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, 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, Sarnt Utamachote

Graphic design: Paula Buškevica