Party of the Panke
Flowing Encounters & Collective Explorations
Over the course of the session, visitors moved between different stations, engaging with artistic interventions, performances, and interactive installations. This format gave the event its most festival-like character, as people wandered, explored, and discovered. Participants were invited to experiment and engage with the river Panke, flowing just meters from the event location, and could choose three sessions, both indoors and outdoors, gaining insights and perspectives on the rights of rivers.
© Pauline Müench
Panke Archives
The history of the Panke is entwined with the legacy of human impact and control. Centuries ago, the river was straightened and redirected partly to water royal gardens, now the Panke is slowly becoming renatured, albeit partly to help German federal ministries obtain official sustainability measures. Maps retrieved from various archives highlight these changes over time, but several unanswered questions remain—a particular bend in the river might have been left intact—for and by whom? The flow of water which is influenced by a human operator—why does this happen? Social hydrologist Tobias Krüger presented this collaborative research and open the floor to further exchanges.
City of Living Beings – Water Tour
This guided walk and live performance dived into Berlin’s watery underworlds — tracing the life rhythms that move through porous boundaries of soil, infrastructure, and memory. Between the city’s forgotten swamps and the flow of its rivers and pipes, nonhuman voices recalled the deep-time entanglements between ecology, urbanization, and survival. Featuring: Eel, Swamp Nettle, Groundwater Bacterium (Hydrogenophaga), Ancient Ringed Worm, Zebra Mussel, Cholera Bacterium, Zebrafish, and Mosquito. Part of City of Living Beings, a 32-episode Berlin audioguide that retells the city’s history through the perspectives of plants, animals, fungi, and microorganisms. A project by artist collective Club Real (Paz Ponce, Georg Reinhardt, Marianna Sonneck, Mathias Lenz). Club Real has been creating site-specific projects since 2000. Their installations, political multispecies formats, and participatory urban development projects invite audiences to co-create alternative realities. Organismendemokratie e.V., in cooperation with Ballhaus Ost. Supported by the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion (Funding Program for Contemporary History and Culture of Remembrance).
Dear River
A collaboration between researchers from the University of Montpellier and Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, the participatory station invited visitors to leave written or drawn messages with rivers across the world. It presented The Water Drops: Letters from Rivers to Rivers, a booklet created by researcher-artists in which French and Swiss rivers exchange fictional letters about their health, emotions, and relationships with humans. These letters highlighted how everyday, emotional, and spiritual ties to rivers are often silenced by the technical and economic frameworks of public policy. Visitors were invited to browse the booklets, explore enlarged prints, and reflect how humans relate to rivers.
Moveshop "Be River, My Friend"
This movement-based workshop invited participants to explore their fluid interdisciplinarities through choreographic and somatic practices. Organized by the Knowledge Exchange with Society team at the Centre for Cultural Techniques (ZfK) and artist Irina Demina (Scarbod. Lab), the session used sensory observation, kinesthetic imagination, and guided movement improvisation to connect with the waters that move around and through us — both literally and metaphorically. They tuned into the liquid architecture of our bodies as a way to engage with interdisciplinary thinking and embodied togetherness.
© Irina Demina
Barghusen - Music performance
Composer Thorsten Wilrodt called his working method "horizontal writing". It was perfectly suited to setting the project about the River Este to music. Like currents in a river, strands of melody flow along the timeline, encountering each other as if by chance, reinforcing and complementing each other, playfully losing each other again, and coming together in the unknown to form something new. As in previous works, Wilrodt approached his theme through people and places. BARGHUSEN was not only the title, but also the hero of this work. The two met and exchanged ideas in his construction trailer on the riverbank overlooking the Este: about life on the river, working in shipyards, and the special history of this place by the water. Wilrodt then visited a number of important places to consciously trace their sound and made audio recordings of them, while at the same time always searching for silence. Inspired by this, he composed his piece with a view of the Este, which he can see through the windows of the old house where he lives. He recorded the music live with trumpets, trombone, tuba, bass, drums, and other instruments, incorporating his own sound recordings. "Everything flows together. That's part of the concept," says Wilrodt, who is a composer, theater maker, and musician; his main instrument is the trumpet.
