Friday 12th and Saturday 13th of July 2024

How can we shape the future of the planet out of an activist-artistic-academic practice?

How can we confront climate change based on the hopes and struggles of the most affected communities?

How can we address profound ecological interconnectedness within contexts marked by persistent injustice, daily unpredictability, and rapid urban transformation?

How does the South design planetary futures? 

These are questions resonating since 2022 within the network “Designing with the Planet. Connecting Riparian Zones of Struggles” (South Designs Initiative). The group has a planetary geometry, formed by transdisciplinary activists, artists, and academics from Labtek Apung from Jakarta, Ground Atlas, and Salve Saracura from São Paulo, and Floating University Berlin.

Confronted with degraded landscapes, toxic legacies of urbanization, resource exploitation, and historical injustices as sedimented in our city waterways and riparian ecosystems, we’ve collaboratively devised tactics and objects for planetary healing. Over the past two years, the group has together designed an infrastructure for mutual learning and mutual aid to exchange practical knowledge on water quality testing devices from Labtek Apung in Jakarta; counter-mapping and visualizing colonial legacies from Ground Atlas and Salve Saracura in São Paulo, and experimental forms of multispecies cohabitation at Floating University in Berlin.

After two years of intense correspondences, travels of river beings and inhabitants of zones of struggle, crafting objects and strategies, we are now inviting you to dive into the exchanges and join our common processes during a 2-days festival happening at Floating University Berlin. 

For this gathering, we extended the invitation to other activists and transdisciplinary groups.  Working on revoicing a river and awakening watery creatures from Marseille, Les Gammares Collective with Made in the River project will join the constellation as well as researchers and academics of the TD-Lab of the Berlin University Alliance and BUA Exploration-Project “Rescaling Global Health” to build bridges between disciplines of applied and citizen science as well as artistic and activists approaches. 

From these streams of waters, we will learn and shape a time and place for exchange and friendships, tactics and solidarities, a time for confluences. 

Programme

Workshops, Performances, Talks, Screenings, Food

from 2-22h on Friday 12th and Saturday 13th of July 2024
All events are free and open to all bodies. Children are welcome!

Friday 12th

Transdisciplinarity meets Improvisational theatre: Narratives of water

14-15h –  AUDITORIUM

Workshop: German and English

Co-organisers: BUA TD-Lab: Luise Grell, Aldo Spahiu, Sorka Tzschabran
Would you like to get to know improvisational theater techniques and try them out for yourself? Through this workshop, you have the chance to approach the topic of water in a playful and creative way: An expression of the global climate crisis or the commons of the future? Which narratives will you develop together with the other participants? In the workshop, you will learn about the principles of improvisational theater (with no prior knowledge needed) and how they are used in transdisciplinary research to collaboratively define fields of action and develop research projects.

Registration not needed, but kindly asked for: sorka.tzschabran@berlin-university-alliance.de

Raising awareness: Mosquito-borne viruses in Berlin

14-16h – SPORTHALL + WORKSHOP AREA

Workshop: 14 h English and 15 h German

Co-organisers: the BUA Re-Health Lab: Sandra Junglen (Charité) and Uli Beisel (Freie Universität)
When the rainwater retention is filled with water, you hear them humming: mosquitoes. They are a nuisance for human visitors but for the local amphibians, birds and bats they are an important source of food. In this workshop we take a closer look at mosquitoes! We will learn how to anesthetize them and look at their colors, scales and hairstyles under the microscope – and then watch them wake up. Learn all about the mosquitoes in Berlin and which viruses they transmit, what you can do against them and get to know our research projects here and in Africa. We show mosquito traps and place them on the Floating University site for further research.
No registration necessary.

Post-natural Creatures:  Costume workshop with emerging materials

15-18h (part 1) – URBAN FOREST

Workshop: English and French 

Co-organisers: Les Gammares: Charlie Fox, Melvil Legrand, Chloé Mazzani, Bulat Sharipov with Salve Saracura: Ж

Les Gammares is a French collective revoicing a hidden river, Les Aygalades, in North Marseille. As a key member of Gammares Collective the artist group Made in the River (mitrcollective) continues to explore with the river, to hear its stories and make them more visible by creating river creatures that emerge from the hybrid materials made in the river environment. Mitrcollective see this co-creation with local inhabitants and the riparian environment as central to engendering radical, sustainable change; a way of altering the narrative by enriching our perception of the river system and working to restore our relationships to this post-natural environment. 

