Dissident Paths: Traces

Location:

Public space, Berlin

Contributors:

Yasmeen Al-Qaisi, Elena Biserna, Mirja Busch, Rüzgâr Buşki, Suelen Calonga, Saverio Cantoni & Noah Gokul & Lo Moran & Iz Paehr, Gabriel Francisco Lemos, Carolin Genz, Jane Hwang, Mahshid Mahboubifar, Pol Merchan, Harun Morrison, Pitchaya Ngamcharoen, Marlene Oeken & Martha Schwindling, Minh Duc Pham, Liz Rosenfeld, Natthapong Samakkaew, Kaspar Schmidt Mumm, Nour Sokhon, Lauryn Youden, Alternative Monument, hand breast heart kollektiv, House’ it going? (Laura Margarete Bertelt & Uli Kneisl), Project In/Visibility (Samirah Siddiqui & Tasnim Elboute), ssssSssssssss (Ashkan Sepahvand & virgil b/g taylor)

nGbK working group:

Clementine Butler-Gallie, Bengisu Çağlayan, Raphael Daibert, Luise Leon Elbern, Eirini Fountedaki, Viviane Tabach, Sarnt Utamachote

When does walking become a refusal, a reclaiming, a reimagining? What stories does the city whisper when you move through it at different paces? What forms of knowledge emerge when we walk together, rather than alone?

Dissident Paths is a curatorial project unfolding over a year, by means of collective movement along traced, imagined, and yet-to-be-discovered paths across Berlin. Walking can be both a necessity and a gesture of dissidence, a refusal to accept the given infrastructures of a world increasingly defined by polarization and devastation. Walking through the city can change perceptions and awareness, at once exposing barriers and impossibilities, whilst also opening up new routes. Movement, in both its bodily and political forms, holds the potential to reshape our sense of belonging and collective agency.

Between May and October 2025, across five chapters titled PATHS, a total of 23 walks will take place. Led by invited artists, collectives, poets and cultural theorists, these walks take on multiple formats, expanding the idea of the walk towards performances, readings, open-air film screenings, workshops for children and adults, sound interventions, foraging, board game sessions, after-parties, and more. Each walk embodies a set of socio-political urgencies, as articulated by its contributors—who come from different backgrounds and lived experiences, bringing various forms of accessibility to each event.

From each walk, the contributors are invited to leave a TRACE—whether through documentation, material-making, textual reflections, or something yet to be defined. These traces will be collected and shared during a 4-day public program at nGbK in February 2026, as well as in the form of a booklet  titled Walk Notations. The traces will reflect on the trajectory of the program whilst opening space for reflections and discussions about future steps.

PATHS in public space

PATH 1: SPACES AS THRESHOLDS (on crossovers and commons)May 2025Urban spaces can be considered sites of encounter, transition and negotiation. Cities are filled with in-between places that reveal and conceal, invite and exclude. This PATH’s contributions reflect on how we navigate these spaces, tracing experiences of invisibility, access, and the shifting conditions of the commons. The featured contributions explore invisibility and accessibility in a fractured world, reflect on climate shifts through embodied attention and consider the role of waterways and changing landscapes. They draw from mythologies to address cultural erasure and question how contemporary architecture threatens shared land. Together, they invite us to rethink the urban as a dynamic and fragile commons, shaped by environmental precarity, historical complexity and collective movement.

PATH 2: TRESPASS & TRANSIT (on migration and access)June–July 2025Movement is at the core of migration, displacement, and the quiet unraveling of familiar ground. TRESPASS & TRANSIT explores migration as both a lived experience and political condition, considering how borders—visible and invisible—define who can move freely. The contributions reflect on the concept of a public monument to migration, revisit histories of refugee displacement, and explore how sound and emotion shape the symbolism of motion. These urban explorations challenge the erasure of migrant histories and offer urgent reflections on the politics of memory and decolonial engagement.PATH 3: STREETS & PROTESTS (on movements and demonstrations)July 2025Protest means to disturb, to interrupt, to alter social rhythms. This PATH explores how collective movement in public space—walking, marching, gathering—becomes an act of dissent and resistance. PATH 4: DECELERATE (on alternative temporalities)August / October 2025 To decelerate is not to withdraw, but to attune differently. To call for a slower and more sensorially engaged way of being in the world. Through scent, touch, sound, and movement, artists trace migrant space-making, reimagining rituals around mortality and gender, inviting children to set the pace, rethinking monuments through acts of touch, and walking with forests while listening to their fungal networks.PATH 5: CRUISE (on cruising and queer route-making)September 2025In spatial grey zones, desires can be openly negotiated, giving rise to both community and conflict. During CRUISE, queer practices of reimagining and reinterpreting different urban spaces trace unruly lines of intimacy, survival and solidarity. TRACES: Public program and Walk Notations booklet launchFebruary 2026 (Detailed information to be announced here.)

More information on the events program here.

PROGRAMM

Dissident Paths: The Garlic Ensemble

Tue, 29.4.25, 7.00–10.00 pm

Launch, Performance by Yasmeen Al-Qaisi and an introduction to the project by the curatorial team

For the launch of Dissident Paths, Yasmeen Al-Qaisi invites us to walk inside of our gut through making toum or mujdei (a garlic paste with oil and salt) together. As the first trace of Dissident Paths will be the smell of garlic, we are going to focus our intention towards invoking allium protection; transforming garlic into an anti-violence tool in a time when right wing politics are entering our stomachs.

Garlic, a taboo for the non-east and the non-eastern art world, becomes a weapon. A natural antibiotic, but also a sacred and secret ingredient that leaves traces of good life. As always, Iazmin will invoke the knowledge and power of our grandmothers, while looking for the polyrhythm of our mortars in unison. Smashing lots of it together, garlic will turn into a form of collective protection of a non-neutral space where we will stink collectively. A form of consensus towards chaos cooking is proposed; by smashing garlic with our hands and our teeth, we invite each other into a smashing of social norms.

Yasmeen (frequently misspelt) Al-Qaisi is a poet who writes for voice and paper, articulates and performs language with sound, food or care practices towards uncontainable forms of literature. When writing with sound, Jasmin shape-shifts in inexistent institutional forms, invents jobs, engages in human and more than human relations and broadcasts temporarily or mobile on free and public radios.

The curatorial team’s introduction will be available on site as a script in German.

Dissident Paths: Stroll a Debilitated World

Sa, 3.5.25, 11:00–13:00 Uhr

Stroll with Saverio Cantoni & Noah Gokul & Lo Moran & Iz Paehr

Location: Memorial and Information Point for the Victims of National Socialist »Euthanasia« Killings, Tiergarten

This walk/stroll begins from our situated hirstories (not his, nor her, but hir) in Berlin and moves with our questions, desires and uncertainties as disabled people who are witnessing disabling violences unfold locally and transnationally. Four crip comrades gather around the Aktion T4 memorial, to share annotations in disabled life, and mourn those who have been murdered. Calling on crip knowledges from the past, we learn how disabled people have shifted our mourning practices for the violences of National Socialism euthanasia into public memory, and draw on the wisdom of our crip ancestors to question the politics of disposability of disabled bodyminds in their current local and global entanglements. On our way through Tiergarten, we walk along the question of how to foster a transnational axis of solidarity and we lie down together to dream up futures that we actually want.

Iz Paehr, Lo Moran, Noah Gokul, and Saverio Cantoni met during the peer support group session held by the Sickness Affinity Group (SAG). They are all based in Berlin and are active members of SAG.

Iz Paehr is an artist-designer whose work explores access, anti-ableist hacking, and trans*feminist worldbuilding through a Disability Justice lens. Informed by their experiences as a disabled and autistic person, they are currently developing a haptic virtual interface to archive touch.

Lo Moran is an interdisciplinary artist whose socially engaged, collaborative projects explore community support, accessibility, and alternative ways of being together. Through practices like printmaking, pedagogy, and archival methods, they investigate cultural divides and embrace fluidity to imagine radical, emergent futures.

Noah Gokul is an interdisciplinary artist, performer, and healing educator whose work spans sound, performance, painting, and video. Centering collaboration, care, and liberation, their practice blends art and healing to envision new forms of connection and collective transformation.

Saverio Cantoni is an oral-Deaf artist whose practice explores sound through haptics, assistive technologies, and participatory performance, creating multi-sensory access points to shared narratives. Rooted in Crip and Queer theory, their work challenges ableism and reimagines sensory experience by blending noise, text, visuals, and sound to build counter-narratives and disrupt normative structures.

Part of PATH 1: SPACES AS THRESHOLDS (on crossovers and commons)

Dissident Paths: Crossing Thresholds, Holding Connections

Sun, 4.5.25, 12.00–4.00 pm

Walk, with Hand Breast Heart collective

Location: Topography of Terror Address: Niederkirchnerstraße 8, 10963

Contributing to Path 1: Spaces as Thresholds of the Dissident Paths program, Hand Breast Heart Kollektiv invites you to a walk, cross and connect through threshold spaces of Mitte, starting from Topography of Terror and ending at the Memorial to the Sinti and Roma of Europe Murdered under National Socialism in Tiergarten. The journey is shaped by readings and reflections, that think through the below proposition together:

The Roman God Janus is a deity of beginnings and endings, the guardian of thresholds, gates, transitions, time, duality. The King of Sacred Rites himself carried out his ceremonies and the gates of a building in Rome, named after him, were opened in time of war and closed to mark the arrival of peace. His Greek equivalent can be found in the archetype of the witch goddess Hekate. Every culture has deities assigned to doors, thresholds, borders, passages. This walk is leaning into the image of a two-faced god, which on first glance suggests polarity, but as this principle symbolizes beginnings and endings at the same time, we understand Janus as a cyclical energy without an ending or starting point. Stacked with memory culture and vibrant erasure at the same time this short walking passage in the political, historical and touristic center of the city will be approached with affection, patience and grief. Centuries of violence condensed in Disneyfication of historical anecdotes and cherry-picked victories. We will connect, walk, pause, read, rethink, recognize and emerge transformed.

