the applied storytelling society
A lab for applied storytelling in Berlin – for journalists, publishers and media makers who develop new formats.
Now
Unbroken Witness
A project on media freedom and democracy – as a book, a documentary series and an interview series.
Unbroken Witness began as the Media Futures Residency during Berlin Freedom Week 2025: twelve European journalists, filmmakers and activists spent nine days in Berlin – between the World Liberty Congress, the Berlin Freedom Conference and closed workshops on editorial independence, digital security and documentary storytelling, with partners including taz, Publix and Tactical Tech.
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Book
Walls Fall
Its QR codes lead to the interviews recorded at the World Liberty Congress 2025 in Berlin.
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Film
Documentary series
Episodes on YouTube. In production.
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Interviews
World Liberty Congress 2025
First-hand accounts from people who stand up to authoritarian rule.
- Cover
- Volker Bartsch
- Edited by
- Berlin WorX
- Published by
- Mentor Verlag
Supported by
About
Formats where culture does real work.
Our formats
- Film & YouTube
- Books
- Stage
- Spaces
We connect what too often works in isolation: newsrooms, independents, collectives. And we build formats. Some are born at tass; others arrive with the people who run them and leave stronger than they came.
What connects our work is a method rather than a subject: read a situation closely, find the story inside it, and use that story to move something – in the media and in the city alike.
Selected formats
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Communal Spaces in Transformation
Belgrade · Thessaloniki · 2026
With Berlin WorX: storytelling as a planning tool for spaces in transition.
Belgrade
For six days, students and practitioners from Berlin, Belgrade and Thessaloniki mapped a former brewery in Dorćol – spatially, socially and economically – and sketched first scenarios for its future as a cultural quarter. With Technische Universität Berlin.
Thessaloniki
Near Thessaloniki, young people from Germany, Serbia and Greece develop community projects for art and culture venues and write a manifesto for spaces open to them. Part of a Berlin–Thessaloniki programme with the Berloniki Labs, pop-up performances by the Berlin Ballet Company and the 1st Thessaloniki LWI Composition Masterclass for Film Music.
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Books
Walls Fall · Reflektionen · Reklame
Together with Mentor Verlag at Holzmarkt.
Walls Fall
Cover by Volker Bartsch, edited by Berlin WorX.
Reflektionen
From 2012, the sculptor Volker Bartsch worked at Kater Holzig and later in an S-Bahn arch next to Holzmarkt: paintings, prints and a new relief printing process, made between upheaval and new beginnings. Dedicated to everyone who made Bar25, Kater Holzig and Holzmarkt unique, colourful, creative places.
Reklame
The posters of Manekineko alias Steffen Schöler for the clubs on the Spree – from Bar25 to Kater Holzig to Holzmarkt – collected for the first time on the tenth anniversary of the Holzmarkt cooperatives. An archive of Berlin club culture: dadaist, often trashy, never too serious.
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Stage
With the Berlin Ballet Company
Glamour & Resistance
A performance around Marlene Dietrich: dance, film, voice and archive material.
A Techno Ballet Odyssey
A ballet danced in the middle of a club night, to a techno score performed live.
Nutcracker
The Nutcracker in a 1920s cinema: at midnight the dancers step out of the screen and dance live in the auditorium.
Contact