Multispecies Assembly – Joint Closing: On Water. PARCOURS & Confluence of European Water Bodies at Floating University Berlin.
Open to the public, registration required, limited capacity.
This event takes in English language.
Please register. Admission is free.
Accessibility:
The site is wheelchair accessible, as well as most spaces on the site, including toilets and bar. When arriving at the gate, if the large door on the right is closed, please inform us and we will open it for you.
Do you know with whom you are sharing the Spree ecosystem with?
Join us, on the 6th of September 2026 and become part of the “Multipecies Assembly”. A joint event for the final day of the fourth Confluence of European Water Bodies in Berlin, and the closing of the „On Water. Parcours“ by the Berlin University Alliance (BUA). Jointly we invite you to the Floating University, to experience aquatic ecosystems as living commons that transcend disciplinary, territorial, and species boundaries.
Highlights
You can experience water-centric perspectives, co-create river songs, taste neighbouring plants, trace stories through the atmosphere, and are invited to stand in for river beings:
- Berlin’s first Spree Species Council by the performance collective Organismendemokratie e.V./ Club Real – Represent one of the more than 150 species to debate current challenges of the Spree river ecosystem
- Participatory Workshops by scientists and artists linking research and everyday life to more-than-rivers (limited capacity)
- Joint Closing of the „On Water. Parcours“ (Berlin University Alliance) and the Confluence of European Water Bodies
Location
The Floating University Berlin – which evolved through long-term community practice from a human-made urban wetland into a living water creature and a natureculture learning site, offers the setting for a day for reflection, for listening, and for imagining.
Reimagining Rivers
Dying rivers, broken by extractivism, intoxicated by fertilizers or drained by damming, are alarming. Could rivers survive if they would be recognized as a living being – both in imagination and law? What if a river would be more than the sum of its organisms?
Can more-than-human worlds be integrated into democratic decision-making?
Water connects places, species, and stories
Throughout the day, artists, researchers, and participants will explore water not as merely a resource or a landscape, but as a medium of relations circulating through atmospheres, plants, bodies, voices, and multispecies worlds. Participants experiment with sensing, listening, tasting, singing, and role-playing.
Program 10:00 – 20:00
- Sensorial Guided-Tour to experience the floating university berlin
- Per-Forming Atmospheric Commons – Clemens Winkler, Humboldt University & Matters of Activity
- River Song Workshop – Alessandra Eramo
- Metamorphic membranes – A wild tea tasting – Cholena de Koningh with Selina Tenzer
- Spree Species Council – A Multispecies Assembly & Preference Voting – by the performance collective Organismendemokratie e.V./ Club Real
- Culinary Care: Enjoy delicious food on site prepared by TDD collective
- A bar run by floating university berlin
- Living Infrastructure exhibition unfolds the transformation of a technical rainwater infrastructure into an ongoing eco-social experiment in multi-species living
Joint Closing of the „On Water. Parcours“ (Berlin University Alliance) and the Confluence of European Water Bodies
The event is the closing day of the fourth Confluence of European Water Bodies in Berlin, as well as the BUA On Water. Parcours program.
The final day of the Confluence of European Water Bodies brings together members of the pan-European network of over 40 water bodies and their communities in Berlin. The gathering reflects on rivers as ecological, cultural and political commons and how that change of perspective plays in the sustainable future of the city.
The „On Water. Parcours“ (Berlin University Alliance) has traced Berlin’s water knowledge and waterscapes through artistic research, scientific inquiry and collective exploration over the course of the past two years. The closing of the „On Water. Parcours“ event series, is an invitation to attune to the ecologies that sustain us, imagine new forms of responsibility and coexistence, and celebrate the many ways we live with — and within — water.
Together, the encounters and collaborations of the joint closing, invite new forms of responsibility, coexistence and river citizenship.
Sensorial Guided-Tour to experience the Floating University berlin
11:30 AM – 12:30 PM
Join us for a guided walk around Floating University, the Tempelhof rainwater retention basin with a member of the association. More than a technical facility, this urban wetland has become an ongoing eco-social experiment in multi-species living. Discover how a self-organised association of over sixty members accompanied the transformation of this grey infrastructure into a feral urban ecosystem hosting wetland flora, insects, birds, and mammals alongside public programs. The tour traces the basin’s layered history and introduces the figure of the steward: a collective practice of care, maintenance, and negotiation that tends both the water body and the social life around it. We will explore how Floating e.V. operates: maintaining spatial structures, supporting ecological succession, opening the site to diverse publics, and doing the institutional work required to secure its future.
Participatory Workshops (limited capacity)
Language: English, with possible spontaneous translation to German
Per-Forming Atmospheric Commons – Clemens Winkler, Humboldt University & Matters of Activity
10:30 AM – 1 PM
A participatory workshop that brings water, soil, and air samples into relation as speculative materials for sensing atmospheric commons and questioning care, coexistence, responsibility, and river citizenship.
Per-Forming Atmospheric Commons explores air, water, and aerosols as shared media connecting bodies, infrastructures, plants, rivers, weather, and more-than-human life. Starting from the Floating University basin and nearby waterways, participants observe and compare water, soil, and air samples, then transform their observations into situated atmospheric imaginaries through mist, sensing, and movement. Once turned into mist, the samples become speculative assemblages of sediments, sweat, tyre abrasion, and other residues of multispecies cohabitation. Because such mixtures often escape perception, they open a shared space for sensing, imagining, and questioning. Together we map atmospheric commons and ask how local atmospheres resonate with wider landscapes. The session culminates in Atmospheric Commons Declarations that question care, responsibility, coexistence, and river citizenship.