© Simon Brunel
Hydrofeminist Mapping
The book Troubled! Architecture of Ruinous Landscapes is an artistic research project by Barbara Herschel together with her collective Space for Relational Research on various ruinous landscapes in Berlin-Brandenburg. One of these landscapes was the River Panke, which is currently being renaturalised. Barbara engaged with this contaminated body of water by carrying out a hydrofeminist mapping of its watery entanglements. Rather than reducing the river’s renaturalisation to the reshaping of its course, Barbara proposes the practice of re-ecologising—an act of nurturing the river’s relations stretching far beyond its banks. The hydrofeminist mapping traced a multitude of bodies, spaces, and relations interconnected through the river’s waters: infrastructural pipes, soils, human and more-than-human bodies, houses, and sewage systems. Who, or what else, belongs to the watery body of the River Panke? In dialogue with this textile mapping, participants were invited to join a poetic and collective act of relating. Together, we traced further spaces, bodies, and relations of water–expanding the hydrofeminist mapping of the River Panke to even more distant worlds. In doing so, we created a collective, imaginary, and relational body that leaks, absorbs, and changes.
Infrastructure Rhythms
Through performative interviews, abraso colectivo from Colombia, German artists, and international scientists of IRI THESys invited a continuous reflection on rivers and sediments. Over the past months, this temporary, transient and transdisciplinary collective has navigated between the Magdelena and Spree rivers. Across countries, languages, and disciplines, through movement, film, and sound, questioning where these rivers flow, where they spring and end. Remapping riverscapes of Europe and Latin America, this interactive action aimed to (dis)orient the audience while collecting fragments of bodies of water and their imaginaries. We aimed to further unsettle, re-scale and re-navigate our understandings of these rivers.
Speakers Bio
Abraso Colectivo
Abraso is an artistic collective formed by Camilo Londoño Hernández and Juan Pablo Gavira Bedoya, two Colombian artists living in Germany. Since 2022, we have founded the Mobile Center for Intratropical Artistic Research and Affective Practices as a way to study the movements, commotions, relations, tensions, and fictions between the Global South, where we come from, and the Global North, where we reside (temporarily). From here (and there), we aim to highlight the crisis points between the center and geopolitical peripheries, exploring relations of scale in dialogue with various disciplines.
Barbara Herschel
Dr. Friederike Landau-Donnelly (*1989, she/they) is an intersectional political theorist, urban sociologist and cultural geographer. She is a visiting professor for Social and Cultural Geography at Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany. She is current working on a monograph on conflictual museums in Canada and India. Friederike writes on artistic and affective activism, spatial theory, art in public space (especially murals) and contested cultural policy. Friederike has co-edited Handbuch Kulturpolitik (Handbook of Cultural Policy, Springer, 2024), Konfliktuelle Kulturpolitik (Conflictual Cultural Policy, Springer, 2023), [Un]Grounding – Post-Foundational Geographies (transcript, 2021). Friederike produces zines and publishes poetry as #PoeticAcademic: https://friederikelandau.com/poeticacademic/
Club Real
Timothy Moss is a Senior Researcher at the Integrative Research Institute on Transformations of Human-Environment Systems (IRI THESys) at the Humboldt University of Berlin and Honorary Professor at the Leibniz University Hannover. For 30 years he has been researching urban energy and water systems from historical and social science perspectives. Tim's research is distinctive for connecting historical studies of infrastructure with contemporary debates on sociotechnical and urban transitions.
Irina Demina
Irina Demina is a choreographer and artistic researcher. She studied philology and earned a master's degree in choreography at the Hochschulübergreifendes Zentrum Tanz Berlin (HZT). Since 2012, she has been developing international choreographic projects, collaborating with renowned artists, and her work has been acknowledged with distinctions such as the Pina Bausch Fellowship and an award at the competition "The Best German Dance Solo". Her practice spans performances, teaching, workshops, and dynamic transdisciplinary formats.
Thorsten Wilrdot
Thorsten Wilrodt is a composer, theatre maker, and multi-instrumentalist, the trumpet being his main instrument. He was and is active in jazz, hip hop and contemporary music. He was employed at the Thalia Theater Hamburg as an actor, singer, and trumpeter and has run several bands on his own. In yoga, which has become his second professional home, he also gives special interest to the world as sound. Today, he runs a yoga studio in the Altes Land region near Hamburg and works as a theater and musical theater educator. He is a founding member of the artist collective FLUNST.
Tobias Krüger
Tobias Krüger is Director of IRI THESys and Professor of Hydrology and Society at Humboldt-Universität´s Geography Department. His interdisciplinary research is at the intersection of hydrology and critical social science. Recent projects tackle the changing water cycle in the Berlin-Brandenburg region, inequalities around hydropower dams in the Magdalena and Sinú basins in Colombia and decision-support modelling for water governance in North-East India. All of his projects involve some level of public or stakeholder participation, outreach or connection with art-based formats.