For Post-Natural Creatures we invite you to create costumes, masks and ritual props as we explore the basin territory. And as we make, we exchange stories, restore and transform the materials together. The workshop will be continuing through the 2 days, and the emerging creature costumes will form a vital part of the parade on Saturday evening.

Please register via: counterproductions.director@gmail.com

Cooking Feijoada

16-18h: Cooking Session – KITCHEN
18-19h: Public Buffet

Co-organisers: LebensMittelPunkte KulturNetz Kreuzberg
with Salve Saracura

Join LebensMittelPunkt KulturNetz Kreuzberg, a group of committed Berliners from Mehringplatz working together to bring the food revolution to the neighbourhood!! While cooking vegetarian healthy dishes with and for the community they use partly rescued as well as self grown food. During their intervention they will also use some ingredients brought by guests from Brasil and Indonesia. 

With a deep conviction that food opens up to a deeper understanding and dialogue through diverse cultures, they believe that taste conveys emotions with positive impact. 

Everybody is invited to a collective cooking, eating and cleaning session.

No registration necessary.

Performed Conversation: CONFLUENCES 

19h30 – 21h – AUDITORIUM

Talk: English 

Part 1: Water stories from four streams, finding planetary ways of resisting and repairing damaged riparian zones. 

A fluid and performative presentation and conversation will gather voices and artefacts from Salve Saracura and Ground Atlas, Labtek Apung, Les Gammares and Floating University sharing stories of their context and work, and discussing strategies developed locally and globally to resist and repair watersites. Moderated by Laura Kemmer and Jamie Baxter.

Film Screening

21h30-22h45 – CINEMA

A selection of short films from different sites, exploring riparian stories, presented by some of their authors will be screened in the dusk of the Floating site, resonating with frogs singing and birds flying around celebrating the coming of the night. 

•  Rema nascentes (rowing the river spring) 2021,

16:44 min

The collective struggle for São Paulo as a multispecies cosmocity in the ancestral land of Quilombo Saracura, Bixiga neighborhood

Film-design: Ж; Sound: Ж; Camera: João Rubio Rubynato & Ж; Field Recording: Akira; Cast: Carla Lombardo (Lobby(ster) with a Theodolite); Music: Vai –Vai Samba School (Drums); José Bispo & Mario Pereira (Chants for Oxum); Halim el Dabh & Ron Slabe (Aviary); Pictograms: Walter Benjamin; Painting: Surubim Feliciano da Paixão Film labs: Andec Berlin & Subversões Fotoquímicas (Distruktur workshop) Transfer 16mm to HD: Korn Manufactur

Parte da coleção Revelando Território do Museu da Cidade de São Paulo(MCSP) / part of São Paulo’s city Museum Revealing Territories colection (MCSP)

•  Eyga (working title), 2024

9:30 min

A short film based on scientific and artistic research around the Aygalades river in the industrial areas of Northern Marseille

Film by: Bulat Sharipov
Idea and production: Chloé Mazzani, Charlie Fox, mitrcollective (part of collectif des Gammares)
Voice-over: Chloé Mazzani
Featuring: Aygalades river, Chloé Mazzani, Melvil Legrand, 
Creature co-creators: Chloé Mazzani, Charlie Fox, Melvil Legrand
Sound: Julien Tort
Scientific support: Sylvain Rigaud, Alexis Vasilakis (Chrome Lab of University of Nîmes)

•  Confluências do Sul (Southern Confluences), 2024

15 min

The film is an interpretation of the issues that were addressed at the event “De-Saracura”/”Reading the Sediments” – a project to map and artistically investigate the Saracura River in São Paulo,2023. An initiative linked to the “Designing with the Planet” Project (South Designs Initiative). The film highlights some of the conflicts in the Bixiga territory in São Paulo and some of the current struggles of institutions and activists. 

Film by : Lúcio Telles

• Fluid Lagos, 2024

11min

Ebbing, fluvial, dripping… we are all bodies of water. Our film explores what this means and looks like in Lagos, Nigeria – through a boatman, a vessel, and a passenger…

Film by: Fluid Lagos Collective (Justine Chima Unanka, Kamnelechukwu Obasi, Kenneth ‘Laboomz’ Donatus, Lateefah Mayaki, Morola Odufuwa, Nora Mandray, Peace Olatunji ‘Dopay’, Ramon Shitta, Uwana Anthony ‘Churchy’, Wami Aluko)
Featuring: Osan Kola, Tola Adu. III: The Passenger — DP: Rufus Eniola, AC: Temidayo Ogunremi, Costume Design: Isabelle Irabor. 

