© Andrea Kiesendahl
One last opening before the renovation: an exhibition that turned a participation process into something you could walk through, touch and drink coffee in.
The exhibition
How do you exhibit a participation process? The Supermarkt der Ideen is a former supermarket in Oberhausen’s old town centre that serves as an open workshop, repair café and lab for the city’s creative scene. Before its renovation, the space opened its doors one last time in its old state. The exhibition was not meant as a final presentation. It was the third of four phases of a participation process, a moment to make visible what had been discussed so far and to give it back to the people who had shaped it.
The exhibition was built around three tenses.
Past: A large-format timeline ran across the panels and told the story of the building and the projects it housed, from its time as a neighbourhood supermarket to its years as a laboratory for the city.
Present: Instead of clearing out the workshop, the exhibition made the working space itself the exhibit. Small labels, placed directly on objects in the room like product labels on a shelf, told the stories behind them:
a cabinet built from leftover material exactly to fit local needs
a heavy machine that requires professional instruction
a graffiti tag left over from the 2020 Schlingensief exhibition
sewing machines whose fine fabrics never got along with the sawdust
Each object pointed to a need the users had raised. The sewing machines, for example, will get a dust-free area in the renovated space.
Future: Panels documented the participation game held earlier that year and its results, alongside sketches for the future entrance and an outlook on the renovation. For the three days of the exhibition, a pop-up café previewed the co-working café the renovation will create, so visitors could try out its atmosphere as a 1:1 test before anything was built.
Graphic identity. The visual language drew on the building’s past as a supermarket: halftone textures, signal red and yellow, heavy type and repeated slogans borrowed from discount flyers and sale posters. It ran through the panels, the object labels and the social media campaign. A window foil, created together with Berlin artist Felix Egle, drew attention from the street to the space and its upcoming renovation. It stayed in place throughout the construction work, screening the building site and keeping the Supermarkt present in the street. The identity was loud, accessible and true to the place’s motto: “Mach doch!”
The Supermarkt
The building on the corner of Goebenstraße and Stöckmannstraße was built in 1960–61 as a combined shop and residential building, typical of its time in joining commerce with modern living. For decades it housed the Farfsing-Wefa supermarket, a local grocery whose roots go back to 1895, and later a Netto discount store. Like many shops in Oberhausen’s “Alte Mitte”, it was hit by structural change in retail, which accelerated after the CentrO shopping mall opened in 1996 and with the rise of online shopping. From 2016 the shop stood empty.
In 2018 it reopened as the Supermarkt der Ideen, first as an exhibition and event lab on the future of vacant retail spaces. In the years that followed it became a space of possibilities for the city: it hosted the Schlingensief exhibition, the c.lab, a material exchange for the cultural sector, an open workshop and a repair café, and since 2023 it has been the headquarters of Creative City Oberhausen.
The process
To meet the different needs of its users, the building is being renovated by architects Meier & Ebbers on behalf of the City of Oberhausen, coordinated by Fraunhofer UMSICHT. In parallel, the people who know the place best were involved in four phases:
Phase 1: Learning from others: Between February and May 2024, kitev hosted a series of public talks at the Supermarkt. Initiatives and practices from the region shared their experiences: the Bibliothek der Dinge in Bochum, the open workshop of die urbanisten in Dortmund, the open workshop of the B-Side, raumwerk architekten on building in existing structures and urban production, and the Ressourcerie of Atelier Automatique in Bochum. Their examples gave the users a shared starting point for thinking about the future of their own workshop.
Phase 2: Participation game: In June 2024, Dutch designer and urban planner Hans Venhuizen and Jan Körbes led “The Making Of…” with the Supermarkt team and its users. Small groups developed ideas, built models, presented and critiqued them and lobbied for votes. They proposed an entrance that opens up to the street with flexible workspaces and a green façade, a shelf running through the entire building, and a system of colours and symbols to label rooms, machines and materials. The labelling system won, but all four ideas fed into what came next.
Phase 3: Exhibition: Supermarkt der Ideen: ZUKUNFT
Phase 4: Designing the interior together: After the exhibition, I led a participation process that went deeper into the interior design and developed the furnishing of the renovated Supermarkt together with its users.
Photo: Andrea Kiesendahl