Participants
PARTICIPANTS
Alexander Steffen
Alexander Steffen (*1967) was born and raised in West-Berlin. He grew up in a shared flat in Schöneberg, studied Political Sciences at the Freie Universität Berlin, trained at Dirk Nishen publishing house. Discovered Allen Ginsberg and Reality Sandwiches. Edited a photobiography of William S. Burroughs. Spent time exploring the techno clubs and ruins of Berlin’s new centre after the fall of the wall. Was director of the art gallery transition from 1999-2005. Has been working for the Berlin International Film Festival (Berlinale) since 2005. 2009 marks the start of the Vanishing Berlin project. Since then several exhibitions.
Anastasia Ponomariova
Anastasiya Ponomariova works on the edge of architecture, art, community development, practice and research. She is co-founder of NGO Urban Curators and СO-HATY initiative. Since 2015 she worked in the Eastern part of Ukraine, enhanced local communities to work with city landscape. Anastasiya’s academic background includes fellowship in Levental Center for Advanced Urbanism at MIT (Cambridge) and architectural department at ETH Zurich. Her current project focuses on integrated, sustainable and rapid housing for internally displaced people in Ukraine.
Anneke Lubkowitz
Anneke Lubkowitz is a literaty expert and author. In 2018 she published her essay “Falling through the map” with SuKuLTuR and in 2020 the anthology Psychogeography with Matthes & Seitz. Further texts on urban walking appeared in the magazine metamorphosen and the anthology “Flexen. Flaneusen* write cities” edited by Özlem Özgül Dündar, Mia Göhring, Ronya Othmann and Lea Sauer (Verbrecher Verlag 2019). She lives and works in Munster.
Chris Petit
Chris Petit, born in 1949, is an English writer and filmmaker. In the 1970s he was an editor for Time Out and wrote for the Melody Maker. His first film was the British cult road movie Radio On, his film An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1982) was submitted to the 32nd Berlin International Film Festival. His films often have a strong psychogeographical element, and he has frequently collaborated with writer Iain Sinclair. He has also written a number of crime novels including The Butchers of Berlin (2016).
Claudia Basrawi
Author, illustrator, director, performer, lecturer in creative writing. Born in Beirut, dance training at the Hanover University of Music. Studied Arabic literature and history in Berlin and Damascus. In 2009 was published Claudia’s novel Mediterranean Anemia, written during a stay in Damascus, Beirut and Cairo. In 2015/16 Claudia directed and developed El Jihad, a play about propaganda and recruitment in the name of Jihad. Since 2019, Clauda has been working on drawings, texts, and performances for the project Beirut – Meeting The Saints.
Daniela Fromberg
Daniela Fromberg, born in 1968, is a sculptor who uses the potential of everyday, “poor” materials and used objects that she finds in her personal environment. She has a penchant for natural products, food, sounds, found objects and old building materials, which she transfers into sculptural, expansive arrangements while fluctuating between sound, film, photography and performance.
David Wagner
David Wagner, born in 1971, lives as a writer in Berlin. His novel Meine Nachtblaue Hose was published in 2000, followed by books like the child speaks, four apples and what color has Berlin. His novel Life received the 2013 Leipzig Book Fair Prize and the 2014 Best Foreign Novel of the Year Award from the People’s Republic of China, and has been translated into fifteen languages. In 2014 he was Friedrich Dürrenmatt Professor of World Literature at the University of Bern, and in 2017 Writer in Residence at the University of Innsbruck. In 2019 he published The Forgetful Giant, awarded the Bavarian Book Prize, 2023.
Dima Levytskyi (Miskyi Theatre)
Dima Levytskyi is the founder of Miskyi Theater. Miskyi Theater offers performances in which the urban space is both the stage and the main action. The initiative unites artists and researchers who work interdisciplinary with different themes and spaces. Modern Ukrainian composers and sound designers are involved in creating audio works that are used during the walks of Miskyi Theatre.
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Evgenija Wassilew (geräusch[mu’si:k])
geräusch[mu’si:k] is a sound art mediation project founded in 2009. With a participatory artistic work, the association pursues the goal of establishing sound as an aesthetic means of expression and promoting the joy of noise and attentive listening. Evgenija Wassilew (Berlin) is a visual artist who deals with auditory perception and its diverse traces: performative, graphic, sculptural and installative.
Fabian Saul (Flaneur Magazine)
Fabian Saul is an editor-in-chief of a Flaneur magazine. Flaneur is a site-specific magazine telling global stories on a micro-local scale from streets all around the world. Flaneur’s team lives on site and builds a local network of contributors for each issue. Flaneur embraces the street’s complexity, its layers and fragmented nature and collaborates with locals to unearth histories beyond the dominant narratives, explore current political issues or just shine a light on the things we normally walk past. These fragments, woven together, form artistic and literary interpretations of the street and transport the reader directly into a microcosm of many voices. We come to understand: Streets are always larger from the inside than from the outside.
