Welcome to the inaugural episode of Notes From The Field, a Cement Fields podcast where we talk to artists, practitioners and researchers to dig deeper into our projects and the people behind them.
Our very first guest in this series is Floating University Berlin. We’re really grateful that we got to spend some time with a few of the team behind the pioneering project this Summer, as part of a Cultural Bridge funded peer to peer exchange programme called Wetland.
Through a series of online reading groups and two week-long labs in London and Berlin, we explored and reflected on the practices of care and hospitality we use to engage communities and redefine our former industrial locations.
Condensing several month’s worth of discussions proved challenging, so we have chosen to zoom in on our visit to Berlin as the culmination of our time together, and as such the moment when the threads of our exchange began to gather.
This episode of Notes From The Field invites the listener into our week-long Lab, which took place during a September heatwave in the rainwater retention pool of the former Berlin Tempelhof airport, the site which floating has called home since 2019. Over 36 minutes we attempt to encapsulate the spirit and potential of Wetland and provide a window into our shared practice.
Cement Fields is a visual arts organisation working collaboratively with artists and communities to create ambitious new art along the Thames Estuary in North Kent. Our programme is an exploration of place and process, defined by the multiple shifting landscapes that stretch along the Thames from Dartford to Whitstable. We invite artists, participants and audiences to use North Kent's unique contexts to ask radical questions and explore new ideas. Through this interaction we create experimental art and develop imagination, skills and pathways into creative careers. Cement Fields has grown out of Whitstable Biennale, a visual arts festival founded in 2002. We’re proud to be a National Portfolio Organisation, supported using public funding by Arts Council England, and the University of Kent.
Floating University Berlin is a Natureculture learning site and fully functioning urban campus run by non-profit organisation Floating e.V., a self organised group of practitioners whose mission is to open, maintain, and take care of this unique site while bringing non-disciplinary, radical and participatory programs to the public. Floating operates in solidarity with the site's history and the lineage of alternative narratives for urban development. It is an ecosystem in which to learn to engage, embrace complexity, and imagine different forms of living.
Wetland was funded by Cultural Bridge, which celebrates bilateral artistic partnerships between the UK and Germany through a collaboration between Arts Council England, the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, British Council, Creative Scotland, Fons Soziokultur, Goethe-Institut London and Wales Arts International.
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