The River Spree And Us. On our relationship with a Berlin body of water

Badeschiff und Spree – Die Spree in Berlin, im Vordergrund das Badeschiff

Berlin is built close to the water. Berlin was built from the water. And yet today we have a rather troubled relationship with the city’s most famous river.

Who can claim to really take the Spree seriously – beyond its function of supplying the city with fresh water or its role in transport or tourism? In view of climate change, calls for sustainable urban development and the transformation of transport, doesn’t the Spree deserve more of our attention? As a non-human actor, does it need to be given more rights of its own? And are there opportunities for the Spree to regain its independence – as a meander through Berlin, as a refuge for urban flora and fauna, as a swimming destination for people?

At SPÄTI, we will look at the Spree from an artistic, scientific and activist perspective. We will ask what role the Spree has played for the city in the past, how we currently deal with it and whether we can develop a different relationship with it in the future.

Firstly, actor Maximilian Grünewald and guitarist Sven Daniel Bühler take an artistic approach to the Spree with the Fairy Tale of the Giant Sprejnik. Grünewald will then talk about how he developed new forms of dealing with water in a participatory way with residents of the Spreewald as part of the scientific-artistic project ‘River Stories’ (part of the experimental laboratory ‘Anthroposcenes’ at the HU). Geographer and ethnologist Tomás Uson from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin discusses how we can shape our relationship with water in times of rapid environmental change. Charlotte Hopf will report on the commitment of Flussbad e.V., which she co-founded and which takes the Spree seriously as a water for public bathing – and thus also wants to make lasting changes to the area surrounding the Humboldt Forum. The Spree herself will also be taking a seat at the podium table.

There will be drinks and music after the event. Additionally, you can watch the short film Bellerophonte’s Dream shot by Anthroposcenes in the Spreewald.

Programme

4:30 pm: DJ playlist

6:00 pm: Fairy tale of the giant Sprejnik with musical accompaniment

6:30 pm: Talk with Maximilian Grünewald (‘River Stories’), Charlotte Hopf (Flussbad e.V.), Tomás Uson (Humboldt University). Moderation: Bastian Herbst.

7 pm:  DJ set and drinks

Participants

Sven Daniel Bühler is an actor, radio play narrator and musician. He can be heard in radio plays for NDR and SWR. He has been working as an actor since 2015, including in the feature film Los Veganeros. In 2021, Sven Daniel Bühler was seen in a continuous leading role as ‘Sven’ in the sitcom Ich dich auch! on ZDFneo. He plays several instruments and works as a musician in German theatres and wrote the music for the Spreewald production.

Maximilian Grünewald is an actor and freelance dramaturge. He studied at the Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy Academy of Music and Theatre in Leipzig. This was followed by engagements at the state theatres in Karlsruhe and Hanover. In his work, he deals with the relationship between man and nature and the dramatisation of scientific discourse. In 2020, he co-founded the collective ANTHROPOS EX. The collective looks for ways to give non-human actors a stage and experiments with methods from theatre, film, the visual arts and the natural sciences. This has led to collaborations with students from ETH Zurich, the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) and the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design (HFG), among others. Maximilian Grünewald developed the artistic concept of ‘River Stories’ in close collaboration with scientists, artists and residents of the Spreewald village of Raddusch.

Charlotte Hopf is an architect and architectural historian who lives and works in Berlin. She has been chairwoman of the Flussbad Berlin e.V. association since 2012 and was the master builder of Berlin Cathedral from 2011 to 2016.

The Spree is a river about 400 kilometres long, flowing 700 metres through the Czech Republic and the three federal states of Saxony, Brandenburg and Berlin. Classified by people as a tributary of the Havel, the three sources of the Spree lie in the Lusatian Highlands, where, according to Sorbian legend, the giant Sprejnik created it by shooting arrows. In addition to the Lusatian lowlands, where she is filled by groundwater extracted from open-cast mining, the Spree flows through the Spreewald forest named after it and 44 kilometres through Berlin. In the capital, she meanders – divided into branches and canals – around the Museum Island with the Humboldt Forum, among other places. With a flow rate of just 50 centimetres per second, she likes to take it easy – particularly in Berlin where she lingers a little longer at just nine metres per second. Once a popular bathing water, her water quality has only been improved in recent years so that swimming is once again possible, at least some of the time.

Tomás Uson is a research associate at the Institute of Geography at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. His research interests range from disaster and risk studies to multispecies research, urban studies and the temporality of environmental degradation. As a research associate in the BUA project ‘Re-Scaling Global Health: Human Health and Multispecies Cohabitation on an Urban Planet’ (ReHealth), Tomás analyses the intricate geo-symbiotic interactions between bacteria, heavy metals and humans in highly polluted environments in Peru and Spain. He also analyses the challenges and opportunities of the rights of nature as a legal framework for redefining our understanding of health from a multispecies perspective.

Bastian Herbst studied Modern and Contemporary History, Academic Politics and Public Law at the Universities of Freiburg, Rennes and Basel. From 2019 to 2021, he was a research assistant in the Department of Education and Outreach at the German Historical Museum and has been Curator of Outreach at the Humboldt Lab since November 2021.

Partners

AnthropoScenes combines theatre and science – and everything revolves around water. Whether on the stages of Berlin or at markets in Brandenburg, various audience groups, scientists and artists are called upon to experiment together so that a sustainable future for water becomes part of the public debate. The project is embedded in the inter- and transdisciplinary research consortium , Climate and Water Under Change (CliWaC), which is investigating the effects of climate change on water resources in Berlin and Brandenburg. It is funded by the Berlin University Alliance as an experimental laboratory and will run until the end of 2024.

Flussbad e.V.: Founded in 2012 by fifteen river bath enthusiasts, the non-profit association now has over 500 members who are passionate about and committed to a liveable and sustainable urban development of Berlin, the cleanliness and intelligent use of the inner-city Spree as a natural resource and the reclamation of the almost two-kilometre-long Spree Canal in the historic centre as a recreational and regeneration area for the city’s residents and visitors. The association has been funded by the state of Berlin since 2015. The association also received funding from the federal programme ‘National Urban Development Projects’ until 2023.

- free admission, no ticket required

- 12 years and older

- Language: German

- Mechanical Arena in the Foyer

- Part of: SPÄTI

- Belongs to: After Nature

Next date:

• Date Friday, 27/September/2024 18:00 bis 19:30
• Venue Humboldt Forum
• Address Schloßplatz, 10178 Berlin-Mitte