The diamond as a light fixture above the entrance, the steel lattice doors for the night, the glass showcases for the jewelry, the large safe in the back room, including the extra-deep concrete floor that is supposed to prevent burglary - everything is still there.
For several generations, the town house in Offenbach's pedestrian zone served as a jewelry store for the Hunder family.
Now that the house has been sold and is awaiting renovation, Heiner Blum, professor at the Hochschule für Gestaltung (HfG), Jan Lotter and a team of 13 students in Offenbach want to temporarily transform the former shop into a new social space.
Into a museum for urban culture and a school for creative action.
Exhibitions with everyday views
Catherine Deschka
Editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.
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The “Diamant Offenbach”, as the project that has just opened is called, is showing art this autumn and winter in a series of exhibitions for two weeks each, which was particularly inspired by the view of everyday life and public space.
The first exhibition includes the photographs of the Viennese Xenia Lesniewski, who takes pictures of herself climbing over luxury limousines, with just that dash of cheekiness that is a pleasure to look at.
The Documenta artist Rene Wagner can also be seen with motorcycle helmets made of concrete and bright vases with car tuning pictures.
Inaara Mariel's street scenes, filmed at night with an infrared camera, are projected onto a video projector on the back wall of the backyard.
Sonja Rychkova drew friends from a prefabricated housing estate.
And by Anica Seidel from Berlin you can see a dress with sequins made from shooting range targets, a wind chime with baseball bats and pictures scratched by ice skates.
In the former attic apartment, with its traces of previous residents, the exhibits are even more unsettling.
So it is a special experience to discover the art in the house that was built in 1875 and renovated in the 1970s.
They would have left everything as they found it, reports Heiner Blum, who teaches experimental room concepts at the HfG and has already used a number of abandoned buildings.
Two floors of shops with their showcases for cutlery, drawers for jewelry, a workshop for watches and two apartments can now be explored in the "Diamant".
There will also be a bar on the lower floors from Thursday to Sunday afternoons to evenings, a meeting point for talking and getting to know each other.
Social place for everyone
Because the "Diamond" as a social place is intended for everyone, open to everyone, and should also attract random passers-by.
Blum, who has already developed formats such as the “Schmalclub” and “xqm” with Jakob Sturm in Frankfurt to get people talking to each other in art events, has observed that “low-threshold participation” and encounters with people are again very important to students today .
In the "Diamant" visitors can experience that their art without curators, their texts without publishers are given attention in a presentation.
In a public gallery, they can put their works in snap frames installed there, and deposit unpublished texts in a public library.
The "Diamant" team is also interested in what Offenbach's residents have hanging on their walls at home.
When visiting, they want to get Offenbacher to exhibit their paintings in their museum.
In the Wall Paper Gallery in the stairwell, photographs are also used to refer to the long-standing idea that art can be made anywhere and by anyone, as in "Fashion Moda", the art space founded by Stefan Eins in 1978 in the South Bronx in New York .
Or at the workshops of the teacher Tim Rollins, who worked with endangered young people, the “kids of survival”, in New York in the 1980s and saw art as an antidote to social decline.
Children teach teachers
Working with children and young people is also an essential part of the concept of a place “of learning and action” in the “Diamant”.
On weekdays, the place becomes a "diamond school" with interdisciplinary workshops for children, young people and school classes.
To this end, "Diamant" works together with the Offenbacher Rudolf-Koch-Gymnasium as part of the "Profile Schools Cultural Education Hesse" program.
Jan Lotter, who had already worked as an artist with students in the Crespo Foundation's "Flying Artists' Room", created a timetable for students in the 5th to 13th grades with HfG students.
Everyday street art is to be conveyed, such as collecting street sounds.
This shows children and young people that “things are different here,” says Lotter.
It is planned that teachers would also be taught by their students.
■ Diamant Offenbach, Frankfurter Straße 8, opening hours Thursday 5pm to 10pm, Friday 5pm to midnight, Saturday 4pm to midnight, Sunday 3pm to 8pm. Information on Instagram at diamant.offenbach.