A Festival That Chose Its Neighbours Over the Art World

Mid-September in Berlin means vernissage season: galleries opening autumn shows, collectors circling, and this year, three competing design weeks in London, Paris, and Zürich all vying for the same international attention. Into this crowded calendar stepped Currents, a new design festival that asked a question worth sitting with: who needs another design fair?

The answer, it turns out, depends entirely on who you're designing for.

The Principle Behind the Party

Currents, founded by journalists Jasmin Jouhar and Laura Ewert, made a deliberate choice. Rather than chasing international collectors or the jet-set crowd that hops between fairs, the festival catered to everyday Berliners. The furniture on show was contemporary and, crucially, fairly affordable. Sixty venues across the city opened their doors, and the experience of wandering between them became as much the point as the objects inside.

This is not a small distinction. Most design weeks operate on prestige logic: attract global buyers, generate press, hope the local scene benefits by proximity. Currents inverted the model. The audience was the city itself.

What Sofia Already Understands

In Sofia, specialty coffee roasters like Blue Bag have built a following by prioritising direct farm relationships and small-batch quality over international brand recognition. The principle is the same: serve the people who actually live here, and the culture follows.

The city's emerging maker scene faces a version of the question Currents answered. How do you build a design culture that serves residents, not just tourists or collectors? The growth of independent studios, craft workshops, and small-batch producers in neighbourhoods like Kapana in Plovdiv and the artisan clusters around Sofia's centre suggests the appetite exists. What's often missing is the infrastructure: the venues, the visibility, the sense that local making is worth celebrating on its own terms.

Currents offers a case study in what becomes possible when a city chooses accessibility over exclusivity.

The Venues Were the Gallery

Part of what made the festival work was its use of space. A motorcycle-themed bar operated inside the Eternithaus in Hansaviertel. Fourteen designers set up shop at Jalousiefabrik, an abandoned shutter factory in Kreuzberg that architects Bächlemeid and Taneli Mansikkamäki will soon convert into apartments. Disused warehouses filled with new design, some brilliant, some uneven in quality.

Berlin-based studio Gonzalez Haase AAS and Munich's Marbledworks presented modular marble side tables that could be stacked into shelves. Daftar made perforated steel versions of cake doilies and used them to serve tea and ice cream in a Kreuzberg carpet shop. Cutlery brand Mono launched a multi-tool by Universität der Künste student Oskar Poetsch: a French-fry fork, ice-cream spoon, and bottle opener that clips to a keychain.

None of these objects will change the history of design. That was never the point. The point was that exploring the city became the gallery, and the city's residents were the intended audience.

Curatorial Intention, Not Curatorial Gatekeeping

Even the architectural highlight of Berlin Art Week followed this logic. The Neue Nationalgalerie arranged a public peek into the still-incomplete Museum des 20 Jahrhunderts next door. The construction site's floor became the setting for screenings of Gordon Matta-Clark's 1970s films, in which the artist cut circles through apartment buildings and sliced suburban homes in half.

This was not a stunt for critics. It was a gesture toward the people who live in the city, an invitation to participate in a cultural moment rather than observe it from outside.

What This Reveals About Cities That Support Making

Berlin still has plenty of disused and unfinished spaces, and smart people finding uses for them. Few places are better for people who create, make, and build.

The lesson for Sofia is not imitation. It's recognition. Local design ecosystems thrive when cities invest in access, affordability, and community participation over prestige. The question is not whether Sofia has the makers. It does. The question is whether the infrastructure will follow: the venues, the visibility, the sense that what's made here is worth celebrating here.

Currents proved that a design festival can succeed by choosing its neighbours over the art world. That's a model worth remembering.