• Wata, 2024

3min

We journey in water, following a prayer sent from the sacred river of Osun in Nigeria, all the way to the Atlantic Ocean, via the Lagos Lagoon.
Film by: Nora Mandray. Assistant Director & Translator: Lateefah Mayaki

Saturday 13th

Collective healing through threads practices

15-17h – URBAN FOREST

Workshop: English, German, French, Portuguese, Indonesian

Co-organisers: Designing with the Planet team

This hands on embroidery workshop is a continuation of an activity held already with the group formed by the Designing with the Planet group. A piece of cloth, naturally dyed and embroidered at Floating in early 2023 was taken to Sao Paulo where it was continued by local hands, and will return once more to the site. 

In threads practices, like quilting or embroidery, lies a potential for coming as a community and sharing stories while keeping your hands busy. In the textiles will be interwoven and assembled intimate and collective stories, entities and wishes based on the exchanges from the past two days. 

Please register via: press@floating-berlin.org

Riverain Creatures: Costume workshop with riparian materials

15-18h (part 2) – URBAN FOREST

Workshop: English and French 

Co-organisers: Les Gammares: Charlie Fox, Melvil Legrand, Chloé Mazzani, Bulat Sharipov with Salve Saracura: Ж

For this Riverain Creature Workshop we invite you to help us create several creaturely elements, creature masks and ritual hybrid materials as we discover the basin territory. 

Using found material from Floating terrain and its watery environs we offer another way to restore and transform the materials together. See the element of water and ground mingling together to create new post-natural material, that tell of a new unseen vitality that guides, animates and repairs. These creature elements will form a vital part of the parade on Saturday evening, intermingling with costumes, masks and ritual from other riparian sites (Sao Paulo, Jakarta, London).

Please register via: counterproductions.director@gmail.com

Cooking Gado Gado

16-18h : Cooking Session – KITCHEN
18-19h: Public Buffet

Co-organisers: LebensMittelPunkte KulturNetz Kreuzberg
with Labtek Apung 

Join LebensMittelPunkt KulturNetz Kreuzberg, a group of committed Berliners from Mehringplatz working together to bring the food revolution to the neighbourhood!! While cooking vegetarian healthy dishes with and for the community they use partly rescued as well as self grown food. During their intervention they will also use some ingredients brought by guests from Brasil and Indonesia. 

With a deep conviction that food opens up to a deeper understanding and dialogue through diverse cultures, they believe that taste conveys emotions with positive impact. 

Everybody is invited to a collective cooking, eating and cleaning session.

No registration necessary.

Public Talk, Parade and Performances:

CONFLUENCES 

19h30-21h30 – AUDITORIUM

Part 2: Free the waters! 

From storytelling to action, an open and participative format to explore riparian struggles and to elaborate messages of planetary solidarities. 
Collective and plurilingual voicing of the waters: performative reading of letters to the rivers, exhibition, rituals and grand parade. 

Featuring:

a ritual-performance by Ground Atlas reading letters from Saracura River,

letters from Mar Menor (Lorenzo Sandoval),

letters from La Loire (Camille de Toledo)

letters from students from the «Planetary Correspondences» studio (TU, Jona Möller),

letters from The Reeder #1 & #2 (Floating University by David Morsi and Jeanne Astrup-Chauvaux),

accompanied by creatures by MITRcollective, collective parade,

and the multimedia performance by Lúcio Teles: «Confluence of the center: South no more».

Join us for this final multimedia and interactive political performance to advocate for the rivers and waters as well as all the beings and spirits depending on them to exist!

Soundscape Installation

ONGOING through the 2 days – near the Sauna

Immersive sound installation, streaming voices, words, and soundscapes from different shores and bodies of water, including a piece of the Ground Atlas featuring Carla Guagliardi. 

Embroidery Exhibition

ONGOING through the 2 days –  upstairs URBAN FOREST

Featuring embroideries from the São Paulo „Bixiga Lowlands – Rio Saracura“ by Solange Lisboa and the collectively embroidered “Herbarium of Healing Plants” by Solange Lisboa and the Bordadeiras do Viveiro-Horta Denuzia Pedreira Bastos.