Originating in a theater play written by Nicole Angela Pearson, Hand Breast Heart Kollektiv specializes in forming bonds over barriers and acknowledging commonalities and those historical connections which can be found in exclusions and erasure. The collective works interdisciplinary and investigates public space/s through walks, interventions & counter-narratives. hand breast heart collective turns grief into joy. It is formed by Ghasal Falaki, Nicole Angela Pearson and Nina Berfelde.

Ghasal Falaki is a queer sociologist, poet, feminist, and PoC. She centers sensitized, community-building encounters in her artistic work, interwoven with biographical inquiry and both personal and shared histories. A (public) space for collective togetherness that empowers is especially relevant in her process-based practice, whether through writing, reading, or spoken word as a form of expression. Her work reflects on histories of migration, displacement, and trauma, as well as her own identity, examining the reciprocal dynamics of belonging and non-belonging within community through an intersectional lens. These themes are processed and brought into focus through exchange and peaceful coexistence, whether in the context of writing workshops (poetry or comedy) or readings.

Nicole Angela Pearson is a theatre artist, researcher, writer, and activist of African descent. She brings to light silenced and erased histories and supports communities in reconciling with them through imaginative and interactive engagement. Her work addresses the impacts of colonialism and transatlantic enslavement across time and space. Inspired by the Afro-German Enlightenment thinker Anton Wilhelm Amo, she explores the intersections of sensation and knowledge. The body serves as the site of her work. This practice enables the cultivation of awareness, the fostering of empathy, and a more sensitive and intentional way of moving through our surroundings. She draws on African and Afro-diasporic forms of expression—such as dance, song, and food—as practices of connection and healing. As a member of the Amo Collective, she recently curated a three-day counter-mapping event in commemoration of the Berlin Conference.

Nina Berfelde is an artist, mother, documentary filmmaker, researcher, cultural anthropologist, gardener, and flâneuse. Born in the GDR in 1982, this origin informs her perspectives, analyses, approaches, tools, and methods of communication and mediation. She holds a B.A. in Cultural Anthropology (Viadrina University) and an M.A. in Art in Context from the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK), which she completed with the highest distinction. She digs through historical sediment and presses her fingers into the wounds of the perpetrators, while positioning herself as both an heir and a processor of acts and omissions. Accompanied by many others who reject and subvert dichotomous, linear narratives, her practice lays bare the ground for long-overdue discourses.

Part of PATH 1: SPACES AS THRESHOLDS (on crossovers and commons)

Dissident Paths: PUDDLE WATCHING

Wed, 14.5.25, 4.00–5.30 pm

Walk with Mirja Busch

Location: Aufbau Haus Adresse: Prinzenstraße 84.1, 10969 BerlinPuddles emerge wherever humans leave their traces; they are part of the city. Mirja Busch has conceived Puddle Watching as an artistic walk that frames puddles newly and makes selected Berlin puddles visible, visitable and tangible – even in their dry state. From the Double Core Puddle to the Majestic Red Shield Puddle, the different species and their specific behavior are discussed on-site. Although puddles are a fleeting phenomenon, they do not appear by chance. The walk explores the preferences, needs, and logics of puddles and asks why they emerge, which places they inhabit, and how they relate to climate change⁠.

Participants are introduced to puddle research and terminology, and engage in discussions around themes such as materiality, urban practices, weather, and climate change. The walk offers a new perspective on this weather phenomenon in interplay with the city.

Mirja Busch is a visual artist. For over ten years, she has been working with puddles, experimenting with various forms of archiving them. Whether as a photographic collection, in liquid form, through ethnographic observations, or via language – she brings the often-overlooked phenomenon of the „puddle“ into focus, opening up new perspectives.

Part of PATH 1: SPACES AS THRESHOLDS (on crossovers and commons)

With contributions by Saverio Cantoni & Noah Gokul & Lo Moran & Iz Paehr, hand breast heart kollektiv, Mirja Busch, Harun Morrison, House’ it going? (Laura Margarete Bertelt & Uli Kneisl)

Where does a threshold begin, and what does it divide? Bridges, borders, passageways – cities are full of in-between places where people come and go, meet and move apart, where some things are easy to see and others remain hidden. Some thresholds invite and include, others reinforce exclusion. How do we find common ground within sites of multitudes?

This Path is guided by the belief that urban spaces should be understood as public resources and communal goods that are accessible to all members of society, human and non-human. The contributions explore aspects of invisibility and accessibility in a fractured world (Saverio Cantoni & Noah Gokul & Lo Moran & Iz Paehr); climate shifts and puddle-watching as new forms of attention (Mirja Busch); the role of waterways and changing landscapes (Harun Morrison); memory culture and erasure through a mythological lens (hand breast heart kollektiv); and the evolving architecture threatening common land (House’ it going?). Together, they trace how bodies move through thresholds shaped by environmental fragility, layered histories, and urban transformation.

Part of PATH 1: SPACES AS THRESHOLDS (on crossovers and commons)

Dissident Paths: Flowing Streams: Co-develop a water themed board game

Sat, 17.5.25, 11.00–2.00 pm

Board Game Workshop with Harun Morrison

Location: Rummelsburger Ufer, Lichtenberg

You begin as a raindrop. Flowing Streams is a water-themed board game in-progress. You are invited to co-develop the rule system and game play for using a board and set of icons as prompts. Participants are encouraged to informally create and test new rules and objectives as a way of thinking about the cultural, spiritual, industrial and meteorological roles of waters. The workshop structure involves dividing the attendees into smaller groups of four and five, giving each group a template game board. The group are tasked with developing a rule system for a game using different textual and graphic prompts as starting points. Part of the workshop focus is being attentive to how different rule systems embody and promote different ideologies. E.g. is the group looking to replicate the individualistic, acquisitional logics of Monopoly for example? Does the game necessarily need a conclusion? If two rain drops meet, do they become a single body, in turn leading to two players becoming partners in the game?

Harun Morrison is an artist and writer based in London, he is a Somerset House Studio Resident. He is currently an associate artist with Greenpeace UK and teaches in the COOP project “Trespass, Loopholes, Action Design” at the Dutch Art Institute (DAI). His forthcoming novel, The Escape Artist will be published by Book Works in 2025. Since 2006, Harun has collaborated with Helen Walker as part of the collective practice They Are Here. He is a former trustee of the Black Cultural Archive (est. 1981).

Part of PATH 1: SPACES AS THRESHOLDS (on crossovers and commons)

Dissident Paths: What is out there? – Traces, Borders, Spaces

Sun, 18.5.25, 4.00–6.00 pm

Walk & ecture with House’ it going? (Laura Margarete Bertelt & Uli Kneisl)

Location: Tempelhofer Feld, Neukölln, Entrance Oderstraße

Thresholds, frontiers and borders are everywhere. In our cities, on our maps, and yes, right at the edge of our picnic blankets. So why do we so rarely pull them onto the table and properly question them? What is out there? – Traces, Borders Spaces is not your average Sunday stroll. It’s a collaborative walking as learning from practice, grounded in place. Settled on a picnic blanket in the layered landscape of Tempelhofer Feld – probably Berlin’s most fiercely defended common ground – we ask: Who sets the table? Who gets a seat? And who decides what’s being served?

The Menu – What is on the table today?

Starter: 16:00 — Discursive Picnic

A light yet thought-provoking entrée. Bring your snacks, your thoughts, and your curiosity. We’ll nibble on ideas about space, access, and the politics of the picnic blanket.

Main Course: 16:45 — Performative Walk along the Borders of Tempelhofer Feld.

A rich and layered dish—served while in motion. We’ll explore the crunchy textures of thresholds, the seasoning of speculation, and the bitter aftertaste of exclusion. Bon appétit.

Leftovers: 18:00 — End

We wrap things up with a slow fade-out and some lingering reflections. No bill—just the cost of awareness.

House’ it going? is an experimental investigation lab exploring housing, climate, and social justice, using several spaces as a case study to link local challenges with the global housing crisis. Using a fluid collection of methods and visualization tools, we engage residents, policymakers, and practitioners to rethink housing strategies collaboratively.

Laura Margarete Bertelt (she/her) is an architect, urban designer, and activist with a soft spot for adorable public space. She co-creates workshops, teaches, and contributes to discourse around the housing crisis, the Bauwende, and feminist urban planning. Currently, she’s diving deep into democratic (planning) processes in the Urban Studies Master’s program at Bauhaus University Weimar. She works with Experimental, a foundation that’s about rethinking what we build with and why. She’s also part of Kontextur, a digital magazine spinning around architecture. And she is really into Podcasting. Website

Uli Kneisl (he/him) studied architecture in Munich and Milan, where he developed a strong interest in socio-ecological housing and engaging with existing buildings. His collaboration with Angelika Hinterbrandner and Laura Bertelt further deepened his focus on the housing crisis and its economic, ecological, and social impacts on the built environment. At the moment, he works on independent projects centered on the refurbishment and adaptive reuse of existing housing structures.

