Mohammed Abdallah
Head of Projects & Financial Oversight
organization and team
Spore Initiative is a foundation registered in Germany since 2020. The foundation directly and exclusively pursues non-profit purposes related to the arts and culture. It is active predominantly in programming and co-productions both in Berlin and abroad, and its philanthropic work is based on collaborative processes. Spore’s institutional anchor is in Berlin-Neukölln, in a building conceived by AFF Architekten. Spore is founded and funded by Hans Schöpflin, a philanthropist and entrepreneur.
He laid the foundations for his philanthropic activities focused on contributing to the building of a more just and sustainable world with the establishment of the Panta Rhea Foundation in the United States in 1998, making his first mark as a risk-taking and innovative funder by supporting a successful campaign that fought the privatization of an aquifer in the Mojave Desert. In 2001 he founded the Schöpflin Stiftung in Germany, committed to raising critical awareness and the strengthening of a vibrant democracy and diverse society.
The annual funding of Spore Initiative stems solely from the entrepreneurial activities of the Initiatives founder Hans Schöpflin (born in 1941), which he began in the mid-1970s in the USA.
Having grown up in post-war Germany, Hans Schöpflin did not experience the period of National Socialism in Germany himself. In order to gain insight into the activities of the former family business "Versandhaus Schöpflin" (sold in 1967), particularly during the Second World War, he and his siblings decided in spring 2023 to commission an independent scientific research into the company's history, with a particular focus on the period of Nazi rule. The research is being conducted by the Frankfurt-based Gesellschaft für Unternehmensgeschichte (Society for Corporate History). Initial results are expected to be made available by mid-2024. The completed report will subsequently be published in its entirety.
Hans Schöpflin founded Spore together with Osvaldo Sanchez. The Advisory Board of Spore comprises Hans Schöpflin and, his daughter, Dr. Lisl Schöpflin, a historian and philanthropist. She leads the Panta Rhea Foundation as President and Co-Chair and serves as board member of the Schöpflin Stiftung, Solidaire Network in the USA, and Casa Gallina in Mexico. Her research and writing focus on Indigenous history, cultural translation, and social memory particularly in the Andes during the colonial period. The Advisory Board of Spore advises, supports and monitors the Executive Board as it pursues the Foundation’s stated mission. We are actively working to expand board membership to include community multipliers, cultural practitioners, and other relevant actors.
Spore’s Executive Board consists of Hans Schöpflin and Antonia Alampi, the initiative’s founding director.
Spore's team comes from different disciplines and locations and holds varied knowledges and mother-tongues. Below, you can read about each member.
Berlin, August 2023
Mohammed leads, oversees and manages the coordination of all programs and projects in Berlin and in the Global South. He oversees the executive unfolding of projects in various sites and creates and maintains structures and processes for workflows. Additionally, Mohammed performs financial oversight and is responsible for the budgeting, tracking, and reporting on the finances of all projects. For the past fifteen years, he has managed, advised, and upheld not-for-profit institutional cultural structures in the Arabic speaking world and in Europe.
Antonia Alampi
Artistic & Executive Director
Antonia Alampi is the founding artistic director of Spore Initiative. Her professional practice as a cultural organizer, curator, and director, has been defined by working collaboratively with artists and professionals from different fields and backgrounds, and within rather small-scale, socially sensitive, politically engaged, and structurally vulnerable organizations. She has been the artistic co-director of SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin (2016–20); in the curatorial team of sonsbeek20➜24; curator of Extra-City Kunsthal, Antwerp (2017–19); and curator of Beirut, Cairo (2012–15), among other things that go further back in time. Within and outside of institutions, she has curated or been involved in many types of cultural and artistic projects, researches, movements, publications, and actions pursuing social, political, and environmental justice. She occasionally teaches, writes essays, edits books and talks in public. She is the mother of two girls who very much influenced her professional life.