Documentary from Labtek Apung

ONGOING through the 2 days – upstairs URBAN FOREST
IMMERSING IN MUARAGEMBONG: How Saltiness Shapes Us Humans and Our Nonhumans Kins (Kerabat Lama)

BIOS & CONTRIBUTORS

• Floating e.V. Berlin is a self organized space and group, where practitioners from a wide range of backgrounds meet to collaborate, co-create and imaginatively work towards possible futures. Floating’s rainwater retention basin is home to a diverse range of animals, plants and algae who have taken root and given birth to a unique landscape: a human-made environment reclaimed by nature where polluted water coexists with the relatively new presence of Floating University, forming a natureculture (Haraway) or a third landscape (Clément).
Ute Lindenbeck is a freelance scenographer working in the fields of performing arts, urban practice, and art education. Since 2000 she has been designing stage and costume designs for operas and theatre, both at public funded theaters and in the independent scene. Lindenbeck’s interest in public space runs through her work, where she primarily creates occasions that bring together diverse people. Since 2019, she has been a member of Floating e.V. and works in the areas of programming, production, acquisition, and public communication.
website
Garance Maurer is a designer and artist, specialised in textiles with a Master’s in textile design from ENSCI-Les Ateliers. Her work was exhibited in France, Germany, Hungary and, Mexico in group and solo shows. She will be a resident of the Villa Albertine in San Francisco in 2024. Since 2021 she’s a member of Floating University where she works as a curator, artist, educator, and researcher. Garance is part of the project “Designing with the Planet” (South Designs Initiative) and co-curator of “Planetary Confluences”.
website
Silja Teresa Huppertz  is an artist, activist, curator and mother with a background in cultural sciences. As a founding member of groups like Floating e.V. and Urbane Praxis e.V. she bridges the realms of academia, art, and community engagement. Within the collective she pushes social-ecological transformation through a decolonial, intersectional feminist perspective by investigating various themes by creating context specific interventions and installations.

• TD-LAB – Laboratory for Transdisciplinary Research
Initiated in 2019 as Research Forums, the TD-Lab is the contact point for transdisciplinary research in the Berlin University Alliance. As a structural project, the TD-Lab aims to strengthen the transdisciplinary research mode in the Alliance and in Berlin – for research with society. To this end, the TD-Lab team develops innovative formats, methods and further training, forms new collaborations and networks and supports academics and societal actors in transdisciplinary research.

• ReHealth is a transdisciplinary research project funded by the Berlin University Alliance in the framework of the Grand Challenge “Global Health”. Together with international and practice partners researchers from Technische Universität Berlin, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Charité, Freie Universität Berlin explore urban human-animal-environment relationships and how they affect human health in urban spaces. The project thus investigates the multiple links between health, biodiversity, and environmental pollution.
• The South Designs Initiative project “Designing with the Planet” is coordinated by:

Laura Kemmer holds the DAAD Martius Chair at the University of São Paulo. Her research interests include modes of care, repair and planetary healing across urban waters and grounds in Berlin and Brazil. Together with J. Baxter, she coordinates the project “Designing with the Planet” (South Designs Initiative), and she is an associate member of the BUA project “Re-Scaling Global Health”.

Jamie-Scott Baxter (Dr.-Ing) is an architect-planner and sociospatial researcher. He coordinates the “Planetary Tactics for Cohabitation” living lab within the BUA project “Re-Scaling Global Health. Human Health and Multispecies Cohabitation on an Urban Planet” at the TU Berlin. At the intersection of design and science, Jamie engages critical creative methods to research on, for and with design and planning.

• Labtek Apung is a transdisciplinary collective including an anthropologist, chemist, environmental engineer, artist, and architect. It originated from a citizen science workshop in low-income slum settlements at the lowland areas of the Ciliwung River banks in Jakarta in 2017. Labtek Apung aims to amplify the unheard voices and unseen actions of non-humans who live alongside us, and who, together with humans, play significant roles in maintaining the planetary life cycle.
website

Endira F. Julianda is an art producer who observes the interrelations of human, nonhumans, and space. She has been making art in forms of drawing, painting, and installation and later grew an interest in producing art activities and multi/transdisciplinary approach. She co-found non-profit organization Rakarsa Foundation and is a co-researcher of Labtek Apung.