Part of PATH 1: SPACES AS THRESHOLDS (on crossovers and commons)

Dissident Paths: Walking-Through Allesandersplatz

Wed, 11.6.25, 6.00–8.00 pm

Walk, activation with Alternative Monument

Location: nGbK

‘ADfD seeks forms that connect migration experiences and public memory culture. As a result of the current toxic discourse on migration in Germany, we feel an urgent need to connect and counteract. The purpose of our efforts is to establish a positive frame for migration discourse and counter current xenophobic movements.’

During Dissident Paths, the augmented reality monument ADfD (Alternatives Denkmal für Deutschland) will be showcased on the rooftop terrace of the nGbK near Alexanderplatz, offering an immersive exploration of migration’s traces via the Monuments AR app.

Alternative Monument is an interdisciplinary collective of artists, researchers, activists, and cultural practitioners focused on reimagining public memory and commemorating migration. Founded in Berlin, the collective blends art, technology, and social engagement, activating diverse communities in co-creating artistic content, ensuring the monument reflects the lived experiences of those it represents. For a full list of people involved in the monument see here: https://adfd.info/TEAM

Part of PATH 2: TRESPASS & TRANSIT (on migration and access)

With contributions by Alternative Monument, Nour Sokhon, Minh Duc Pham, Project In/Visibility (Samirah Siddiqui & Tasnim Elboute)

To be in motion is at the core of migration, dislocation, and displacement — a quiet unraveling from a once-known ground. Such movements can be chosen or forced, desired or inevitable. These movements may be voluntary or forced, driven by hope, necessity, or survival. Borders, both visible and invisible, dictate who moves freely and who must trespass.

This Path explores movement as both lived experience and political condition. The contributions consider what a monument to migration in public space might look like (Alternative Monument); the revisiting of a former refugee camp of East German citizens through the act of collecting flowers (Minh Duc Pham); containers in a harbor as symbol of motion and vessels of emotion through sound (Nour Sokhon); and the urgency of decolonial engagement by walking a colonial site, addressing the erasure of Palestinian solidarity and the limits of remembrance culture in Berlin. (Project In/Visibility).

Part of PATH 2: TRESPASS & TRANSIT (on migration and access)

Dissident Paths: Harbouring Voices

Sat, 28.6.25, 11.00–2.00 pm

Sound-Workshop with Nour Sokhon

Location: Westhafen, Moabit

Harbouring Voices is a sound workshop exploring Westhafen as a site of movement, memory, and containment. Containers, designed to enable transit, also obscure and confine – mirroring broader tensions around migration, borders, and urban belonging.

The workshop will begin with a two-hour walk around the harbour site, sharing stories, collectively discussing, exploring the surroundings, and gathering sounds along the way. Afterwards, we’ll head to the rooftop of ZK/U, overlooking the harbour, to continue the conversation through a collective sonic orchestral moment where we all produce a short recording together. Following this, we will have a moment to share reflections together over snacks and refreshments.

Recordings from the workshop will be developed into a sound piece for the TRACES part of the Dissident Paths program by the artist. Participants of the workshop can choose to remain anonymous or be fully credited for their contributions for all the different possible iterations of the final product.

Nour Sokhon is a Lebanese artist based in Berlin. Her practice explores artistic research through interviews, field recordings, and site-specific interventions, which she translates into sound compositions, performances, interactive installations, and moving image works. In 2017, she completed People on Sound, a documentary for her Master’s in Sound for the Moving Image at the Glasgow School of Art. In 2019, she received the Emerging Artist Prize at the Sursock Museum in Lebanon for her moving image piece Revisiting: Hold Your Breath and was awarded the Sound Art 2020 scholarship by Lower Saxony and the University of Fine Arts in Braunschweig. Her debut solo album, Beirut Birds, was digitally released in 2024 with support from the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture – AFAC. She has exhibited internationally and performed at festivals such as Network Music Festival (2020), This Is Not Lebanon (2021), Punkt Festival (2023), Gaudeamus Festival (2023), United in Grief (2024), Vorspiel (2024), and Biennale d’Aix (2024). Sokhon’s work has been featured at institutions such as the Spatial Sound Institute, Beirut Art Center, SAVVY Contemporary, Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, Kunsthaus Hamburg, and Henie Onstad Kunstsenter.

Part of PATH 2: TRESPASS & TRANSIT (on migration and access)

Dissident Paths: Mit Liebe und Beispiel

Sat, 5.7.25, 2.00–4.00 pm

Walk with Minh Duc Pham

Location: Marienfelde

Mit Liebe und Beispiel invites you to take an interactive walk along parts of the trail of the Berlin Wall. This performative event combines walking as a collective practice with the memory of refugees from the GDR and the resistance against the authoritarian regime. Flowers will be collected along the way, which will later be laid down in front of the Marienfelde reception center. This center was set up in 1953 as an initial reception for GDR refugees and was the first safe haven and transition for many, before they were sent to West Germany. This walk looks to create a space for remembering the history of flight within Germany. Walking along the wall thus becomes a symbolic act of remembrance that takes up the personal and collective experiences of the former GDR refugees and establishes a connection between past and present.

This event is a collaboration with Minh Duc Pham’s exhibition Integrationswunder at Galerie im Tempelhof.

Minh Duc Pham (*1991, Schlema) is a Berlin-based artist and performer. Pham studied Exhibition Design and Scenography at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design as well as Performance Studies and Design Theory at the Berlin University of the Arts. His artistic practice engages between visual and performing arts and explores identity at the intersection of gender, race and class. Pham has been involved in productions such as ‘Die Große Klassenrevue’ (2023) at HAU 1, ‘Home Away From Home’ (2021) at HELLERAU and Cloud Gate Theatre Taipei and ‘Semiotiken der Drecksarbeit’ (2022) at Mousonturm Frankfurt. His works have also been exhibited at the Museum der Bildenden Künste in Leipzig, Stadtmuseum Dresden, Bundeskunsthalle Bonn and most recently at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt. He has received scholarships from multiple art and cultural institutions such as the Baden-Württemberg Art Foundation, the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe, the Fonds Darstellende Künste and Stiftung Kunstfonds.

Part of PATH 2: TRESPASS & TRANSIT (on migration and access)

Dissident Paths: Walking towards the decolonial urgencies of today

Wed, 9.7.25, 6.00–8.00 pm

Walk with Project In/Visibility (Samirah Siddiqui & Tasnim Elboute)

Location: Volkspark Rehberge

This walk opens up a fugitive learning space: one that resists the prescriptive and embraces the messy, liminal terrains where transformation takes shape. Moving through Volkspark Rehberge and Wedding, we navigate a district shaped by diasporic presence, leftist working-class struggles and Germany’s colonial history.

Through sharing personal narratives, readings, and collective dialogue, the walk engages with themes of migration, remembrance culture, and resistance.

Drawing on Fred Moten’s undercommons and bell hooks’ pedagogy of transgression, along the way, we reflect on our own positionalities and how these crossings inform our artistic practices. We interrogate migration myths and narratives around movement, labor, and citizenship, questioning who is allowed to belong and under what terms. In unpacking the figure of the „good immigrant“, we expose how states determine usefulness and value, reinforcing racialised hierarchies of inclusion and exclusion.

Project In/Visibility is a research collective led by anthropologist Tasnim Elboute and marine biologist Samirah Siddiqui. Project In/Visibility troubles and disrupts dominant narratives in environmental and conservation university classrooms by amplifying perspectives and lived experiences from the forefront of Indigenous and local communities working on ecological restoration and preservation. They combine and build from the experience of Project Myopia, a participatory crowdsourcing platform that amplifies diverse voices in arts and humanities academia, and frontline environmental workers, activists, and stewards.

Part of PATH 2: TRESPASS & TRANSIT (on migration and access)

Dissident Paths: Asphalt: Walkway of Refusal

Sat, 12.7.25, 8.00–10.00 pm

Walk with Mahshid Mahboubifar

Location: Kottbusser Tor, Kreuzberg

A bridge emerges where the road appears to end—reshaping limits into links. It holds the in-between: between streets, between directions, between movements. Unfolding across the span, we begin at the conjunction point—where we walk, pause, observe, and make our presence visible. This walk invites participants to step into a space of tension and transformation, where every step reflects the larger systems that govern us: systems of state-sanctioned police violence, racialized violence, and the right to demonstrate.

Mahshid Mahboubifar is an artist and filmmaker from Iran, currently based in Berlin. Working with still and moving images, her practice fosters a direct bond with her immediate surroundings, interviewing research, objective reality, and subjective perception. Through the reconstruction of archival materials, she explores how narratives are constructed and preserved. Mahshid Mahboubifar holds a diploma in Expanded Cinema from the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig and a bachelor’s degree in visual communication from Alzahra University in Tehran.

PATH 3: STREETS AND PROTEST (on movements and demonstrations)

Dissident Paths: Walking the Walls: A Protest in Motion Against Berlin’s Housing Crisis

Fri, 18.7.25, 6.00–8.00 pm

Performance, Protest with Carolin Genz

Location: Mediaspree, Friedrichshain/Kreuzberg

This performance takes the form of a guided walk along the Mediaspree area, a site that has undergone drastic transformation over the past decades. Once a contested urban space, it now stands as a concrete symbol of neoliberal urban development, despite persistent and long-standing protests, including a citizen referendum. Performers turn the walk into a living echo of Berlin’s lost promise of affordable housing. Walking the Walls serves as a moving act of remembrance and resistance, revisiting past efforts and highlighting the ongoing struggle for housing justice in Berlin.

