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.