Lisa Clemen (b. 1989) is a freelance designer who moves playfully between different disciplines, much like a walking multi-tool. Whether it’s stage sets for events, clear concepts and implementations in interior design for restaurants and holiday residences, set design or the creation of communal spaces – every project redefines the format.
Clemen grew up in Hamburg and studied communication design at Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design Halle until 2014. She also spent a semester each at the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig studying painting and at Hanover University of Applied Sciences and Arts studying scenography. Armed with this creative foundation, she has been working as a freelancer on the design of immersive spatial concepts for almost seven years.
Through her many years of experience with a wide variety of no-budget projects, she has become a master of improvisation. She skilfully reimagines used materials, develops clear colour schemes and meticulously curates details. The cornerstones of her design philosophy lie in an uncompromising aesthetic to shape a sensitive, discerning eye for visual language. Furnishing her spaces with high-quality and inviting materials embodies a departure from pure functionality and places the aesthetic experience above the often defensive German pragmatism.
A drab industrial hall transforms its social meaning the moment it is imbued with huge chandeliers, velvety materials, warm lighting or improvised seating arrangements. The space’s original function loses its clarity. For a brief moment, people no longer know which rules apply, how they should behave, or what role they play within the space. A small carnival emerges – a reversal of the familiar. It is precisely in this disorientation that social leeway arises. Lisa Clemen creates temporary counter-realities in which otherness is both daring and deliberate, and where hierarchies and forms of coming together can be renegotiated.
In doing so, she works not only with the adaptation and continuation of existing systems, but also with ruptures, renamings and decontextualisations. Humour and profundity communicate directly through spaces – for instance, in the abundance at the end of the dizzying underworld of the Casino Hangar at the Fusion Festival, or in the interior design of the forester’s lodge in the Brandenburg punk project Alte Hölle, whose thematic worlds extend far beyond the borders of Brandenburg and the intellectual horizons of former Stasi headquarters.
In event and exhibition design, Lisa Clemen repeatedly finds endless scope for fantastic ideas. In recent years, she has developed various interactive experience spaces for the Chaos Computer Congress in Hamburg and Leipzig, including the Kinderstadt (2018), a walk-in mini-city featuring a cinema, disco, café, bookshop and hospital – a playful reflection of social structures and social roles. In the Wolkenschloss (2023), she combined stage design, a lounge and an interactive haunted house into an overall experience that was a cross between a retreat and a fantasy space.
Commissions from Hanseatische Materialverwaltung in the field of stage and venue design are just as much a long-standing tradition in her work as her involvement in Alexander Schubert’s performance Virtual Genesis at the Elbphilharmonie Music Festival 2020, where Clemen played a key role in set design and staging.
For the 2026 Beethovefest Bonn, she is designing and constructing the Festival Salon, which will be located in the exhibition space of the Beethovenhalle.