An encounter with Liz Rosenfeld

No registration required

Meeting point: At the entrance of the Neue Wache Memorial
Google Co-ordinates

Accessibility:
- The site is wheelchair accessible.
- No seating is provided on-site, but public benches are available nearby in the chestnut grove.
- A public toilet is available free of charge within a 7-minute walking distance.
- For any accessibility inquiries, please contact: cruisingcurators@gmail.com

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)  
September 2025

With contributions from Liz Rosenfeld, “ssssSssssssss” Ashkan Sepahvand & virgil b/g taylor, Pol Merchan, Lauryn Youden, Natthapong Samakkaew    

Queer practices of reimagining and reinterpreting hidden urban spaces frame this Path. In these spatial grey zones, desires are openly negotiated, giving rise to both community and conflict. How can different groups adapt to and appropriate urban structures to fulfill needs for connection, intimacy, and safety? This collection of events highlight how the “mainstreaming” of queer lifestyles has affected the shape of cruising spaces and relates to ongoing struggles for rights and visibility.

Contributions include a performative exploration of cruising ecologies and how memory is queered (Liz Rosenfeld); approaching the „after“ as a moment to gather in and out of time, in which friendship is forever (“ssssSssssssss” Ashkan Sepahvand & virgil b/g taylor); a reflection on moss as metaphor and witness to queer presence near cruising paths (Pol Merchan); and a sonic procession reclaiming the voice and the scream as disabled tools of disruption and care (Lauryn Youden). Throughout the Path, live drawings will capture movement, gestures and shifts on site (Natthapong Samakkaew). Together, these works trace unruly lines of desire, survival, and solidarity through the city.