Inspiration

Insights, examples of best practice and experience reports from the funded institutions will be added here gradually. Please check back regularly!

Future Forums
21/05/2026

Marlene Troidl and Martin Zierold: Love Your Dilemmas! Leadership as the Art of Navigating Conflicting Goals

Inputs at the fourth Future Forum
What it means to embrace your own dilemmas as a core competency of effective cultural leadership, Troidl and Zierold explain in their inputs.
# Leadership
# Transformation
Future Forums
21/05/2026

Beat Fehlmann: Making Impact Visible – Why Culture Needs More Than Metrics

Keynote at the fourth Future Forum
In his keynote, Beat Fehlmann shows why transparency about impact is not an end in itself, but the foundation for genuine cultural policy dialogue.
# Impact
# Transformation
Future Forums
27/10/2025

Caroline Paulick-Thiel: Politics for Tomorrow

Keynote at the first Future Forum
How can institutions become more vibrant through change? And how might we develop a language that is grounded in scientific and planetary contexts, rather than viewing society through a dogmatic lens of innovation? Caroline Paulick-Thiel, Director of Politics for Tomorrow/nextlearning e. V., takes these questions as her starting point...
# Transformation
Future Forums
13/10/2025

Prof. Dr. Dirk Brockmann: Thinking Like a Fungus – How to Better Understand Complex Systems

Keynote at the first Future Forum
Professor Dirk Brockmann, Director of the Center Synergy of Systems at TU Dresden, takes the evolutionary success of fungi as the starting point for a conceptual approach. To him, “thinking like a fungus” means nothing less than communicating, building networks, and exploring despite blindness...
# Collaboration
# Transformation
Future Forums
27/10/2025

Aric Chen: From Ideas to Enactment – Cultural Institutions as Testing Grounds

Keynote at the first Future Forum
Aric Chen’s lecture is a compelling call for a culture of action. According to Chen, Director of the Zaha Hadid Foundation, museums must recognise themselves more clearly as agents of change – not least because, as publicly funded institutions, they already serve as “third places” with the potential to act as testing grounds or experimental spaces...
# Collaboration
# Transformation
Future Forums
27/10/2025

Katarzyna Wielga-Skolimowska: Welcome Speech

Welcome at the first Future Forum
In her welcome speech, Katarzyna Wielga-Skolimowska, Artistic Director of the Federal Cultural Foundation, invoked a quote from the economist and science theorist Otto Neurath to capture the current state of cultural institutions...
# Transformation