Talk & Discussion
Bureau for Hybridising Encounters
Floating University Berlin
Floating University Berlin. The Sun Machine Is Coming Down © Berliner Festspiele / Eike Walkenhorst
Floating University Berlin investigates alternative, biodiverse forms of co-habitation in a partially contaminated rainwater basin, part of the former Tempelhof airport. For ten days, the ICC will become the “Bureau for Hybridising Encounters" of the Floating e. V, which will continue to explore themes of reuse and repurposing of urban spaces through conversations, projections, and an open archive process.
In 2018, the Floating University Berlin was initiated by the architecture office raumlaborberlin as an initially temporary laboratory for collective learning and cooperative research. Since 2019, the Floating e. V. – an artist run association is situated on the premises of the rainwater retention basin of the former Tempelhof airport, cohabiting this unusual location. The basin – a fully functioning urban infrastructure serves as both a workspace and a field of research: a natureculture (Haraway) in which a variety of animals and plants coexist with cultural activities.
The contribution of the Floating University to the ICC as part of “The Sun Machine Is Coming Down” is an attempt to transport the praxis of this hybrid association into the disused relic of the ICC and to develop new impulses for a sustainable opening based on this encounter.
Conceived of as a “Bureau for Hybridising Encounters” the Floating University Berlin will bring its culture of conversation into the ICC for 10 days, view and discuss materials from three years of activities, and, through two discoursive formats such as the "Floating Dialogues" and the "Future Talks", reflect retrospectively on its own work as well as prospectively on the potential of the ideas at the heart of our work: multi-species co-habitation in urban environments and the hybridising of urban infrastructure with cultural activity.
The setting for the winter office will bring atmospheres from the site of Floating through projections and spatial arrangements, not attempting to represent a space within a space, but to inhabit the ICC with a Floating feeling. Within the space, ongoing processes from the dense program of the Floating are also hosted, such as the Urban Practice residency.
For their project at Floating University, the artists in residence Zoe Claire Miller and Marco Schmitt constructed a mobile raku kiln. They will use it to banish the spirits and traumas of the systemic malformations within our capitalist, heteropatriarchal, and techno-feudalist social order into sculptures and exorcise them through the ritual act of raku firing. The sculptures will travel to ICC to serve as protective totems or talismans for the association members in the office.
A project organised by the programme series Zu Immersion.
Floating Dialogues
Thursday, 7 October 2021
With Benjamin Foerster-Baldenius, Phillip Oswald, Florian Stirnemann and Rosario Talevi 22:30–23:30
Saturday, 9 October 2021
With Sarah Bovelett and Tatjana Schneider 15:00–16:00
With Katherine Ball and Christian Hiller 16:00–17:00
With Teresa Huppertz and Saskia Hebert 17:00-17:30
Sunday, 10 October 2021
With Hannah Lu Verse and Felix Wierschbitzki 15:00–16:00
With Ursula Rogg and Jeanne Astrup-Chauvaux 16:00–17:00
With Sabine Zahn and Lorenz Kuschnig 17:00–17:30
Future Talks
Tuesday, 12 October 2021
"Future Forms of Public-Civic Coalitions in the City" 20:00–21:00
With Sarah Bovelett, Benjamin Foerster-Baldenius, Adrienne Goehler, Mathias Heyden, Thomas Oberender and Felix Wierschbitzki
Wednesday, 13 October 2021
"The Future of Floating Kids Manifesto" 20:00–21:00
With voices from kids university, collected by Teresa Huppertz, Inci Güler and Ute Lindenbeck
Sunday, 17 October 2021
"The Future of Environmental Pedagogies" 20:00–21:00
With: Katherine Ball, Ignacio Farias, Sandra Jasper, Sina Ribak and Ela Spalding
Floating Archive Work
With Sarah Bovelett, Teresa Huppertz, Roman Karrer and various association members
Tuesday, 12 October 2021 17:00–20:00
Wednesday, 13 October 2021 17:00–20:00
Thursday, 14 October 2021 17:00–21:00
Friday, 15 October 2021 17:00–21:00
Saturday, 16 October 2021 15:00–21:00
Sunday, 17 October 2021 15:00–20:00