About us — Guerilla Architects

Guerilla Architects is a transdisciplinary collective of female artists based in Berlin. Founded in 2012 during a squat in London, we consciously navigate the tensions between critical urban research, artistic intervention, and activist action. We work with temporary appropriations, subversive strategies, and legal gray areas, which we use as effective levers for spatial justice.

Provoking urban development for the better!

Through performative and creative interventions, we question established processes of urban planning, asymmetrical property relations, and dominant spatial arrangements. We understand public space as the place where democracy is negotiated. With our artistic practice, we resist the ongoing capitalization of our cities.

Who owns the space? Who is missing—and why? Together with our accomplices, we create spaces where knowledge can be shared, perspectives negotiated, and mutual support made possible. Our aim is to question existing rules and power structures, reveal hidden stories, and create new approaches.

The city as a stage for resistance

Based on specific locations, the immediate surroundings always play a central role for us. We observe and analyze one square kilometer of the surrounding area as a tool for our artistic research. From this, we develop site-specific installations that expose productive disruptions through irritations, shift spaces, and initiate debates about their future. We design simulations and immersive spaces that break down existing hierarchies. To immerse ourselves in these realities, we use camouflage. It allows us to slip into different roles, experience the location up close, and become part of a place without dominating it. Camouflage is a safe space for experimentation.

Often, a minimally invasive intervention is enough to reveal the invisible and give neglected spaces new meaning. Our method begins where urban habits become fragile: we read empty spaces, activate interstitial spaces, and transform secondary locations into central stages. Our “we” remains deliberately ambivalent and discursive, a flexible structure that expands, contradicts, and reassembles itself. In this way, the city becomes a terrain of collective agency.

Team

Anja Fritz

Anja Fritz (she/her) studied architecture at the State Academy of Arts in Stuttgart and at the Berlin University of the Arts. Her artistic training shapes her understanding of architecture: in her work, she combines urban research, performance, and art to create experiential spaces and situations. As co-founder of the Guerilla Architects collective, she has been investigating since 2012 how bringing together different formats can generate added value in terms of content. She has been active in Berlin’s independent scene on a project basis, including as a stage design assistant for the artist group Zentrum für politische Schönheit at the Maxim Gorki Theater and as a project assistant at Raumlabor Berlin. Since October 2024, she has been volunteering as an architecture representative on the Commission for Art in Public Space Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg.

Silvia Gioberti

Silvia Gioberti (she/her) studied architecture at the Politecnico di Milano and the Berlin University of the Arts. She works freelance with international artists as an art producer. This work has strongly influenced her view of the different interpretations and value of the production of art (and space). Since 2022, she has been a research assistant at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Design at the Berlin University of the Arts. Her research and work with the collective focus on questioning socially established paradigms and reinterpreting them through design and unconventional use of (public) space.

Shahrzad Rahmani

Shahrzad Rahmani (she/her) studied architecture at KIT Karlsruhe and stage design and scenic space at TU Berlin. She is a freelance stage and costume designer and scenographer. In her artistic practice, she defines scenic spaces as social and political resonance spaces that create dynamic interactions through their performative and interdisciplinary orientation between stage, urban space, and installation. In 2023/24, she was Bertolt Brecht Visiting Professor at the University of Leipzig – Centre of Competence for Theatre (CCT). With her collective, she explores site-specific spatial concepts that shift perception and critically question social structures. She works in close collaboration with directors and choreographers in Germany and internationally.

Provoking urban development for the better!

The city as a stage for resistance

Team

Former Members

Accomplices

Sponsors and Commission­ers

Sponsors and Commissioners