Lucas Rehnman on Brave Berlin
“In the future, it appears there won’t be financial support for art projects but only for war products”
Marcel Schwittlick has started a new project called Brave Berlin, an artistic reaction to the massive shift in public spending toward defense and away from culture. It takes as its source of
inspiration a defense-tech initiative called Brave1, established by six Ukrainian state institutions to connect startups, defense companies, investors, military users, and government
institutions involved in the development and deployment of military technologies – as well as upcoming Brave Germany, a German-Ukrainian defense-tech program built in partnership with
Ukraine’s Brave1. Incidentally, in May 2026, Germany has projected to spend around €180 billion per year on defense by 2030.
The Brave1 Market website features an online catalogue where suppliers offer their products and military units can browse it, select equipment, contact the manufacturer, and place an order,
much like buying on Amazon – a comparison made by Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine's Minister of Digital Transformation itself.
Brave Berlin unfolds in various directions. At SP2, Schwittlick exhibited colorful, plotter-drawn grenades taken from original DEFCAD blueprints; and, being fully inspired by Brave1 Market,
created and displayed an online marketplace, where one can browse and buy a number of different items, including bionic drones mimicking bees, butterflies, dragonflies and ants, which use
solar energy as power source. Besides selling these items and the plotter-drawn blueprints, he intends to invite other artists to contribute, asking them to develop original art proposals
that sneakily can be read as warfare technology.
As has been said, the project began with the artist’s own bewilderment at the current financial scarcity imposed on the cultural sector, in stark contrast to the abundance of investment in
“defense”. Art has always followed the money, and defense appears now as a hot word capable of raising billions, especially after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Given the huge amount of money now being allocated to defense, how do the arts relate to this? What role can art play in these specific circumstances? Should artists ignore it? Should they
fight it? Should they engage with it? How can visual artists deal with this uncomfortable question?
In the future, it appears there won’t be financial support for art projects but only for war products. Fashion designers will develop new camouflage uniforms, painters will paint heroic
depictions of the most recent war victories (and crimes) and sell them to the warlords; and so on.
The topic of war in the 21st century was most accurately investigated in Achille Mbembe’s famous essay Necropolitics. Going beyond Michel Foucault’s term “biopolitics”, the
Cameroonian philosopher proposes the concept of necropolitics, a new logic of our times in which the highest power resides in dictating the conditions of who gets to live and who should be
left to die. The same essay also suggests that the Israel-Palestine conflict is a paradigm for new forms of arbitrary power and necropolitical management. The Russia-Ukraine war has become a
war of attrition, just like the Israel-Palestine conflict as analyzed by Mbembe. Only the very powerful profit from these bloody endeavours, carefully crafted to occur without questioning, as
a natural, unavoidable event – and innocent civilians who never wanted war are forced to pay the price.
“Who may live and who must die” – normalizing weapons’ marketplaces adds to the tragedy of necropolitics. The most powerful behind the decision-making of these new dystopian realities are
the ones deciding, imposing necropolitics, profiting from death and shielding themselves from chaos and war.
Schwittlick’s project takes a humorous and ironic approach to these matters, aiming at raising civilians’ consciousness through the power of art to question our present world.
One’s got to laugh, or one will cry.
Lucas Rehnman, 2026
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Brave Berlin