The two-hour walk, led by Carolin Genz, will include dialogical exchanges exploring the historical, cultural, and political context of the route, as well as performative interactions along the way. The event is a collaboration with the Urban Ethnography Lab and features special guest Diana Lucas-Drogan, who will trace the walk through live mapping.

Carolin Genz is an anthropologist working at the intersection of spatial research and urban design. Combining artistic and ethnographic methods, her practice explores the shifting geographies of urban imaginaries and contested narratives of everyday life. She focuses on socio-spatial practices related to housing, protest, gender, and aging, using multimodal techniques that combine qualitative and visual inquiry. Carolin is a co-founder of the Urban Ethnography Lab (UELab), established in 2017.

Urban Ethnography Lab: The UELab adopts creative, inter- and transdisciplinary approaches at the intersection of architecture, design, art, and urban anthropology to uncover the underlying logic of cities’ social and built environments. Through multimodal fieldwork and collaborative research, we examine the urban everyday—its social and spatial practices, interactions, architectures, and infrastructures.

Special Guest: Diana Lucas-Droganis a trained architect and works as a planner, developing a performative and critical spatial practice for municipalities and universities. In her artistic work, she weaves feminist methods into mappings and performances. Diana enjoys opening boxes — to subvert dichotomies.

PATH 3: STREETS AND PROTEST (on movements and demonstrations)

Dissident Paths: Printing for Abolition

Sa, 19.7. – So, 20.7.25, 14:00–17:00 Uhr

Printing Ritual mit Rüzgâr Buşki

Location: FHXB Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg Museum

This screen printing ritual is a collective prayer—a shared act of dreaming toward a world without police or prisons. It is also an offering in honor of all those who have shown up in their own ways: marching in the streets, educating their communities, raising funds for the people of Gaza, or simply sharing solidarity online—for Palestine, the most dissident path in contemporary Germany.

For two days, Rüzgar Buşki will be screen printing, and you are warmly invited to join them, take home a print, and spend time together. This prayer finds place in the museum’s garden, honoring decades of migrant life in the Kotti neighborhood—a place many call home, shaped by resilience, community, and the shadows of police presence and violence.

We’ll also be reading excerpts from Abolition Revolution by Aviah Sarah Day and Shanice Octavia McBean.

Rüzgâr Buşki, born in Istanbul is a Berlin based artist whose practice focuses on printmaking, video, and performance. Their work have been shown in numerous spaces and institutions, which include Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Savvy Contemporary, documenta14 - Parliament of Bodies, DOK Leipzig, Translations Seattle Transgender Film Festival, Schwules Museum, Badischer Kunstverein, Silent Green, Galerie Wedding and Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien. They have received several accolades, including LABA Berlin Residency (2024), Close-Up Program Fellowship for NonFiction Cinema (2020-2021), the first prize of the Karl Hofer Society Grant (2019), and the Zeliş Deniz Queer Cinema Award at Pink Life Queer Film Festival (2019). Buşki graduated with a Meisterschüler title from the class of Prof. Dr. Hito Steyerl at Berlin University of Arts.

PATH 3: STREETS AND PROTEST (on movements and demonstrations)

Dissident Paths: Feminist Steps

Wed, 23.7.25, 8.30–11.00 pm

Night Walk with Elena Biserna

Location: Görlitzer Park, Kreuzberg

This collective walk aims to be a platform to reflect together on gendered (listening) experiences in public space and to unlearn some of the behaviors that are assumed as appropriate, safe or expected when we walk. Some first steps to question asymmetrical power relations and to imagine together practices of care, solidarity, re-appropriation or overturning that might feed other spatial configurations and practices. We will collectively perform scores by Pauline Oliveros, the Blank Noise collective and Elena Biserna herself to experiment with the limitations and potentialities of our silence, voice, noise and collective movement. This iteration of the walk will take place at Görlitzer Park, a public site currently embroiled in conflict in relation to its potential closure at night.

Scores entertain a paradoxical relationship with time. In music, they are compositional tools, while in other disciplines such as dance they have a primarily memorial function and can be imagined as traces or archives of past performances ready to be re-enacted in the future. In the same way, the two scores activated during Feminist Steps – The Resounding Flâneuse and The Resounding Flâneuse, Ηχώ - Ανάμνηση – contain the traces of Biserna’s past experiences in public space as well as an invitation to write together possible futures.

Elena Biserna is a researcher and curator based in Marseille, France. She writes, talks, facilitates workshops or collective projects, curates events and sometimes performs. Her interests are focused on listening and on contextual, time-based art practices in relationship with urban dynamics, socio-cultural processes, the public and political sphere. She currently serves as artistic director of LABgamerz and Lips festival, Aix-en-Provence. Her writings have appeared in several international publications (Les Presses du Réel, Mimesis, Le Mot et le Reste, Errant Bodies, Amsterdam University Press, Cambridge Scholar, Castelvecchi, Bloomsbury, Routledge, postmedia, Electa, Silver Press, etc.) and journals. She has recently edited two books: Walking from Scores (Dijon: Les Presses du réel, 2022) and Going Out. Walking, Listening, Sound-Making (Brussels: umland, 2022). She co-edits the feminist column wi watt’heure of Revue & Corrigée with Carole Rieussec. She has collaborated with or presented her projects in different venues/organisations, such as B’sarya for Arts (Alexandria), Errant Sound (Berlin), LUFF (Lausanne), Padiglione Italia, Venice Biennale; Tavros and Fondation Onassis (Athens), La muse en circuit and Sonic Protest (Paris), Festival Plataforma (Santiago de Compostela); Oscillation festival, CIVA and Q-O2 (Brussels); City of Women, TO)pot festival and Cona (Ljubljana); ar/ge kunst (Bolzano), GMEA, Albi; La Membrane, Manifesta 13, Unité d’Habitation Le Corbusier and La Friche la Belle de Mai (Marseille); 3bisF-centre d’arts contemporains, LABgamerz, Locus Sonus and Fondation Vasarely (Aix-en-Provence); soundpocket (Hong Kong); Standards (Milan); NUB (Pistoia); Radio India (Rome); Sant’Andrea degli Amplificatori, Xing, Radio Città Fujiko (Bologna); Saout Radio; p-node. She has taught at ESAAix-École Supérieure d’Art d’Aix-en-Provence, Aix-Marseille University, the Academy of fine art of Bologna and Paris 8 University.

PATH 3: STREETS AND PROTEST (on movements and demonstrations)

Dissident Paths: A Line Back Home, Ancestral Echoes in Seven Turns

Sat, 26.7.25, 4.00 pm

Walk: 16:00–18:00

Installation at BARAZANI.Berlin: 16:00–21:00 

Dinner Table at BARAZAN.BerlinI: 19:00–21:00

Walk, installation with Suelen Calonga (in cooperation with BARAZANI.berlin)

Location: Schloßplatz, Mitte

Meeting point, installation/dinner: BARAZANI, Spreeufer 6, Mitte

They keep trying to make us forget, in the infinite twists and turns of negligence. But we are better wizards. The line hasn’t been cut, and the voices of our ancestors are calling us back home, not without first going to look for them so that we can return together.

This proposal unfolds in three-parts. The first is a walk that traces a line back home, moving in seven turns around the Humboldt Forum, a site of colonial amnesia and violent displacement. Inspired by the forced ritual of the Tree of Forgetting, in Ouidah, Benin, where the enslaved people were made to circle a tree to erase their past, this walk reclaims the motion in defiance. Each turn is a refusal, an affirmation that memory endures, retracing what was never truly lost. Through incantation, offerings to the river witness and collective presence, the walk calls upon the ancestors trapped inside that building to wake up from their restless forced sleep to reactivate our memory as a living force. One that cannot be archived, only carried within.

The second part, the installation Fetish, activates a sonic, visual, and symbolic counter-device that departs from the historical materiality of colonial collecting to open cracks in the European construction of authority over the sound of the Other. All the objects that form the set - a digital speaker in the shape of a gramophone, an original Edison wax cylinder over a hundred years old encrusted with hundreds of gramophone needles, archival images, and a selection of texts - were acquired through contemporary collecting channels: marketplaces, antique dealers, “relic” resellers, collectors’ associations, and institutional archive catalogs. This intentional provenance re-enacts — and strains — the contemporary circuit that still profits from coloniality and the domestication of the sacred belonging to others.

The final part is a dinner table made together with the matriarch of the African-Brazilian community in Berlin, Sandra Bello, starting from 19:00 serving Brazilian Food. All parts of this event start and end at Spreeufer 6, across from Humboldt Forum, to the project space of BARAZANI.berlin, an interdisciplinary collective that engages with decolonial issues and practices.

Suelen Calonga is a mother, priestess, artist, researcher, and educator whose work resides at the intersection of academic, spiritual, and artistic practices. She intertwines ancestral knowledge with contemporary art, using performance, audiovisual, and research as poetic method to engage with themes of memory, provenance, and spiritual knowledge. As practitioner of the Lese Orisa cult, and a strong background in curating and community engagement, Suelen has developed independent research and exhibition projects that center African and Afro-diasporic voices. She is PhD candidate in the Art History as Cultural History program at TU Berlin, supervised by Dr. Prof. Bénédicte Savoy and holds a master’s in Public Art and New Artistic Strategy from the Bauhaus-Univerisität Weimar. She collaborates with other artists and community organizations exploring the decolonization of knowledge and the role of museums in preserving colonial legacies in residencies, group exhibitions and publications in Brazil, Germany, Benin, The Netherlands, Portugal and France.