João Eduardo Albertini
Pedagogue & Educator
João develops and implements learning programs with a particular focus on multi-generational education and pedagogy. He develops and facilitates Spore's cultural programs contributing his extensive pedagogical experience to the many levels of the organization. Particularly in Berlin, he creates playful and accessible entry points for participants and activates the exchange between many different people and groups. João qualified as a primary school teacher and actor in his home country of Brazil. Since 1998 he has been working in Berlin at the intersection of social work, art and education. Among other things, he has been pedagogical director and theater pedagogue at the Labyrinth Kindermuseum Berlin and educational consultant for extracurricular and political youth education at the Jugendbildungsstätte Kaubstraße. Key methods of his work are the "Theater of the Oppressed" and diversity-conscious pedagogy.
Mariangela Beccoi
Host
At Spore, Mariangela is part of the hosting team, active in welcoming and facilitating the communication of the program to visitors, fostering exchanges, and harvesting feedbacks. In the library, she supports the process of making the collection more accessible. As designer and researcher, she explores the intersection of environmental justice and the politics of the Right to Breathe. In Berlin, she has worked as a curatorial assistant and is currently a PhD candidate in Artistic Research at HfK Bremen.
Felicitas Borgstede
Accounting & Office Management
Felicitas is responsible for the accounting of Spore. She is also responsible for the office management and maintenance of the office and she handles many day-to-day responsibilities of care. She is an artist and holds a degree in graphic design and she is a certified accountant. Previously she worked as creative director, designer, and account manager for advertising, PR, design and production agencies.
Marco Clausen
Community Facilitator - Ecological Practices
As part of the Spore team, Marco develops and implements learning programs using community-based collective knowledges and everyday practices to engage in agroecology, seed and food sovereignty, and the protection and defense of water, forests, soil, and the web of life. This includes learning activities, in the Spore garden. He previously cofounded the Prinzessinnengarten and the Nachbarschaftsakademie in Berlin-Kreuzberg, where he organized programs on topics such as urban-rural relations, food sovereignty, and social-ecological justice. Marco grew up in a family of farmers, gastronomes, and millers in the countryside, and studied history.
Cátia Patricia de Almeida Santos
Host
Is a performer in the field of physical theater and circus, also facilitates socio-educational projects as artistic pedagogue. In Spore welcomes visitors with a smile, showing them around the house and clarifying any doubts and curiosities.
Doris Kleemeyer
Head of Administration
Doris is responsible for finances and human resources. She holds a diploma in cultural pedagogy, and previously provided administrative support for SMart eG, a cooperative of freelancers, and an association of counselling centers for victims of right-wing violence. She sees administrative infrastructures as enablers of programs and works on keeping them aligned with everything else happening.
Simon Krosigk
Head of Production
Simon is the link between curation, design and executive craftsmanship, together with whom he produces the exhibitions and transforms the imagined into reality. In doing so, he prefers to work with the material itself, but often simply ensures that everything finds the right place and that those involved along the way have all the information necessary. Before joining Spore, Simon worked on various exhibition productions in Berlin and realized various projects as a freelancer or volunteer. These include, the collaborative construction of a collective housing project, diverse activities in the craft sphere, but also in Berlin’s literature scene. He has a special connection to Mexico, where he returns again and again for friends, studies and human rights work.
Sarah Zilan Kößler
Events Coordinator - Hosted Events
Sarah Zilan Kößler coordinates hosted external events at Spore, and assists with community outreach. An Amed-born youth psychotherapist, refugees counsellor, and children’s book author, Zilan works as a bridge builder between Europe and the democratic women’s self-administration structures in North and East Syria (Rojava). Her mission is to help the next generation grow up resilient and courageous in a world characterized by uncertainty.
Mariela Nagle
Community Facilitator & Curator
Mariela facilitates and coordinates community programs, and publications particularly when related to educational tools that are multi-generational. She also cares for Spore’s library, in both acquisitions and programs. As a curator of alternative educational and publishing projects that focus on inclusion and intercultural understanding, Mariela has worked with books and other narrative formats to connect people from different backgrounds to build up new relationships. She founded the bookstore Mundo Azul in Berlin, which is specialized on international children’s literature, mostly from small publishing houses from all over the world.
