Shuttling back and forth between refugee camps and Western society, Kerber spent years grappling with the question of what one really needs to live and what makes one happy. On the one hand, he spoke with people who had a lot but were still unhappy; on the other, he spoke with people who had lost everything but still invited him into their tents and showed him great hospitality. These conversations shed new light on the question of what wealth means. “For myself, I found that inner wealth comes precisely from being meaningfully active,” he explained in an interview with the magazine Original.

He was influenced by figures such as Joseph Beuys, who used unconventional artistic methods to radically advocate social change. He was also inspired by the multi-talented Buckminster Fuller, who worked as an architect, designer, philosopher and writer, among other things, and saw his life as an experiment – he wanted to find out what an individual could contribute to changing the world for the benefit of humanity.

Daniel Kerber has retained his creative approach. From his perspective, the various forms of intercultural work have not distanced him from what once motivated him to investigate informal architecture in slums and refugee camps. “Even though it’s not about big international exhibitions now, the mindset or way of working is exactly the same. I just changed the impact context,” Kerber explained in another interview with Original. His activities, whether in distant places, in a Berlin neighborhood or whether in strategizing, can certainly be seen as a kind of “Gesamtkunstwerk” (synthesis of the arts).