Bio Sandra Bello:

Steps from afar that crawled, walked/walk, ran/run, played/play, loved/love, raised/raise. Steps that flee colonial tyranny. On the lookout. Always fighting for my, our humanity. Always Quilombola! This is bio resistance, resilience, reexistence. Bio from the school of quilombola life. Here is the mini bio and the long struggle. E(x)u Sandra Bello.

From the very beginning, activists, artists, and scholars have rejected and criticized the idea of the Humboldt Forum. Through cultural and political interventions, they have succeeded in exposing the project as a continuation of colonial systems of injustice and in making its effects on today’s society visible. It is in this context that BARAZANI.berlin was founded.

BARAZANI.berlin is an interdisciplinary collective that engages with decolonial questions and practices. It has existed since 2020 and brings together actors from the fields of art, academia, education, and community work. Emerging from the “Working Group on Museums and Collections” of Decolonize Berlin e.V., BARAZANI.berlin was initially founded during the COVID-19 pandemic as a virtual space that, in protest against the reconstruction of the Hohenzollern Palace, imagined an occupation of the undeveloped Schlossplatz. Since 2021, BARAZANI.berlin has had its own action and project space, SPREEUFER 6, located in the Nikolaiviertel directly opposite the Humboldt Forum. http://blog.barazani.berlin

PATH 3: STREETS AND PROTEST (on movements and demonstrations)

Dissident Paths: Who moves and who doesn’t

Sun, 10.8.25, 6.00–8.00 pm

Walk with Pitchaya Ngamcharoen

Anmeldung erforderlich unter anmeldung@ngbk.de

Location: Thaipark/Preußenpark, Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf

There’s a familiar look I’ve come to recognize—disdain, discomfort, or even disgust—whenever I open a jar of shrimp paste or let the scent of traditional Thai scented water linger on my clothes. These reactions have made me wonder: why are certain smells automatically deemed offensive, while others are accepted without question? Who decided that one scent is sophisticated and another is vulgar? Whose nose, exactly, holds the power to judge what is acceptable?

This project traces the path of Thai immigrant activities from the distant past through the present, and into a speculative future. By asking what smells existed along this route—then, now, and in the time to come—I invite you to actively use your nose to gather as much olfactory information about the area. We will start the walk by gathering at a spot next to a public toilet in Preußenpark, a former Thai Park, and head towards Barstraße. These sensory impressions will be documented, recomposed and shown alongside each other.

Pitchaya Ngamcharoen is a Thai artist based in the Netherlands. Her work focuses on the obscure area where different inhabitants overlap, with a particular focus on the crucial role that the sense of smell plays in this dynamic. She researches olfactory sense, investigates smells through the act of orientation and disorientation, territorial marking, and the process of being deterritorialized through the shifting of smells. In Western society, hegemony of vision and hearing is evident. To release herself from the despotic reign of the eyes, she refuses to give visuals a priority in my research and writing, however, never turns a blind eye. By bringing my nose to the forefront, she asserts that smell, scent, and olfaction are equally important in orienting oneself, claiming space (territory), and in the formation and transmission of communities. Her recent interest shifted to perfumery and the ability of smells to create an illusion of memories once the familiar smellscape became inaccessible.

Part of PATH 4: DECELERATE (on alternative temporalities)

Dissident Paths: Purgatory Society: A Liminal Walk

Part 1

Wed, 13.8.25, 7.00–9.00 pm

Workshop with Jane Hwang

Meeting point: nGbK, Mitte

Purgatory Society: A Liminal Walk is a processional performance inspired by Korean funeral rites, reimagined as a public ritual for collective mourning. Through a slow, embodied walk along migratory borderlines, the project mourns personal loss and the shared grief of displaced lives, silenced histories, and distant tragedies. Mourning becomes a form of resistance – a way to make loss visible and grievable in a society that deprives us of time and space to mourn. Purgatory Society proposes grief as a starting point for solidarity and political re-engagement.

The first part of the project takes place on 13.08. in the form of a workshop, where we will gather to prepare ritual objects, share food, and exchange migration stories—reviving traditions often held and passed down by women. The second part unfolds on 15.08. as a collective walk from the North Korean embassy to the graveyard in Tiergarten. The route is shaped organically as we move, and the procession continues until the home-brewed makgeolli—offered to comfort both spirits and the living—has been shared. We walk to grieve, to remember, and to resist obscurity.

Jane Hwang is a multimedia artist based in Berlin. She employs research-based narratives to navigate the intersections of community memory and documentation. Her work examines oral history, rituals, archives, geopolitical dynamics and the sensory impact of historical findings through film, text, and audiovisual installation. She is particularly interested in liminal spaces where boundaries blur, exploring ways to reinterpret and embody collective memories through multisensory experiences.

Hwang holds a B.F.A. from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and an M.A. in Art in Context from the Berlin University of the Arts. Her work has been exhibited on various platforms, including a solo exhibition at Artspace Hyeong, Seoul (2024), as well as screenings and group exhibitions at the 18th River Film Festival, Padua (2024), CCA Berlin (2023), the Icelandic Visual Artists Association, Reykjavik (2020), and the Museum für Fotografie Berlin (2020).

Part of PATH 4: DECELERATE (on alternative temporalities)

Dissident Paths: Whirling Worlds

Wed, 13.8.25, 2.00–6.00 pm

Workshop, walk with Kaspar Schmidt Mumm

This workshop is for children aged 5-16. Children must be accompanied by an adult.

Location: Klassenzimmer der Zukunft, Alice Salomon Platz, Hellersdorf

Weltenwirbel is a participatory workshop and street performance for youth and their families in Berlin-Hellersdorf. On the 13th of August participants parade a papier-mâché sculpture from station urbaner kulturen. Through several days of local interactions Kaspar will gather local stories and build a tour centering local narratives and spaces. These contributions inspire stories and performances that are woven into a public parade through local playgrounds and space. Together we walk to playgrounds and other locations around Hellersdorf while decorating and performing the mobile sculpture. Each stop, stories are told, interventions unfold, and spontaneous play emerges, generated by local youth. The project culminates in the joyful destruction of the sculpture releasing symbolic offerings and reclaiming collective space. Through collective making and storytelling the project explores playful protest as a form of public dialogue and intergenerational exchange, reimagining youth’s space as both a site of resistance and communal joy.

The artist Kaspar Schmidt Mumm comes from three generations of migration on both sides of his family. He has lived in Australia for 23 years, where he leads a collective as a singer, theatre educator, and scenographer. Recently he completed a Master in Art in Context at the Berlin University of the Arts. The artist’s practice focuses on world-building—through costumes, music, sculptures, movement, and other artistic forms: cars become crocodiles, laughter choirs are conducted, robot Tamagotchis are built, and bread masks are baked.

Part of PATH 4: DECELERATE (on alternative temporalities)

Dissident Paths: Purgatory Society: A Liminal Walk

Part 2

Fri, 15.8.25, 7.00–9.00 pm

Walk with Jane Hwang

Meezing point: Glinkastraße 5–7, Mitte

Purgatory Society: A Liminal Walk is a processional performance inspired by Korean funeral rites, reimagined as a public ritual for collective mourning. Through a slow, embodied walk along migratory borderlines, the project mourns personal loss and the shared grief of displaced lives, silenced histories, and distant tragedies. Mourning becomes a form of resistance – a way to make loss visible and grievable in a society that deprives us of time and space to mourn. Purgatory Society proposes grief as a starting point for solidarity and political re-engagement.

The first part of the project takes place on 13.08. in the form of a workshop, where we will gather to prepare ritual objects, share food, and exchange migration stories—reviving traditions often held and passed down by women. The second part unfolds on 15.08. as a collective walk from the North Korean embassy to the graveyard in Tiergarten. The route is shaped organically as we move, and the procession continues until the home-brewed makgeolli—offered to comfort both spirits and the living—has been shared. We walk to grieve, to remember, and to resist obscurity.

Jane Hwang is a multimedia artist based in Berlin. She employs research-based narratives to navigate the intersections of community memory and documentation. Her work examines oral history, rituals, archives, geopolitical dynamics and the sensory impact of historical findings through film, text, and audiovisual installation. She is particularly interested in liminal spaces where boundaries blur, exploring ways to reinterpret and embody collective memories through multisensory experiences.

Hwang holds a B.F.A. from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and an M.A. in Art in Context from the Berlin University of the Arts. Her work has been exhibited on various platforms, including a solo exhibition at Artspace Hyeong, Seoul (2024), as well as screenings and group exhibitions at the 18th River Film Festival, Padua (2024), CCA Berlin (2023), the Icelandic Visual Artists Association, Reykjavik (2020), and the Museum für Fotografie Berlin (2020).

Part of PATH 4: DECELERATE (on alternative temporalities)

Dissident Paths: What Does History Feel Like? Former monuments tell of their past

Sat, 16.8.25, 2.00–5.00 pm

Workshop with Lisa Klein, Marlene Oeken & Martha Schwindling

Tactile tour and discussion in the exhibition “Unveiled – Berlin and Its Monuments”

Meeting point: Zitadelle Spandau (Torhaus)

Target group:

Designed for blind and visually impaired participants aged 16 and over.

