Fluid Interdisciplinarities served as a platform for knowledge exchange between science, art, and society. Running over three days, the program was structured as a two-day symposium with over 50 participants across Europe which flowed into the public events of a river film festival at the Humboldt Labor and the participatory program of the festival day “House of Rivers.” 

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The guiding questions of the symposium touched on the synergies and challenges of interdisciplinarity within artistic and academic projects focusing on waters and hydrosocial spaces. Partcipants shared how different disciplines or actors worked together in their research projects, and explored the relations between water bodies, humans and non-humans beings that were enacted.
These questions were at the core of two World Café sessions of the symposium, showcasing ten interdisciplinary projects. The insights of the tables were reflected in the “Sediment Sessions”, and harvested in the concluding plenary session, “Anatomy of a River”.

The design of the festival was co-created, co-curated and coordinated by Pauline Münch (ZfK / IRI THESys) and by artist Regina Hügli (One Body of Water). Regina brought in the inspiration of a “watery epistemology” and the drive of the metaphor of the “sponge”, offering an analogy between water flow and information processes. Soaking and filtering, learning and unlearning and the fluidity of memory were observed in personal reflection, embodiment prompts and conversation formats.

The event was further organized by Tobias Krüger, Rossella Alba and Matthias Zarama Giedion from the Integrative Research Institute on Transformations of Human-Environment Systems (IRI THESys) in cooperation with the IHE Delft Institute for Water Education, the University of Montpellier, the Knowledge Exchange with Society team and the TA T – Tieranatomisches Theater at the Centre for Cultural Techniques (ZfK). It was co-funded by the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung, alongside Open Science Ambassadors and TD-Labs from the Berlin University Alliance.​