Serkan Sabanuc
Caretaker
Serkan is a caretaker of the house of Spore in Berlin. His tasks include the maintenance of its premises and the technical care for its various uses. He supports in creating a welcoming atmosphere for all users of the building, such as guests, visitors, participants, and team members. Serkan´s parents were born in Turkey, and he has lived in Berlin-Neukölln his whole life. Here, he treasures his friends and local community and works as a youth trainer for Martial Arts. He is also a certified Plant Mechanic for HVAC and Sanitary Engineering.
Lotta Schäfer
Community Facilitator & Curator
Lotta co-develops, facilitates, and curates in close collaboration with partners in Berlin and abroad, new commissions, cultural tools, and multidisciplinary exhibitions that are all closely entangled with public and educational programs of Spore. Before coming to Spore, Lotta was the head of the international residency program at ZK/U–Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik in Berlin and produced a variety of cultural and educational programs at Beirut, an art initiative and exhibition space in Cairo.
Kathrin Scharf
Host
At Spore Kathrin is part of the hosting team, takes care of visitors and hopes to enable guests to take inspiration home and happily come back. She works with intuitive systemic constellations. The garden is her learning space in understand how plants play an important role in healing processes. Kathrin strives to live in connection with the earth.
Marvin Systermans
Communication and Graphic Design
Marvin is working on Spore's website and social media channels and is an in-house graphic and communication designer, supporting the team in visual matters. He also works as a photographer and artist on freelance projects exploring the human relationship with our environment. Marvin has been working with the Spore Initiative on a freelance basis since 2022 and has been a permanent member of the team since 2024.
Tanzim Wahab
Community Facilitator & Curator
At Spore, Tanzim initiates and implements new collaborative and multi-disciplinay commissions and exhibitions. He co-develops programs, visual displays and narratives and facilitates situations that encourage relationships and generate inter-cultural dialogues. His curatorial interests revolve around the sensory entanglement of exhibition spaces in the making of different experiences, and art education. He also writes and edits art journals and anthologies on South Asian art and lens-based media. Tanzim curated five editions of Chobi Mela, an international festival of photography in Dhaka.
Magdalena Wiener
Community Facilitator & Curator
At Spore, Magdalena co-develops, facilitates, and curates in close collaboration with partners abroad and in Berlin, new commissions, cultural tools, and multidisciplinary exhibitions that are all closely entangled with the public and educational programs of Spore. Before joining Spore, she worked for several years as curator and project manager, most recently at the Goethe-Institut Mexiko, and at the Research Center for Material Culture Leiden in the Netherlands. Her practice is informed by working together with artists, communities and institutions from different cultures and contexts, understanding it foremost as possibility for building relationships, and creating spaces for encounter and empathy, for conversation, and collective learning.
Aline Winchester
Community Facilitator – Head of Communications
Aline is in charge of defining communication approaches and implementing strategies with external collaborators, partners and communities of reference. To nurture relationships and facilitate unlikely encounters, she also works on audience building and outreach to communities of interest, including curating and facilitating programs and activations. Before joining the team, Aline worked as a project coordinator for FABRIC at the Schöpflin Stiftung, where she anchored the participatory bottom-up urban planning process within the neighborhood, as well as codeveloped tools and learning experiences. As a cultural worker she has supported initiatives and associations in conceptualizing, communicating, and fundraising.
Marina Witt
Host
Is a Brazilian interdisciplinary visual artist, primarily focused on sculptures, installations, and performances. Her work investigates the concepts of the body and its territorialities. While her techniques vary depending on the project, she has a particular affinity for working with clay and textiles. As a host at Spore, she is welcoming and introduces visitors to the values and work of the institution. She enjoys exchanging knowledge about creating a better and more sustainable future, discussing the concepts behind the exhibitions, and engaging with the children who visit the space through play and interaction.