Companions and/or assistance dogs are welcome (please mention this when registering).

As part of the program Dissident Paths: Walking Together as a Method by nGbK, Lisa Klein, Marlene Oeken and Martha Schwindling invite participants to a tactile tour through the exhibition “Unveiled – Berlin and Its Monuments.”

Together, we explore former monuments that once shaped Berlin’s urban landscape and now bear witness in the museum to the transformation of collective memory. Once symbols of power, they can now be questioned under new premises. Through touch and conversation, we approach the monuments as material witnesses, as carriers of ideology, and as entities shaped by social and political upheaval.

Maximum of 13 participants. When registering, please indicate whether you will be accompanied by an assistant or guide dog.

Lisa Klein is a museologist and freelance cultural mediator based in Berlin. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Museology from HTW Berlin (2020–2023) and works as an art mediator in institutions including the Zitadelle Spandau, the Berliner Medizinhistorisches Museum der Charité, and the Museum für Kommunikation. Her practice centers on inclusive mediation, with a particular focus on blind and visually impaired audiences. She is also an active volunteer with the ABSV (General Association for the Blind and Visually Impaired).

Marlene Oeken and Martha Schwindling are designers, researchers and curators. They met during their design studies at HfG Karlsruhe and have been collaborating since 2022, working with clients such as the Goethe-Institut, HKW (Haus der Kulturen der Welt) Berlin, Kunstverein München, and Kunsthalle Wien. Their interior and exhibition design projects translate ideas, concepts, and structures into physical objects and spaces. In their curatorial work, they explore the relationship between the conditions and perception of design and architecture, drawing on their shared backgrounds as designers, makers, and researchers. They are particularly interested in transdisciplinary collaborations with institutions, artists, scientists, and everyday experts, resulting in publications, mediation formats, and exhibitions. Oeken and Schwindling live and work in Berlin.

Part of PATH 4: DECELERATE (on alternative temporalities)

Dissident Paths: A Hard Rain

Thu, 11.9.25, 7.00–8.00 pm

Performance: An encounter with Liz Rosenfeld

Location: Neue Wache, Mitte

Meeting point: entrance of Neue Wache

Behind Berlin’s Neue Wache Memorial (originally built as a guardhouse between 1816 and 1818) lies a chestnut grove, which is historically known as a cruising spot where men meet for sex. Accounts of cruising here date back to the First World War (likely even earlier) where soldiers sought sexual encounters, and it has continued to be a cruising area on and off since then. The Neue Wache Memorial, dedicated to the victims of war and dictatorship, is a site of somber reflection. It houses Käthe Kollwitz’s sculpture of a mother holding her deceased son, a powerful image representing the senselessness of patriarchal war. In a one-hour performative encounter combining text and song, Rosenfeld draws attention to the layered historicities of this site, and asks what it means to gather at a public memorial to reflect on the brutality of facism during a time of global war, genocide, political censorship, systemic brutality, and the ongoing drive toward queer erasure.

Liz Rosenfeld is an interdisciplinary artist who works with performance,moving images, drawing and experimental writing practices. Liz addresses the sustainability of emotional and political ecologies, cruising methodologies, past and future histories in regard to the ways in which memory is queered. Liz’s work deals with flesh as a non-binary collaborative material, specifically focussing on the potentiality of physical abundance and excess, edging questions regarding the responsibility and privilege of taking up space. Embracing an auto- theoretical style, Liz’s writing is rooted in questions that contend with how queer ontologies are grounded in variant hypocritical desire(s.) Liz’s first auto- theoretical book, “ Crossings: Creative Ecologies of Cruising,“ co- written with Professor João Florêncio will be published by Rutgers University Press in 2025.

Part of PATH 5: CRUISE (on cruising and queer route-making)

Dissident Paths: spread (after)

Sat, 13.9.25, 10.30–12.30 pm

After Party mit ssssSssssssss (Ashkan Sepahvand & virgil b/g taylor)

Performance

Meeting point: In front of ‘Zum Freund’ späti, corner of Herrfurthstraße & Lichtenrader Straße

bring a gift for the after

the party is over, but it doesn’t have to be. „does anyone have a key?“ he shouted into the crowd, raspy-voiced. everyone waits around idly, huddled on a cobblestone street corner in front of a closed kiosk. “shhhhhh!” the sun’s already out, sudden dawn. no one remembers how to be quiet; everyone is trying to whisper their idea of how the next hours could-should-might look. the consensus emerges: “to eternal friendship!”

we (is it a new “we”? or just a temporary “us”?) begin to walk together. is it a parade or a funeral march? some of us are hungry and stop for something greasy-salty-yum. some of us need ice tea. we buy a fresh pack of Parisiennes, of course. “let’s go to the park!” someone announces. this time there. next time here. another time elsewhere. “don’t forget the bubbles,” she giggles, hoarding little-red-riding-hoods into her tote. “is it a park or a graveyard?” “are we making a monument?” “everyone’s mad!” “is this celebration?” “or mourning?”

to this temporary us, to forever friends.

Ashkan Sepahvand is an artist, writer, and researcher. He was born in Tehran, grew up in Tulsa, and lives and works between London and Berlin. His practice takes time. Projects take the form of performances, publications, and regular collaborations with friends. He is one half of ssssSssssssss, a study-friendship with virgil b/g taylor.

virgil b/g taylor is an artist and faggot in Berlin. His work explores histories of care, crisis, exclusion, and toxicity. He makes the online speculative zine FAG TIPS and is one half of ssSssssssssss, a study-friendship with Ashkan Sepahvand.

sssssssssSsss (13 s’s, 1 arbitrarily capitalized) is a practice of sharing, studying, and strengthening within and through friendship. sssssSsssssss is usually casual, always undisciplined, and frequently invisible. sSsssssssssss thinks and works with spreads, in the sense of scattering, festivity, and the page. sssssssssssSs moves and makes in spaces, real and imaginary, where one can meet the other. ssssssSssssss has hosted and been hosted at Matadero Madrid, Nottingham Contemporary, and the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University. sSsssssssssss resides between Ashkan Sepahvand and virgil b/g taylor. It is pronounced as a sibilant s.

Part of PATH 5: CRUISE (on cruising and queer route-making)

Dissident Paths: Slobber Moss Pee

Sat, 20.9.25, 6.00–9.00 pm

Meeting point: Habermannsee, Marzahn

Slobber Moss Pee explores the interconnectedness of space—natural and urban, visible and invisible—and its inhabitants, human and non-human, tracing the traces of their multiple interactions. The project engages with Karen Barad’s concept of intra-action, Laura U. Marks’ theories on hapticity and tactility in the image, and the eco-sexual practices of Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens. Through collage and remixing of audiovisual material—self-produced and borrowed—an audiovisual ecosystem is generated that transcends the mere function of an archive to become a tool for sensory stimulation. A projection at the Kaulsdorfer Baggersee (Habermannsee) places the artwork, the screen, and the viewers within a dynamic of intra-action. The screen integrates with the landscape, while ambient sounds and birdsong form the soundtrack. The lake, a habitual setting for nude bodies and fleeting encounters—including cruising—becomes a confluence of pixels, celluloid, humans, worms, fish, bodily fluids, pee, and other traces.

Pol Merchan is an artist, filmmaker and curator of the Xposed Queer Film Festival in Berlin. He graduated in Fine Arts at the University of Barcelona and completed the Master Art in Context at the Berlin University of the Arts. His artistic practice explores the audiovisual medium and is influenced by queer, trans and feminist studies and practices. Experimenting with analog media and the techniques of appropriation and collage, his works blur the boundaries between historiography and autobiography as well as fiction and documentary. His works have been exhibited and awarded internationally in institutions and film festivals such as Museo Reina Sofía Madrid, Centre d’Art La Panera Lleida, IFFR Rotterdam, Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Lichter Art Award Frankfurt, Kassel Documentary Film Festival.

Part of PATH 5: CRUISE (on cruising and queer route-making)

Dissident Paths: Silent Networks

Sun, 19.10.25, 9.30–6.00 pm

Walk with Gabriel Francisco Lemos

Meeting point: Ostkreuz Station, Track 1

Natural environments offer endless possibilities for unplanned encounters, including interactions with flora, fauna, and various modes of attention, perception, and connection of the senses. These unique experiences, especially in woodlands, can inspire a range of wandering processes, explorations, and states of mind—audible or otherwise.

When we think of networks in nature, mushrooms and mycelium often come to mind. Similarly, when we think of music and mushrooms, John Cage is a natural association.

“I have spent many pleasant hours in the woods conducting performances of my silent pieces,” Cage once said. The work he refers to includes the compositions he frequently “conducted” from 1956 onwards while wandering through the woods near his home in Stony Point, USA. During these introspective yet observant walks, Cage would also

forage for and eat wild mushrooms. With this in mind, our guiding principle during this year’s Silent Networks Walk is inspired by Cage’s reflection on his compositional practice:

“I am not interested in the relationship between sounds and mushrooms any more than I am in those between sounds and other sounds […] These would involve an introduction of logic that is not only out of place in the world, but time-consuming […] I do not deal in purposes; I deal with sounds. I make them just as well by sitting quite still looking for mushrooms.” He continues: “I have come to the conclusion that much can be learned about music by devoting oneself to the mushroom.”

