In 2010, the artist Stefanie Klingemann began publishing a series of interviews with fellow artists working in and around the Rhineland — conversations that went beyond the usual press-release tone of the art world and tried to capture how creative people actually think and talk when they are not performing for a gallery audience. She called the project MOFF, and for over a decade it appeared as a print magazine under the subtitle KünstlerInnen im Gespräch — Szene Rheinland. Twenty issues were published between 2010 and 2021, with the twentieth presented at Art Cologne.
But MOFF was never just a magazine. In 2012, Klingemann and six fellow artists founded MOFF e.V., a registered association for the promotion of contemporary art projects. The collective has since realised numerous exhibitions and interventions with a focus on art in public space, art in rural areas, and mobile art projects — work that takes art out of the gallery and into the landscapes and communities where it can create unexpected encounters. Since 2023, MOFF e.V. has had a permanent base in a former transformer station in Satzvey, a small village in the Eifel region west of Cologne.
The trajectory is unusual and instructive: a publishing project that grew into a collective, then into an association, then into a physical space — each step expanding what began as a series of printed conversations into a living infrastructure for contemporary art in a part of Germany that the international art world rarely notices. MOFF is proof that the most interesting things happen when artists stop waiting for institutions to support them and build the structures themselves.
<a href="https://moff-magazin.de/">Visit MOFF