Emily Hunt
Emily Hunt’s history as a rare-book dealer has informed her encyclopaedic approach to her art-making. Hunt was selected as a participant in the Goldrausch Künstlerinnen Projekt 2020. Her work has been exhibited at SCCA (GH), Sonneundsolche (DE), Galerie Wedding (DE), Hans Arp Museum (DE), Museum of Contemporary Art (AU), Zitadelle Spandau Museum (DE) Sim Smith Gallery (GB) Te Uru Waitakere Gallery (NZ) and Monopol Galerie (PL).
Grashina Gabelmann (Flaneur Magazine)
Grashina Gabelmann is an editor in chief at Flaneur magazine. Flaneur is a nomadic, independent magazine focussing on one street per issue. The magazine embraces the street’s complexity, its layers and fragmented nature with a literary approach. The team spends two months on location and collaborates with artists of all disciplines to create projects on and relating to the street. The magazine thus becomes an object of art in itself.
Jacek Slaski
Jacek Slaski, born in Gdańsk in 1976, immigrated with his parents, recognized as political refugees. He has been living in Berlin since 1985. After graduating from high school, he studied European ethnology and musicology at Humboldt University. During this time he was involved in the literary scene and worked as a photo editor on various book projects. In 2000s, he published his first journalistic works, initially for radio. In 2006 he did a traineeship at the city magazine tip Berlin, where he still works as an editor today. His texts have appeared in the Berliner Zeitung, Spex, Rolling Stone, Zitty, Galore, etc. 2003-2012 he co-operated the art space Zero Project. In 2018 his interview book Conversations with Genialen Dilletanten was published. In 2022 he published the book Pictures Against War (Verband Schaltzeit) with illustrations by Ukrainian artists created in response to Russia’s attack on Ukraine. Also, he co-edited the illustrated book Kulturbrauerei – 1991 bis heute. A co-organizer of the festival Drift!
Julia Lübbecke
Julia Lübbecke’s works deal with the relationship between body, institution and affects. She is particularly interested in the potential of desire or discomfort, which are key themes in her transdisciplinary practice. Her works have been shown at Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos in Santiago de Chile, Galerie im Turm in Berlin and IKOB – Museum of Contemporary Art in Eupen (BE), among others. In 2022 her first monograph was published by Sandstein Verlag.
Jürgen Ghebrezgiabiher
was born in 1963. After studying literature in Main and interpreting on the Avon, I came to freelance language work and translation rather late. In the many years of collaboration with Sven Koch, numerous texts by the London author Iain Sinclair have been translated into German — since 2005 almost a dozen articles in Lettre International and two books published in 2020.
Koopkultur e.V.
Koopkultur e.V. is a Berlin based network of artists, urbanists, scientists, educators and activists from Eastern Europe. Together we do transdisciplinary projects that often involve urban space. Since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, we have initiated projects in the field of cultural social work. With artistic and participatory formats, we support families arriving in Berlin and connect them with actors from the civil society. Koopkultur Team: Petronela Bordeianu, Maryna Markova, Olesya Chayka.
Marc Weiser
Marc Weiser, born in 1967 in Düsseldorf, studied philosophy, comparative music musicology and sound studies in Düsseldorf and Berlin. He has been working as a freelance music curator, media artist and composer in Berlin since the mid-90s. Marko Krojak has been working as a photographic chronicler of the squatter scene in Friedrichshain since the early 90s.
Mariia Borysova (Miskyi Theatre)
Mariia Borysova is a member of the Miskyi Theater team. Miskyi Theater offers performances in which the urban space is both the stage and the main action. The initiative unites artists and researchers who work interdisciplinary with different themes and spaces. Modern Ukrainian composers and sound designers are involved in creating audio works that are used during the walks of Miskyi Theatre.
Martin Schmitz
Martin Schmitz, born in 1956. Studied architecture, urban and landscape planning with Lucius Burckhardt at the University of Kassel. Author of a book About the Culture of The Snack Bar, 1983. Curator of the film program of the 8th documenta Kassel 1987, the conference Dilettantism, Görlitz 1995, the exhibition Die Tödliche Doris – Kunst, Berlin 1999, the international congress Walking Science : See, recognize and plan, Frankfurt 2008 and the Lucius Burckhardt Conventions 2014/2017/2023 in Kassel. Publisher of books on architecture, art, film, design, music, theater and literature since 1989. Professor at the Kunsthochschule Kassel since 2013.
Nadire Biskin
Nadire Biskin was born in Berlin in 1987. She studied philosophy and Spanish at the Humboldt University in Berlin. She writes essays and prose. Her debut novel Ein Spiegel für mein Gegenüber (dtv) was published in 2022.
Oksana Kazmina
Oksana Kazmina is a documentary filmmaker, media artist and performer based in Ukraine and the US. Her interests lie in the relations between a body and digital moving images, critical queer practice, and situated geographies. In 2016–2017 Kazmina headed a position of assistant professor of film studies at Wesleyan, CT. Today she teaches video art at the college of Visual and Performing Arts at Syracuse University, NY. Together with Vasyl Tkachenko she initiated the music project Serviz Propav. Kazmina is also a member of Freefilmers, a cinemovement and NGO, which promotes decentralization of cultural processes and independent filmmaking, especially in Eastern Ukraine. Their latest projects focus on memories and archives beyond official historical narratives and gender violence in patriarchal capitalist society. Nowadays Freefilmers is engaged in building an activist and volunteer network of solidarity and support for Ukrainians who suffer from and fight against Russian imperialist aggression.