Building on these ideas, we will start from this relationship between Cage’s passion for mushrooms, his modes of attention, and the connection between his “silent pieces” and 4’33” (1952)—one of the most important conceptual works of the 20th century. Beyond that, participants will be encouraged to engage in self-reflection and develop their own personal connections between the field trip, the concepts discussed, and their individual wandering processes in relation to mushroom identification and being in nature. The aim is for each participant to explore ways to integrate these experiences into their own practice. The field trip will include listening exercises, performances of various “silent pieces” and mushroom identification. Participants are encouraged to bring their own recording devices, cameras, notebooks, and any resources central to their creative practice.

Gabriel Francisco Lemos (born 1988 in Brazil, based in Berlin) is a multimedia artist, composer, and educator who focuses on collaboration and mutualism. His work spans sound compositions, technology, and both spoken and written word, utilizing formats like performance, video, print, installation, lectures and multimedia projects. He also teaches electronic music composition and performance as a freelancer and is passionate about mushrooms. Lemos has exhibited his work at festivals and events in Brazil, London, Chile, the Netherlands, Germany, Monaco, and Portugal. He currently experiments with neural synthesis in generative sound art and hybrid narrative formats that emphasize the potential of attention as practice, and connectivity between humans, objects and other forms of life. His research centers on the creative possibilities and societal implications of knowledge systems in artistic processes and modes of reflection.

Part of PATH 5: CRUISE (on cruising and queer route-making)

Dissident Paths: Love Made Her Mouth a Weapon; Her Throat Held a Thousand Graves

Sun, 26.10.25, 3.00 pm

Sound Performance with Lauryn Youden (feat. Dylan Kerr)

Meeting point: Pedestrian Underpass at Leipziger Straße

Duration: approximately 30 minutes

Love Made Her Mouth a Weapon; Her Throat Held a Thousand Graves is a site-specific intervention exploring the use of acoustic weaponry as a form of resistance and a mourning practice rooted in embodied grief and collective care. Set against the backdrop of collapsing support structures for chronically ill and disabled communities—as the machinery of fascism reemerges and systems of care are further replaced by the violence of ableism—the work foregrounds the need for tools of resistance that do not replicate harm or exclusion. Centering chronically ill and disabled individuals, the piece reclaims voice, breath, and the scream as tools of disruption—accessible technologies that emerge from the experience of being disabled itself. When care systems collapse and structural violence intensifies, sound becomes survival. Vulnerability becomes resonance.

Credits:

Performers: Lauryn Youden and Dylan Kerr

Musical Composition: Dylan Kerr

Instrument Production (in collaboration): Lauryn Youden, Emilio Gomez Ruiz and Nicole Ollin of Nasu Alfar, Mexico City

Production Assistance: Cornelia Isaksson

Lauryn Youden is a Canadian sculptor, poet, performance and installation artist. Her practice derives from her research and navigation through the medical industrial complex / colonial medicine, ‘alternative’ healing practices and traditional medicine for the treatment of her chronic illnesses and disabilities. By publicly presenting her personal experiences and queer Crip reevaluations of history, her work illuminates and advocates for repressed, marginalized and forgotten forms of radical care and Crip knowledge. Youden is currently a participant in BPA// Berlin program for artists and was recently in residence at Nasu Alfar, Mexico City.

Part of PATH 5: CRUISE (on cruising and queer route-making)

Dissident Paths: Traces

Thu, 26.2. – Sat, 28.2.26

Event series, Book launch

What remains after different collective movements have taken place?

A collection of fragments, memories, processes and (live) practices compose TRACES, an event that brings together elements from the walks and some of the artists of the program Dissident Paths. Across a three-day gathering, different artistic traces are interwoven through the formats of a display, workshops, performances and collective meals, foregrounding live contributions as well as the Walk Notations publication launch.

TRACES marks the public culmination of Dissident Paths: Walking Together as a Method, a year-long curatorial project that unfolded through artistic walking practices across Berlin. Between May and October 2025, different parts of the city were activated with 23 walks, led by artists, collectives, poets, and cultural theorists, inviting publics to move together along drawn, imagined, and yet-to-be-discovered paths. Walking operated as both necessity and a dissident gesture—exposing barriers, reconfiguring infrastructures, and opening space for alternative forms of belonging and collective agency.

Rather than presenting walking as a means of arrival, the project asked what kinds of knowledge emerge through shared movement, altered pace, and attentiveness to the city’s histories. Each walk engaged with specific socio-political urgencies and experimented with expanded formats: performances, readings, open-air film screenings, sound interventions, foraging sessions, workshops for children and adults, board games, after-parties, and other collective encounters. These moments belong to the past trajectory we titled PATHS—now a dispersed, embodied archive across the city. TRACES is intended as a means to remember, reflect upon, expand and continue onwards from these paths walked.

The book Walk Notations puts these trajectories into relation, having some artists and curators write new commissions in the form of essays or interludes (drawings, sketches, scores, poems, performance scripts, notes and more), expanding the project further.

Whether through documentation, material-making, textual reflections, sound, images, or something yet-to-be-defined, these works will be shared during the public program TRACES at nGbK.

Contributors: Lucía Alfaro Valencia, Yasmeen Al-Qaisi, Elena Biserna, Mirja Busch, Rüzgâr Buşki, Suelen Calonga, Saverio Cantoni, Gabriel Francisco Lemos, Carolin Genz, Jane Hwang, Mahshid Mahboubifar, Pol Merchan & Sarah Martinus, Harun Morrison, Pitchaya Ngamcharoen, Marlene Oeken & Martha Schwindling, Minh Duc Pham, Liz Rosenfeld, Natthapong Samakkaew, Kaspar Schmidt Mumm, Nour Sokhon, Lauryn Youden, Alternative Monument, Esquina Caliente, hand breast heart kollektiv, House’ it going? (Laura Margarete Bertelt & Uli Kneisl), Project In/Visibility (Samirah Siddiqui & Tasnim Elboute), ssssSssssssss (Ashkan Sepahvand & virgil b/g taylor)

nGbK work group: Clementine Butler-Gallie, Bengisu Çağlayan, Raphael Daibert, Luise Leon Elbern, Eirini Fountedaki, Viviane Tabach

Graphic design: Paula Buškevica

PROGRAM

Dissident Paths: Traces (day 1)

Thu, 26.2.26, 6.00–10.00 pm

Workshop, Performance, Book launch, Collective meal

Opening Program
Doors open: 6.00 pm

6.00–7.00 pm + 9.00–10.00 pm
Printing for Abolition with Rüzgâr Buşki

Throughout the opening and across the 3-day program, Rüzgâr Buşki will be live screen printing a new edition of 400 prints, that are created to fit the size of the publication Walk Notations. You are welcome to come by and print together with them, then slide them into your publication copy. Consider this a ritual: a moment to honor those who have stood their ground to exercise their basic rights against police violence in Berlin.

7.00–8.00 pm
Publication launch: Walk Notations

Walk Notations brings together traces emerging from Dissident Paths: Walking Together as a Method, a series of artistic walks across Berlin in 2025. Moving between artistic practices, curatorial conversations, and reflections, the book approaches walking as a method for being together in public space. Some contributions revisit specific sites or gestures while others move further afield, driven by personal memory, archival research, theoretical analysis, or speculative fiction. Conceived as a portable companion, Walk Notations invites the readers to navigate the city otherwise—attentive to detours, thresholds, and the possibilities that emerge when paths are made collectively.

The curators of the groups ReRouting and Cruising Curators will present the book to kick-off the TRACES opening.

8.00–9.00 pm
a-mal-a-malgam with Yasmeen Al-Qaisi

Yasmeen Al-Qaisi invites us to break fast with a daily mash for hope, assortments of grains and stories that are meant to nutritiously welcome life into our bellies. a-mal-a-malgham is an Arabic-English word construction that stands for a mass (الملغم al-malgham, amalgam) and a mixture of hope (أمل amal). Through the collective meal we will be invoking protection of the sweetness of flowers, fruits and spices against destructive “purity”-claiming politics that dominate our environments. As ever before, Iazmin, will be invoking the knowledge and power of our grandmothers and grain-mothers, while inviting the guests to use their hands, their original tools, and put intention and wishes into the act of eating together pan-culinary-world recipe-less dishes.

Dissident Paths: Traces (day 2)

Fri, 27.2.26, 6.00–10.00 pm

Workshop, Performances, Filmscreening, Collective meal

The TRACES installation is open to visitors from 12pm

6.00–7.00 pm
Printing for Abolition with Rüzgâr Buşki

Across the 3-day program, Rüzgâr Buşki will be live screen printing a new edition of 400 prints, created to fit the size of the publication Walk Notations. You are welcome to come by and print together with them, then slide them into your publication copy. Consider this a ritual: a moment to honor those who have stood their ground to exercise their basic rights against police violence in Berlin.

7.00–7.30 pm
Harbouring Voices: Rhythms of Transit with Nour Sokhon

This performance operates as a live composition shaped by recorded footsteps, walking routes, bodily gestures, and spatial markings gathered on site. Recorded voices and whispered responses from participants of the Dissident Paths program workshop form a vocal layer within the score, functioning as rhythms, cues, and sonic triggers that guide the performance in real time. Audience presence plays an active role: listening, movement, and vocal responses influence the timing, density, and direction of the piece. Each iteration remains open and responsive to the site and bodies present. Initiated in 2021 through a site-specific intervention in Beirut, this is part of an ongoing participatory research project unfolding through live performance. This early research laid the groundwork for a broader series of works exploring voice, space, and collective listening in contexts shaped by rupture and transit. The current work-in-progress emerged from a sound workshop held at Berlin’s Westhafen in June 2025 as part of Dissident Paths, marking a shift from collective fieldwork toward a performative score.

