Sensing Loss is a collaboration between Cement Fields, Floating University Berlin, and Three Rivers exploring ecological loss in three sites across the UK and Germany.

The project draws connections between locations in Berlin, Bexley, and North Kent, liminal spaces on the edges of urban expansion, where nature and industry intertwine. Infrastructure developments in these contested post-industrial landscapes are often presented as ‘green’ or sustainable, but commonly threaten the rich biodiversity and vast ecological, social, and cultural significance held in these sites. 

An international community exchange, the project brings together artists, activists, and communities to share lived experiences of environmental degradation caused by infrastructure and building projects in their local contexts through a hybrid programme of in-person and online events.

Exploring how artistic practice can provide tools and strategies for processing and challenging the loss of access and agency that arises in the face of sweeping changes, the programme opens up new perspectives grounded in international understanding and solidarity. By providing space to acknowledge, explore, and learn from loss it seeks to imagine new methods of resistance for communities, activists and artists facing similar challenges, and re-centre contested sites as places to nurture resistance, care, and learning.

What happened so far?

The programme began with an invitation to ten community organisers, artists and researchers who hold a long-term connection to a life form, site or ecosystem under threat, in absence or in transformation. We started with a series of online workshops, beginning with  Youngsook Choi, who introduced us to ecological grief through the  Foreshadowing Project. In September, we came together for an online workshop with Lara-Lane Plambeck from RE-PEAT, exploring the life and death of peatlands and mapping those landscapes of absence, of disappearing boglands.

Alongside this, the Berlin participants slowly began exploring Floating University through site walks, writing, drawing and sharing stories of ecological transformation and succession in the rainwater basin. In Bexley, a workshop at Crossness Nature Reserve  explored habitat protection, species loss and the disappearance of skylarks.

Autumn Gathering at Floating University

In October, the Sensing Loss cohort from North Kent came to Floating University to meet the Berlin cohort for several days of workshops and collective practices, exploring how to mourn, tend to one another and sense ecological loss together. Through writing, drawing, listening, somatic practices, rituals, cooking and reading, we explored what is being lost and what might emerge when we stay with grief.

Together with Cait Fisher and Kim Sanou from Organizing Otherwise, we slowed down and practised ‘Being With’ allowing ourselves to be guided into a grief-tending ritual. With Jane Pitt, we listened closely to the sounds and voiced the resonances of the rainwater basin. Jöran Mandik and Kilian Flade invited us to consider how ecological loss is entangled, and how it might be commemorated, as we braided reeds and twisted cords. Goitseone Montsho led us into the world of ruderal plants, ancestral stories of lost climates and whispers to our more-than-human friends, siblings and teachers. Working with coal and soil, we practised accepting what is gone and welcoming what is yet to come. With Eliza Chojnacka, we drew and imagined landscapes of loss, change and possibility of folding over. With Eliza Chojnacka, we drew and imagined landscapes of loss, change and the possibility of folding over. Adam Moore counted to twenty, and we played hide-and-seek, while Gargi Bhattacharyya’s words, “We, the heartbroken,” resonated with us in silly, surprising ways of mourning.
We will continue to meet over the coming winter, on Sheppey Island in the UK and around Helenesee, near Frankfurt (Oder) in Germany.

To stay informed on the project or more questions, write to us at sensingloss@floating-berlin.org

(The Open Call closed on 15.07.2026)

We are currently looking for participants to join Sensing Loss throughout the programme period.
We are seeking ten participants in total (5 in UK and 5 in Berlin) who are engaged with ecological loss, environmental change, and place-based practices in their local contexts.

You can now apply to become part of the programme.
The open call is open until 15 June 2026
fill out here

Download the flyer HERE and find more information about the open call and application process.
For more questions write to us via: sensingloss@floating-berlin.org

Cement Fields

Cement Fields is a visual art organisation working collaboratively with artists and communities to create ambitious new art along the Thames Estuary in North Kent. Our programme is an exploration of place and process, defined by the multiple shifting landscapes that stretch along the Thames from Dartford to Whitstable. It’s a place where boundaries blur, where busy urban centres sit alongside industrial sites, where waters slow in marshes and wetlands, and the major arteries of rivers and roads connect rural areas and seaside towns. 

We invite artists, participants and audiences to use North Kent’s unique contexts to ask radical questions and explore new ideas. Through this interaction we create experimental new art and develop imagination, skills and pathways into creative careers. 

Cement Fields is proud to be a National Portfolio Organisation, supported using public funding by Arts Council England, and the University of Kent. 

cementfields.org  
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cementfields/ 
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CementFields/ 
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/cement-fields/

Three Rivers

Three Rivers is a community-led arts organisation exploring culture, class and climate in the London Borough of Bexley and a member of Arts Council England’s Creative People and Places programme.

Since 2021 it has supported thousands of people to become ‘mates with their place’ by imagining community and friendship beyond the human through long-term projects including Tump 39; where it is working with Thamesmead residents to reimagine a disused Victorian ammunitions dump as a new space for arts and ecology, and Beneath the Pavement, The Marshes; which brought artists and activists together with local environmental groups to campaign on behalf of Bexley’s threatened marshlands.

In 2025 Three Rivers became the first organisation in the UK to become a Zoöp and pioneer a groundbreaking model of collaboration between human and other-than-human-life. 

threeriversbexley.org
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/threeriversbexley/

Sensing Loss is funded by Cultural Bridge, which celebrates bilateral artistic partnerships between the UK and Germany through the collaboration between Arts Council England, the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, British Council, Creative Scotland, Fonds Soziokultur, Goethe-Institut London and Wales Arts International / Arts Council of Wales. It continues the partnership forged between Cement Fields and Floating University Berlin through our previous Cultural Bridge funded, peer-to-peer exchange programme, Wetland.