Oberhausen needs you. Yes, and we´re also part of Oberhausen. Our Refugees´Kitchen is growing and flourishing as a project of collaborative building. One workshop space alone could not host all of its complexity anymore. While looking for more space, we spontaneously decided to bring the creative mood into the Oberhaus. Those same rooms had once welcomed our theories about improvements for the building, were now hosting the reality entering. A new kind of workshop was finally there.

Here Hakim and Jaqueline are now working at the inner equipment for the mobile kitchen. Unexpected parallel functions: the neighborhood drops by in order to fix some of their furniture or, rather, to work together. Interested people drop by in order to ask for available flats, and some of the inhabitants wonder if there´s a new owners´ office, opening for providing help in word and deed. After few days there´s already people coming along regularly for a chat. By using this place, communicative people are infusing new life to the square in a totally unimagined way. The doors are open, the saw shrieks, people talk to each other while smoking a the door.

The small square all around the building is a special place in Oberhausen. It is continuously crossed by different people. A place of transition, that is now possibly becoming one to stay. Anyway, firs acquaintances happen and every evening we´ve got a few more ideas about how to use the space. This new livelihood should be preserved also after its functions as a workshop will be dismissed. Free University? A Café? Should it really become Vonovias´ new office? Or should it maybe stay a workshop, satisfying the inhabitants´ need to repair their homes? We think that the answer will reveal itself, maybe as a mixture of a lot of our ideas. A dialog between our proposals and those coming from the neighborhood. Transforming a “needing” in a “doing”, this could be the magical formula for a good start at the Oberhaus. And this one´s already done.