When discussing normality, people often talk about what surrounds them: the usual, the familiar, the known. Organized workflows and procedures, their own room, their own family, their own flat in their own neighbourhood in their own city. But also offices, questionnaires, teachers checking homework and vocabulary tests, the German industry standard, the required standard size for laying batteries – they all belong to what constitutes our (German) normality. The harmless term normality conceals nothing less than the source code of our society. The entirety of what pervades our thoughts and deeds, an aura in which we move and which has become second skin to us. This is just why our view is blurred and what makes it hard to grasp this normality and to recognize it as a social and individual construction. Ultimately, our investigations were intended to help getting to know oneself and one's surroundings / reality better, if not at all.

20 Hungarian teenagers as well as four Hungarian artists were involved in the WINTERAKADEMIE 2. With this we widened the academy's horizon beyond Berlin and initiated an exchange of normality which was supposed to confront our own realities with more or less contrary, other realities. In the laboratories we wanted to find out something about the different experiences of children's and teenagers' daily lives in Berlin vs. the Hungarian cities. What do they tell of their normality? A home with both parents? Their own room? Computer games? Unemployment, long working hours coupled with a small income or the attendance of a private elite school? Fast food chains and fitness centres? Social housing? Garden gnomes? Working parents? Heterosexuality? Sewing your own trousers in order to save money?

The artistic examination of completely different aspects of normality was intended to sharpen an understanding for parallel living spheres and survival strategies. For that reason we made a point in offering the programme to participants of different social and cultural origin. Another focus was to question the mechanisms through which "normality" is constructed. Which normality is established by the parents? And which is created by the teens themselves? What about the ambivalence between a longing for normality and to break out of it?