Interdisciplinary Artistic Residency and Festival
Berlin | Museum Kesselhaus Herzberge

31 Aug & 1 Sep 2024

3 pm - 10 pm

15:00 - 22:00 Uhr

 

Herzbergstraße 79, Haus 29

10365 Berlin-Lichtenberg

For its third edition, the site-specific art festival ONSITE is returning to the more than 130-year-old psychiatric hospital and park grounds Herzberge in Berlin-Lichtenberg. In this year's ONSITE Co-Lab, 20 artists of different nationalities develop interactive works in transdisciplinary collaborations. In an ongoing exchange and by examining their own roots, current positionings, and artistic practice, they investigate the history and present of Museum Kesselhaus Herzberge and the adjacent hospital as well as topics such as normativity, perception, psyche, memory and healing. The artworks based on this research will be presented during a two-day program, including light, sound and dance performances, interactive installations, workshops and artistic interventions.

CO-LAB 2024

This year's artists

The Site

We understand site-specific research as the investigation of the relationship of a place with both the territory or space it is embedded in and the subjects that inhabit or pass through it. As living beings, we claim territories by fighting over them or working them, by confining them or defining them. We desert them or breathe life into them. So do the non-living: A mountain casting a shadow on a hot afternoon defines a new territory in which both humans and non-humans share a sense of relief when the temperature drops and the humidity rises, when new smells and colours emerge, and the living world finds itself really present in the shaded reality created by the animated material world.

In their apparent static locality, the experience of sites can be as multiple and ephemeral as the personal relationships established with them. A forest, for example, feels very different from the perspective of the hunter, botanist, walker, nature enthusiast or fairy-tale storyteller. And as the biologist Jakob von Uexküll noticed: Even the stem of a flower becomes a very  versatile element in such forest, whether it is experienced in relation to the environment of the boy picking the flower to put it behind his ear, the ant using it as a path on its way to the goblet, the larvae drilling holes in it to reach the juices that make its liquid house or finally the deer that simply chews and swallows it as food. And, of course, the forest can also turn into an archaeological site that tells us stories of a distant past. It points us to the origins of human civilizations, or provides proof of the existence of species that have been extinct for thousands of years. 

 

How do these distant pasts on site resonate in our lives still today? 
And what might be the traces of our existence to be found in the distant future?

HERZBERGE

 

The site of the residency - the social habitat of Herzberge - serves as the starting point of the artistic research and creation during the residency period. The psychiatric hospital Königin Elisabeth Herzberge is located in a small city forest and 100 hectare nature conservation area, surrounded by the industrial complexes and multi-lane motorways of Berlin-Lichtenberg. Established in 1893 as Irrenanstalt Herzberge , the hospital frequently changed in the course of the 20th century not only its name but also its ideological and medicinal-historical orientations. The stories of Herzberge - of the hundred-year-old inscriptions on the building’s red brick walls, of the 'double-bodied' newts in the Herzberg pond or of the former head of the pathology department who dedicated himself to environmental protection in the 1980s of the Eastern German GDR - are unique and at the same time embedded in larger contexts such as the global triumph of capitalism, the climate crisis and the ongoing questions about the meaning of life, healing and death, the boundaries of body and psyche and the separation of humans and nature.

Museum Kesselhaus Herzberge

The historic boiler house at Königin Elisabeth Herzberge hospital is a European cultural heritage site. The museum showcases over a century of industrial technology and serves as a hub for deconstructivist ideas and innovative philosophies. The cultural program, rooted in the site's unique history, explores themes of diversity and continuous evolution, aiming to contribute to the "Third Landscape."

 

Museum Kesselhaus, with its strong ties to Herzberge and local networks, provides an ideal space for collaborative creativity. Its work blends traditional methods with "wild archaeology," treating the city, its social fabric, and even individual thoughts as sites of exploration. By connecting archival materials with those of various partners, the museum creates a vibrant, open cultural space. Through artistic interventions, a walk-in archive, and its cultural program, it reveals and interacts with existing elements, inviting artists to critically engage with and expand the collections.

Po:era

ONSITE festival is hosted by the interdisciplinary collective Po:era. Lucas Lacerda and Daniel Weyand create immersive experiences at the intersection of performance, sound and audio-visual art. In their site-specific research they engage with the material, imaginary and living qualities of a space to uncover its stories and paths to the future or to create connective, sense-based encounters with its human and non-human inhabitants. In 2022 the actor / director and filmmaker / anthropologist hosted Onsite Herzberge, the first edition of the site-specific residency and art festival in Berlin-Lichtenberg.  


 

 

 

A project by Po:era 

in cooperation with

Funded by:

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