If you put your mind to it, pretty much anything can be converted into an art experience: basements become art galleries, factories become biennials, entire cities become art-world playgrounds. Adaptive reuse is all the rage, a postmodern urban balm that uses the power of art to resuscitate abandoned and irrelevant buildings and neighborhoods. "Kulturbahn" is such a project, a proposal to turn Spreepark Berlin, a forsaken amusement park built by the German Democratic Republic in 1969 and transferred to private hands after the Berlin wall fell, into a multimedia art playground.

Photographs of the site — located in in the city's Treptower Park — show a constellation of amusement park attractions abandoned after Spreepark closed for good in 2001. Defunct swing rides sway next to weed-choked spinning teacups and "Dinoworld," an overgrown field of colossal, graffitied dinosaur figures. Viewers can explore the current state of Spreepark through Kulturbahn's Web site, scrolling through a satellite view of the site with flags pinning down different park landmarks. The dreamlike landscape certainly looks like fertile ground for an artistic intervention.

Musement, the group behind the proposed plan, is an interdisciplinary crew composed of gallerist Anthony Spinello, writer Stephanie Sherman, performance-art researcher and artist George Scheer, and artists Chris Lineberry and Agustina Woodgate. The group's diverse composition reflects the scope of the project itself — to present "a new model for cultural amusement," according to a statement on its Web site. Kulturbahn will be a "platform for art creation and exhibition that responds, reflects, and transforms transformative sites," activating interest in Spreepark as a site of "universal imagination."

The organizers will select 10 Berlin-based artists and collectives for a two-week residency and creative camp within Spreepark, resulting in a temporary exhibition that examines the city's political history, the cultural memories of the park, and the future of art and entertainment. The projects created "will illuminate the park as a pre-existing art installation, rather than simply filling the site with works of art," Musement wrote to ARTINFO in a group email. Artists "will consider the land with everything in it, responding to what is there."

An open call for Kulturbahn proposals will begin September 1, seeking projects of any medium or format. Successful proposals will be chosen in November by Musement and an international panel of judges, with the winners to be announced in December.

Berlin is a particularly appropriate place for the Kulturbahn project, given the city's fraught relationship with its own past, omnipresent monuments, and legendarily art-friendly atmosphere. Artists have explored Berlin's ruins as public spaces, turning the entire city into a "site for critical intervention." The city is "a playground of layered histories that both preserve and transform," the group stated.

The plot to turn the park into art is still a work in progress. Musement writes that though virtual interaction has made their collaboration easier, it is when they can be within the space itself that ideas really come together. "It is when you are walking on the tracks, seeing the ferris wheel poking through the trees, sleeping next to the broken pirate ship, that everything seems to converge," the group wrote. "We miss it when we are not there, since we spend so much time working with it in our heads."

When it comes to fruition Kulturbahn will exist between those two spaces: the physical amusement park with its public artistic interventions, and the place's private mental space — a realm of plans, dreams, and memories.