With thanks to the Harbouring Voices Westhafen workshop participants and Augusto Gerardi Rousset for supporting the on-site workshop recordings.

7.45–8.30 pm
Biased noise, aural justice with Saverio Cantoni and Dana Cermane

Biased noise, aural justice is a performance by Saverio Cantoni who is joined by Dana Cermane to interpret spoken words and sonic improvisation into sign language. The work weaves personal experience and lived reality, dealing with questions of sonic justice in transitory improvisation and transtemporal nocturnal storytelling. Conceived through aesthetics of access, sound is not only heard but made visible: spoken words (in English) are live subtitled, accompanied by sound captions and a spectral visualizer. Simultaneous interpretation in German Sign Language (DGS) is curated by Dana Cermane. Some sounds may be loud or harsh; earplugs and balloons are available, quiet areas can be accessed, and the audience is free to move, leave, or engage as they wish.

8.30–9.00 pm
a-mal-a-malgam with Yasmeen Al-Qaisi

Following on from her opening food performance, Yasmeen will be nourishing us for the full program with various dishes and desserts that connect with her concept of a-mal-a-malgam—an Arabic-English word construction that stands for a mass (الملغم al-malgham, amalgam) and, a mixture of hope (أمل amal). See TRACES day 1 for full details on the food performance.

9.00–10.00 pm
The Muscles Are Tense with Mahshid Mahboubifar

Assembled from archival footage from the 2024 Palestine protests in Berlin, this film-essay is centered on the police camera, recording and archiving protestors’ bodies, and the protestors’ body; on the corporeal struggle to claim the streets and the exposure of those bodies to the police surveillance and violence. A composition of public space in which the historical origins of the police, its militarization, and its racial targeting emerge.

16 min., English/German/Arabic with German subtitles
With an introduction by the artist and a Q&A.

Dissident Paths: Traces (day 3)

Sat, 28.2.26, 12.00–10.00 pm

Workshops, Performances, Lesungen, Gespräche, Gemeinschaftsessen, DJ-Set

Throughout the day
Printing for Abolition with Rüzgâr Buşki

Across the 3-day program, Rüzgâr Buşki will be live screen printing a new edition of 400 prints, that are created to fit the size of the publication Walk Notations. You are welcome to come by and print together with them, then slide them into your publication copy. Consider this a ritual: a moment to honor those who have stood their ground to exercise their basic rights against police violence in Berlin.

12.00–1.00 pm
TRACES Walk-Throughs
in German & English

Parallel walk-throughs for children and adults will be led through the space of TRACES, at times intersecting in playful overlap. Walking together becomes a method for mediation: reflecting, contextualizing the wider project, and activating the space, including our Kids’ Corner.

1.00–2.00 pm
Wie fühlt sich Geschichte an? with Marlene Oeken & Martha Schwindling

In this clay workshop facilitated by Marlene Oeken & Martha Schwindling, the participants will exchange experiences and thoughts on material memory culture and try to make monuments from the past, present, and future visible and tangible. This workshop follows from their walk-event for the Dissident Paths program that took the form of a tactile tour at Spandau Citadel’s exhibition Unveiled – Berlin and its Monuments.

This workshop will be offered in German and is open to everyone aged 16 and above.

2.00–3.30 pm
Mind the Gap: From Critical Thinking to Epistemic Disobedience with Suelen Calonga

Mind the Gap explores the limits of critical thinking as the dominant language of reflection in art and cultural institutions. Starting from familiar forms of critique, the workshop asks what happens when we pay attention to gaps, absences, and silences instead of complete explanations. Drawing on artistic practices that resist classification and operate at the edges of legibility, the session frames epistemic disobedience as a shift toward questioning how knowledge is produced, validated, and circulated, and who gets to be recognized as a knowing subject.

3.30–4.00 pm
Pause to Question: A Monument to Migration with Alternative Monument

This activation invites you into Alternative Monument’s ongoing collective research on what a monument to migration might be, who it is for, and what it can carry into the future. Through a series of gentle questions, participants are encouraged to share responses that will feed into the group’s evolving monument-making process. Positioned as a pause within the day’s program, the activation takes the form of a poetic interlude, with lokum sweets shared over tea and coffee.

4.30–5.30 pm
Conversation with the FriendsssssssssSsss with ssssSssssssss (Ashkan Sepahvand & virgil b/g taylor)

Artists Ashkan Sepahvand and virgil b/g taylor, who together form the collective ssssSssssssss, will reflect on their walk ‘spread (after)’ that was part of the Dissident Paths program. Part after-party and part manifesto to friendship, the concepts and collaborations that led to this walk’s creation will be shared in this informal couch-conversation.

5.30–6.30 pm
Crossings: a deep listening encounter with Liz Rosenfeld

In this reading performance, Liz Rosenfeld reads from their most recent book “Crossings: Creative Ecologies of Cruising,” co-written with Professor João Florêncio. “Crossings” is a creative dialogue between a queer artist and a queer academic, reminiscing about and thinking with their cruising experiences. The book takes queer sex practices and cultures seriously as ways of knowing and world-making. It is a collaborative auto-theoretical work between queer kin that explores cruising beyond its homonormative structures, and as a mode of thinking with the body while communicating through sexuality.

6.30–7.30 pm
Embracing The Eternal Present: Crossing Thresholds, Holding Connections with hand breast heart kollektiv

In this performance and gathering the audience embarks on a cathartic journey propelled by the energy of collective healing and the promise of a new future. Through poetry, movement, and sound, a portal to convert sorrow into joy is to be created. The session draws from the collective’s walk Crossing Thresholds, Holding Connections from the Dissident Paths program; a walk that revisited the past in order to forge new beginnings that fuse the present, past, and future. 

7.30–8.00 pm
Notes from Beneath the Surface with Gabriel Francisco Lemos

In this performative reading, Gabriel Francisco Lemos expands his essay Silent Networks into a spoken, sonic, and poetic field. Moving between memory, foraging, fungal ecologies, and altered perception, the text unfolds as a constellation of personal and ecological encounters. Accompanied by a live sound performance, the reading explores mushrooms not only as biological organisms, but as teachers of attention, impermanence, and entanglement. Voice and sound weave together slowly, allowing language to decay, resonate, and reassemble. The performance invites the audience to listen with the body, to follow without rushing, and to consider foraging as an art of coexistence rather than extraction. It is an invitation to walk inside a thought older than language, and to remember that we, too, are temporary fruiting bodies of something larger.

8.00–8.30 pm
a-mal-a-malgam with Yasmeen Al-Qaisi

Following on from her opening food performance, Yasmeen will be nourishing us for the full program with various dishes and desserts that connect with her concept of a-mal-a-malgam - an Arabic-English word construction that stands for a mass (الملغم al-malgham, amalgam) and, a mixture of hope (أمل amal). See TRACES day 1 for full details on the food performance.

8.30–10.00 pm
DJ Set with Esquina Caliente

Pablo Santacana López aka Esquina Caliente is a Berlin- and Madrid-based interdisciplinary artist, researcher, and DJ whose practice spans architecture, performance, and sonic cultures. With Paula Caldiorla aka dj_lava, he co-curates Esquinas Calientes, a series reclaiming diasporic sounds like reggaetón and perreo in queer club spaces, challenging the white techno monopoly on Berlin’s nightlife. His research investigates clubbing as community-making infrastructure, critiquing techno myth-making published in Contemporary& (2019) and Arch+ (2020), tracing GDR clubculture legacies at HKW The Whole Life Archive (2022), and amplifying queer sonic varieties through projects at Gallery Lite-Haus (2020), Kaltblut Magazine (2020), and with Poligonal Berlin (2024).

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TRACES-Installation

Über das dreitägige Programm hinweg teilen einige Künstler_innen physische Spuren ihrer Spaziergänge in Form einer kollektiven Installation, verbunden mit Forschungsmaterial aus der Bibliothek der Kurator_innen.

Beiträge von: Lucía Alfaro Valencia, Yasmeen Al-Qaisi, Elena Biserna, Mirja Busch, Rüzgâr Buşki, Suelen Calonga, Saverio Cantoni, Gabriel Francisco Lemos, Carolin Genz, Jane Hwang, Mahshid Mahboubifar, Pol Merchan & Sarah Martinus, Harun Morrison, Pitchaya Ngamcharoen, Marlene Oeken & Martha Schwindling, Minh Duc Pham, Liz Rosenfeld, Natthapong Samakkaew, Kaspar Schmidt Mumm, Nour Sokhon, Lauryn Youden, Alternative Monument, Esquina Caliente, hand breast heart kollektiv, House’ it going? (Laura Margarete Bertelt & Uli Kneisl), Project In/Visibility (Samirah Siddiqui & Tasnim Elboute), ssssSssssssss (Ashkan Sepahvand & virgil b/g taylor)

nGbK-Arbeitsgruppe: Clementine Butler-Gallie, Bengisu Çağlayan, Raphael Daibert, Luise Leon Elbern, Eirini Fountedaki, Viviane Tabach