instead as a format, something that can travel and be reproduced somewhere else.
I thought about X-Apartments. Matthias has spoken about Jan Hoet’s Chambres d’Amis as one source for it. X-Apartments turned the apartment visit into a repeatable structure and subsequently travelled through different cities. When Matthias brought it to Home Works in Beirut in 2013, visitors were led through private homes, with the domestic situations and, inevitably, the lives of the people inhabiting them becoming part of the work. Matthias was perfectly aware of the possibility of voyeurism. But being aware of a problem is not the same as having produced a form capable of dealing with it.
This is also why I keep thinking about Christoph Schlingensief. Matthias was the dramaturge of Bitte liebt Österreich in 2000. Schlingensief also borrowed forms from outside theater, produced situations in public space, exposed people, manipulated media attention, and worked very close to the line of political irresponsibility. I am not nostalgic for that work, and I am not sure some of it could or should be repeated now.
But the situations were constructed with an extraordinary awareness of the violence contained in their form. Bitte liebt Österreich did not become political because something political happened around it. The container, the vote, the asylum seekers, the public, the FPÖ rhetoric, Big Brother, deportation, spectatorship, and the media apparatus had been forced into a very particular relation.
This seems quite different from providing a situation and waiting for social reality to animate it.
Maybe this is what bothers me about the Volksbad as well. The social situation is expected to do too much of the artistic work.
Although perhaps even calling it artistic work is already too simple. The Volksbad does not have an artist as its author. It belongs to the program of the new Volksbühne and, very visibly, to Matthias’s arrival there. It is a swimming pool, an opening gesture, a piece of programming, an image of the institution, and by now a very effective media event. The ambiguity may be part of its appeal.
A pool comes with bodies, changing rooms, children, old people, rules, hygiene, desire, embarrassment, class, gender, race, leisure, municipal budgets, lifeguards, chlorine. It already has a public. It already has protocols for negotiating the proximity of strangers. To put one in front of a theater and make it part of the program does not necessarily make any of these relations more visible. It may simply allow the institution to claim them.
A friend reminded me of a familiar version of this problem. A curator wants to establish a community space where local people can come together through art. Someone suggests that there is already a council-run community center nearby and that perhaps she could simply offer a class there. Suddenly the proposal becomes less interesting.
This small distinction seems important. The community center already exists within a structure of responsibility, maintenance, compromise, continuity, and use. It has opening hours. Somebody cleans it. Somebody has to deal with the difficult person who comes every Tuesday. Its claim to being a community space is tested every day by whether a community actually uses it.
There are also procedures for what happens when something goes wrong. Safety rules, complaints, minors, staffing, consultation, somebody further up the structure who can be asked to make a decision. From the outside, all of this can look like bureaucracy. But these procedures also contain knowledge accumulated through dealing with actual situations over long periods of time. They are not external to the social space. They are part of what makes it function.
The art version can extract the image of this social function while remaining strangely protected from the criteria by which the real thing would be judged.
This raises a slightly different question about the Volksbad: What happens when the swimming pool becomes part of the theater’s program? If the claim is that it produces access, encounter, publicness, and a different relation between strangers, a municipal swimming pool already does this. But once the pool belongs to the Volksbühne, these ordinary qualities begin to signify something about the institution itself. The pool becomes evidence that the theater is opening up, becoming more accessible, producing another kind of public.
Then the controversy made this much less abstract. The Volksbühne had invited the children and youth department of Each One Teach One (EOTO), a Berlin community-based education and empowerment organization, to curate a closed afternoon at the pool for Black children, young people, and their families. The arrangement was attacked almost immediately as racial segregation. Aileen Weibeler, a young CDU politician in Pankow, posted a video saying that she felt discriminated against because, as a white person, she could not swim there. The story travelled very quickly through the German media and into the political campaign ahead of the Berlin election. Alice Weidel called it “apartheid.”
What had been conceived as a protected afternoon for children became a national argument about racial segregation. The idea of a safer space is not particularly unusual in cultural institutions. But a swimming pool sitting in the open on Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz is a peculiar place in which to try to construct one. After the publicity, racist messages, and threats of violence, the Volksbühne and EOTO cancelled the event, stating that they could no longer guarantee the safe arrival and departure of the children and young people who were supposed to attend.
I am wary of making the controversy into an allegory for the artwork. It is too ugly for that, and the people who were supposed to swim there should not become material for another interpretation of the project.
Still, it is impossible not to think about the history of swimming pools and race in the United States. Public pools were among the most fiercely contested sites of desegregation. This had something to do with the particular intimacy of swimming. Bodies are relatively undressed. They share changing rooms and showers. They enter the same water. Racist resistance to integration repeatedly mobilized fantasies of contamination, sexuality, and physical proximity. In some American cities, desegregation contributed to the closure of municipal pools rather than their integration.
An afternoon organized for Black children in Berlin in 2026 is obviously something entirely different. It was conceived from almost the opposite political position. The point is not that the two situations are analogous. It is that the history makes it difficult to imagine a swimming pool as a neutral container into which questions of access, community, and participation can simply be introduced by an art institution.
The racist campaign around the EOTO event does not retroactively make the artistic proposition of the Volksbad more convincing. If anything, it shows how much politics was already contained in the object before the Volksbühne arrived with the language of publicness and participation.
By then the distinction between the artwork and the pool also started to seem slightly beside the point. It was a swimming pool, with all the ordinary and not-so-ordinary problems that swimming pools contain.
Perhaps this distinction extends far beyond the Volksbad. Contemporary art has become very good at producing things that already exist: schools, kitchens, gardens, libraries, clinics, radio stations, community centers, workshops, archives, and now swimming pools.
The problem is obviously not that art uses things that already exist. Sometimes changing the frame produces something that could not have existed otherwise. But sometimes the transformation seems to consist mainly of taking the visible form of a social infrastructure while leaving behind much of the knowledge, responsibility, and obligation through which that infrastructure actually functions.
And the vocabulary is remarkably stable. Access, encounter, participation, care, community, publicness. These words can describe real social relations, but they can also become a way of avoiding the much less attractive question of what exactly has been made.
With the Volksbad, I keep coming back to the banal fact that the swimming pool was already a social project before anyone called it one.