Clemens Winkler is a designer, artist, and researcher based in Berlin. He works internationally across art, design, science, and education, developing experimental formats for exhibitions, workshops, teaching, and artistic research. He is affiliated with the Cluster of Excellence Matters of Activity at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and runs the Laboratory for Narrative Materials.
https://clemenswinkler.com – https://www.instagram.com/clemens__winkler/
River Song Workshop – Alessandra Eramo
10:00 AM – 1 PM
In the „River Song“ participants explore vocal performance practices and listening, blending human and non-human voices inspired by the sound of the river.
River Song is an interdisciplinary workshop centred on the theme of rivers. Drawing inspiration from the sound of water and the metaphorical dimension of rivers, the workshop invites participants to explore the potential of the voice as an expressive medium. The voice is ephemeral yet deeply embodied, through extended vocal techniques, the voice can be transformed and unfold in unexpected forms. A central focus of the workshop is the concept of ecological memory: a river carries the memory of floods and droughts in its rocks, sounds, and stories. Through singing, graphic scores, text and mimetic practices, we will create a choir that flows like a river – soft, loud, still, moving – blurring the boundaries between human voices and environmental sounds, whether real, imagined or remembered. The workshop will conclude with a choral performance open to the public.
Alessandra Eramo is a sound artist, vocalist, performer-composer based in Berlin. Her practice spans performance, installation, sound poetry, video, and drawing, exploring the latent acoustic territories of the voice and noise as a socio-political matter. Widely acclaimed for her distinctive voice art, she has exhibited and performed internationally at festivals, museums, art spaces and on radio. https://ezramo.com/ – https://www.instagram.com/alessandra_eramo/
Metamorphic membranes – A wild tea tasting – Cholena de Koningh with scientific support by Selina Tenzer
11:00 AM – 1 PM
A guided tasting of wild teas made from riverside plants, where stories of ecological exchange reveal how, like a river, we absorb and are transformed by what flows through us.
Rivers carry more than water; tea carries more than taste. This tasting invites participants to drink wild, oxidised teas made from plants that grow along rivers. With each cup, we introduce the plant and it’s key characteristics, the oxidation process behind its aroma and flavour, and the ecology that ties it to the river, affirming its right to grow there. Like a river, we absorb our surroundings, and are changed by what flows through us. Each tea is a small act of that exchange: the plant’s nutrients become part of our body, its flavours activate emotions, and its story adapts our way of thinking. We close the tasting and talk by collectively bruising fresh plant leaves, breaking their cell walls to activate oxidation, the start of the transformation behind every tea you just tasted.
Cholena de Koningh is an artist and forager who collaborates with chefs, scientists, and other artists to connect people with nature through wild food. What began as curiosity about common weeds grew into a devotion to studying edible flora and fungi, a passion she now shares with others, helping them build a closer, wilder relationship with the nature around them.
www.feistyforagers.com – https://www.instagram.com/feisty.forager/
Selina Tenzer is an Agricultural Research Associate in the Forest Forest Systems project (Waldgartensysteme, WASYS) funded by the German Federal Agency for Nature Conservation, Project Manager of the INTEGRA project and the Food Forest Seminar Series, Food Forest Consultant, as part of the STATTwerke e.V.. She is trained in soil science, where biology, physics and chemistry converge. Passionate about land use and the question how plants feed humans, she also works as a freelance environmental educator specializing in soil science for Weltacker Berlin e.V..
Spree Species Council – A Multispecies Assembly & Preference Voting (limited capacity)
2 PM – 5 PM
Partly English
Younger participants (10 years and older) can participate together with an older person.
Multispecies Assembly with Species Representatives
What if not only humans had political rights, but if all species were included in administrative and political decision making? The participatory performance by the artist group Club Real is an invitation to a change of perspective: The river Spree is a multi species society. All participants of the performance take on the role of a species currently present in the Spree. To enable this Club Real works with scientists compiling lists of living creatures. Eel and bitterling, mitten crab and zebra mussel, cyanobacterium or water lily – more than 150 species representatives will debate current challenges of the spree ecosystem. Together they will vote which of the 4 presented initiatives has the biggest potential to support necessary transformations. It is possible to participate in the performance with no prior knowledge – just show up and dive into a multi species performative experiment.
The artists group Club Real is devising and realising participatory site-specific projects: Installations, one-to-one encounters, political role play scenarios and participatory urban development projects invite visitors to help shape alternative concepts of reality. Since 2017 they are working with multi species scenarios and the participatory political practice Organisms Democracy.
https://organismendemokratie.org/ – https://www.clubreal.de/ – instagram.com/organismsdemocracy
Closing & Get-together
5 PM – 6 PM
Curatorial, Design & Research Lead of the Confluence of European Water Bodies
Léon Gross & Jakob Kukula
Symbiotic Lab
Curatorial Lead Multispecies Assembly
Dr. Nina Samuel, Sina Ribak & Tuçe Erel
On Water. Parcours, Berlin University Alliance