Özlem Dündar
Özlem Özgül Dündar writes poetry, prose, plays, radio plays and essays. Her volume of poetry, Gedanken Zerren, was published by Elif Verlag in 2018. Her radio play Türken, Feue was awarded “Radio Play of the Year 2020”. She performs with her collectives Kollektiven Ministerium für Mitgefühl and Flexen. Also, Özlem is co-editor of the anthology Flexen — Flâneusen*WRITE CITY (Verbrecher Verlag 2019).
Patrick Bieler
Patrick Bieler is a researcher at the Institute for European Ethnology at the Humboldt University in Berlin. He did his doctorate with a thesis on the connection between mental health and urban life and is currently more interested in how interdisciplinary connectivity between the social and life sciences can be meaningfully established. Photo by Rick Moser.
Paul Scraton
was born in 1979. Paul Scraton was born in Lancashire in the north of England and has lived in Berlin since 2002. His work has been published in English, German, Polish and Italian, and includes the books Ghosts on the Shore: Travels along Germany’s Baltic coast (Influx Press), Am Rand: um ganz Berlin (Matthes & Seitz) and the forthcoming Harzwanderungen — Auf Heine’s spuren durch den deutschen Wald (Matthes & Seitz).
Peter Strickmann (geräusch[mu’si:k])
geräusch[mu’si:k] is a sound art mediation project founded in 2009. With a participatory artistic work, the association pursues the goal of establishing sound as an aesthetic means of expression and promoting the joy of noise and attentive listening. The sound artist Peter Strickmann (Berlin) creates installations and performances with self-made instruments and acoustic feedback.
Uwe Schütte
Uwe Schütte was born in 1967 in Sauerland. He grew up in Upper Bavaria and studied in Munich and Norwich. He was a lecturer in Birmingham for two decades, today he lives as an author in Berlin and is also a literary critic, music journalist, cultural essayist and early flâneur in London and Paris. His books deal mainly with W.G. Sebald and Kraftwerk, as well as psychopathological art and extremist music, and communism as a failed attempt to liberate the dead or the present of the apocalypse.
Sashko Protyah
Sashko Protyah is a film director and activist from Mariupol, Ukraine. He’s a co-founder of Freefilmers, a collective of artists and filmmakers. In his films, he works with topics of memory, otherness, and alienation. Now Sashko is based in Zaporizhzhia and volunteers for IDPs and the Ukrainian army.
Stefan Roigk
was born in 1974, works interdisciplinary between sound collage, installation and musical graphics. Noise as an artistic-aesthetic field of research is both the starting point and the central medium of his work.
Sven Koch
Sven Koch was born in 1967, studied comparative literature and has been working as an editor and translator from English since 1994. With Jürgen Ghebrezgiabiher he is trying to make the work of Iain Sinclair better known in German-speaking countries. Together they published the volume Cities Begin in 2020, which presents Sinclair’s excursions to and through Berlin, Marseille and Palermo.
Roberto Ohrt
Roberto Ohrt was born 1954 in Santiago de Chile. He is an art historian, and lives in Hamburg. He works as an art journalist for Art, Texte zur Kunst, Frieze and is co-editor of the magazine Die Beute. Exhibition curator and founder of the Academy Isotrop.
Thomas Karsten
Thomas Karsten, born in Paderborn in 1966, since 1987 lives in Berlin. Studied at the former TFH and worked as an architect since 1992. In 2003 founded a studio Karhard with his wife Alexandra Erhard. First project for club Berghain was initiated in 2003. Since 2003 the studio was working as an architect with a focus on conversion and building in existing buildings. In 2017 the team visited Kyiv and made a project for club K41.
Tobias Morawski
Tobias Morawski is an artist, communication designer and author from Berlin. His recent projects includes Reclaim Your City – Urbane Protestbewegungen am Beispiel Berlins (Verlag Assoziation A), Making Room: Cultural Production in Occupied Spaces (Journal of Aesthetics & Protest), The Death of Graffiti (Possible Books), Potosí Principle Archive (Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König) and more.
Valeria Lazarenko
Valeria Lazarenko, PhD in Psychology. Postdoctoral researcher at Georg-Simmel Zenter for Metropolitan Studies (Humboldt University, Berlin), affiliated researcher of “Affective Societies” network at Freie Universität Berlin. In her doctoral thesis, she explored psychogeographic narratives and identities of internally displaced people in Ukraine. Currently, she is working on a project about subjective experiences of displacement from Ukraine to Berlin.
Yuliia Kulish
Yuliia Kulish is a co-organizer of the festival Drift! She was born in Donetsk, Ukraine. Currently she is a Ph.D. student of literature at Kyiv Mohyla Academy and leader of an alternative education group called Neoclub, which follows the psychogeographical legacy of the Situationist International.