• Salve Saracura is a collective of activists and artists who work with marginalized riparian communities and organized environmental and housing movements in the center of São Paulo to uncover the city’s hidden rivers, the histories of violent urbanisation and environmental disaster they carry – including the covering-over of indigenous and Afro-Brazilian memories – also connecting these histories to recent events of eviction and displacement, urban floodings and other examples of socio-environmental struggle.
Solange Lisboa, Historian, curator and organizer of exhibitions and cultural projects, as well as embroiderer and activist. She is a member of the collective Aparelhamento, responsible for the creation of the 9 de Julho Kitchen. Solange is a partner of the Movimento dos Sem Teto do Centro (MSTC), member of the Linhas de Sampa collective, which mobilizes embroidery as a tool in feminist struggles, and in 2019 she was involved in the creation of Salve Saracura.
Victor Próspero, postdoctoral Fellow at the Princeton-Mellon Initiative for Architecture, Urbanism and the Humanities, associate researcher at the Center for Studies on Contemporary Spatialities, Institute of Architecture and Urbanism, University of São Paulo. Co-curator of the exhibition “Landscape and Power: Brazil’s constructions under dictatorship”.
Lúcio Teles, an artist from Aracajú/Sergipe based in São Paulo, began as a photographer in the 1990s focusing on Black Culture in Brazil’s Northeast. Founder of “Ancestral Filmes,” he explores racial and environmental themes, blending photography with graffiti in projects like “Afroprogênie” and presenting video art at the São Paulo Biennial.

Ж has a non-specialized & situated cultural practice that investigates the energetic, materialistic, economic, political and libidinal fluxes and cycles of (semio)capitalism. It embraces different strategies, materials, propositions, and media to uncover its effects in perception, memory, and subjectivity in our present ecological collapse. His projects took the form of films, video-spaces, counter-spaces, texts, performances, publications, and public spaces interventions that oriented a sense of the reinsertion of artistic practice in specific social-political contexts.
website

• Ground Atlas Brazil  is an academic-artistic counter cartography project by Brazilian architects Ana Luiza Nobre and David Sperling that considers the ground as a world archive and aims at mapping critical points related to contemporary land struggles, processes of urbanization, territorialization and deterritorialization, within a decolonial perspective.
website

Ana Luiza Nobre, Professor, Architecture and Urbanism Department , Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro. Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development Researcher (project “Ground critical cartographies”) and Research Professor at the Center for Studies on Contemporary Spatialities, Institute of Architecture and Urbanism, University of São Paulo. DAAD Grantee. groundatlas.org co-coordinator.

CV and publications

David Sperling, Associate Professor at the Institute of Architecture and Urbanism of the University of São Paulo and coordinator of the Center for Studies on Contemporary Spatialities. Researcher CNPq / Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development, evolving the project “Cartographies: technopolitics and geopoetics”. Co-coordinator of groundatlas.org.

• Les Gammares collective collective has set itself the mission of caring for the Caravelle-Aygalades stream in Marseille since 2019. It brings together associations, local networks, artists, researchers and committed residents taking joint action by sharing knowledge and restoring the ecologies of the coastal river. Its emblem, the gammare, is a bio-indicator shrimp and a symbol of hope that one day ecological continuity will no longer be broken.
website

Chloé Mazzani, actress, performer, and puppeteer. Since 2019, wih the cooperative Hôtel du Nord based in Northern districts of Marseille, Chloé’s work revolves around in situ creations connected to ecological, social, and urban issues, to find ways to address the ecological crisis and imagine a better future.

Charlie Fox, Artist & Producer. Director of InspiralLondon, Charlie works on innovative artistic production, public and site-specific performance. He works collectively and collaboratively, curating, producing, and incubating cross-disciplinary projects; that develop open, transdisciplinary, ecological and creative skills.

Bulat Sharipov, audiovisual artist, filmmaker, photographer. I In 2013, he co-founded the audiovisual installation studio Tundra. In 2016, he began exploring experimental filmmaking, focusing on themes like urban environments, connections to places, and human-environment relations.Works and lives in Marseille.  

Melvil Legrand is a artist, graduate of the European School of Visual Arts in Angoulême, he is now based in Marseille, where he oscillates between sculpture, illustration, and aquatic themes. He divides his time between naval carpentry and leading creative workshops for young audiences.

• The Fluid Lagos Collective came together in February 2024, to tell a story about what “bodies of water” means to us, and queer up authorship in the process. We are artists of various fields (film, dance, visual arts…), we flow and ebb together as ten souls: Anthony, Dopay, Justine, Kamnelechukwu, Laboomz, Lateefah, Morola, Nora, Ramon and Wami.
website
Nora Mandray (she/they) is an artist-filmmaker born in France, educated in the US, and now living in Berlin.
Spanning a conversation on trauma and resilience, their work explores truth-telling as a tool of healing in the age of mass extinction.

website

Download our PR kit here and the program of the 2 days here.