Programmes

Climate Care is a 10-day-festival engaged with theory and practice at the intersection of climate challenges, ethics of care and environmental humanities. Emerging from weathering the conditions of its site, the program is a result of in-depth cohabitation with the constructed water infrastructure, its human culture and its multispecies overlays.

Floating Kids Uni is the programme for young explorers in the rainwater retention basin of Tempelhofer Feld. Kids Uni is a practical, ambitious and crazy laboratory, which is stubborn, playful, deep, forgetful, improvised, concentrated, serious and light-footed at the same time, and which has made it its task to enable children to do, research, enable and reflect on the city, art and space.

Open soils are in direct contact with water bodies, the air and their subsoil, the solid rock. They are complex habitats out of organo-mineral structures and an immense diversity of living organisms in the upper soil horizons, largely unknown even to natural scientists. Analytically, their bodies cannot be determined separately from the soil, nor can the mineral processes and structures be separated from the biological ones. Although we know that all life depends on the regenerative processes in soils and they accommodate high biodiversity, soil organisms usually do not appear in environmental analyses, models, concepts, instruments and technologies. 

Over four days in July members of Floating University Berlin, the Institute for Postnatural Studies (Madrid) and researcher Maria Morata as pollinating agent will gather in Floating University’s rainwater retention basin together with guests and allies to think, exchange, explore and resonate with each other on the theme of toxicity in search of new ways of living on an intoxicated planet. Employing various modes of engagement the group of artists and researchers will work to expand the term, establish a more fluid understanding of it and establish a living archive on site. The research process will be shared in open events including screenings a presentation and discussion.

A week-long series of affective encounters and collective engagements. How can we learn from the natural world, how to create new synthesis in our technocratic times for a more inclusive and ‘cosmo-logical’ knowing? (Re-)Gaining Ecological Futures exercises and mobilises alternative imaginaries and sets of relations between multiple others in a mutually enforcing and regenerative way. It holistically connects transdisciplinary practices for the making of empowered and empowering social and more-than-human subjects.

Space for practice is a space held by movement practices. It is an occasion for practices to encounter places, for choreographers to encounter practitioners, for practitioners to encounter the site of Floating, for the site to shape the practice. It is open for every body and led by a different choreographer each week. As it opens a space for regular body practice it accepts all irregular conditions such as weather, types of practices, people, other activities on site. We start on time. You don´t need to register. It is free of charge. It will take commitment to work it out, but you don´t need professional movement knowledge. 

A multi-week program designed for people who want to work with their body. “Contamination” and “immersion” sessions explore the theme of water – our relationship with it and our place in the water cycle. Our bodies are the most intimate ecosystems we know. Taking this as a starting point, it sets up a situation where people connect with their body’s ecosystem and the wetland’s ecosystem. It is a discourse between organisms and the environment.

Learnscapes is how we describe a floating landscape of knowledge production, of knowing and being and processes of un-, re-, and co-learning, of working and thinking collectively within the site. Floating University offers a broad range of public learning programs in the shape of lecture series, seminars or workshops. The Floating Learnscapes program extends these ongoings through two extra academic perspectives: the Free Radicals support system and the Academic Beach resort.

As part of the Kultursommer festival inviting Berliners to discover various cultural spaces of the city throughout the summer, Floating Berlin hosted two events in 2022 and will host one in summer 2023. Descending the concrete path, walking through the trees, the Floating wetland unfolds into view. A variety of animals, plants and algae have made this rainwater basin of the former Tempelhof airfield their home and have given rise to a unique landscape: an artificial environment reclaimed by nature, forming a nature-culture site for learning and experimentation that needs constant care. From workshops, reading sessions, and performances, to screenings and lectures, we curate a dense program to discover and dive into topics emerging from the site : Frogs and Waste (2022) and Rain Water (2023).

Inspired by the Edo period, reEDOcate me! offers the opportunity to overcome your avoidance strategies and blockades: 20 artists translate the sustainability strategies of the Edo period for current transformation conditions. The experiential spaces they create will disrupt your action routines and change your everyday perceptions. You will unlearn your toxic life practices and practice new, sustainable ones. Contemplate in the onzen, nurture the forest of bad conscience, walk on oak trees or formulate new laws on shit recycling.You need to change your life! Start now!

The Neighbourhood Network has existed since 2018 exploring the immediate social environment in and within the water retention basin in Berlin-Kreuzberg. The office is constantly working towards the building of a network of Berlin based groups and initiatives that are interested in being active at the Floating University. The office offers two moments throughout the year to connect and network with the neighbourhood: Sprechstunde “open-for-all” – a rubber boots tour followed up by an hour of conversation – and the Seasonal Weekends an invitation to experience the seasonal diversity on site.

Water Earth Biodiversity (WEB) is a public analysing & designing process with association members and neighbours to increase biodiversity in and around the rainwater retention basin.

Extradisciplinary is a research platform on cross, inter, trans and extradisciplinary practices that actively foster methods of cross pollination between different fields of knowledge in the floating context. With the Institute of Cross-Pollination (involving external lecturers) and the Office of Synergy Effects (connecting Floating participants with inspiring people), there are two new formats that will enrich the program in the coming months. The multifaceted Salon Extradisciplinaire will host these different kinds of public Events and Happenings till autumn 2022. 

Urban Practice is at its best when holding the complexity of the city. A practice of transformation and in constant renegotiation, deeply rooted in the arts, Urban Practice works to intersect the spheres of the socio-political, the spatio-cultural, the ecological and the pedagogical. It can be understood as a transversal approach enacting urban transformation.

An incomplete collection of programs and activities that happened in the first year of floating university‘s existence.