Echoes, Ghosts, Songs & Soils
4/25/2026, 3 – 10:30 PM

The event kicks off with a sound-based, participatory performance by theatre director Jug Đorđević. The work is inspired by the protest movements against the Serbian government in response to the Novi Sad railway station accident.

In her choreographic work, dancer Isabel Cruz enters into a dialogue with her late father. Inspired by the feel of the Akademie building, physical resonance spaces and contemplative moments for mourning unfold.

Choreographer and dancer Hrishikesh Pawar returns to the role of dancer and presents two autobiographical works choreographed by Akademie member Arila Siegert.

Composer Huihui Cheng creates a performative listening space at the intersection of sound, theatrical gesture and visual projection with two pieces.

In his concerto for string quartet, composer Sinan Samanli unfolds sound as a fluid landscape, referring to images of waterfalls and cascades.

Through a web of perceptions that connects the many layers of a life, writer Éléonore de Duve brings the world of her protagonist Sophia to life: her tragedy and, behind it – backwards in time – the possibility of a new beginning.

The ecofeminist performance by director and choreographer Franziska Wenning and the audiovisual reading by writer Claudia Durastanti merge inscribed stories of bodies and territories. In the twilight between day and night, dance and literature open up a space in which connectedness with the ground, gravity, magical thinking and transcendence can be experienced anew.

Artist and researcher Sophie Seita activates the graphic scores of her installation “the swamp under the forum” in the exhibition hall through a performance. The “swamp” becomes a metaphor for permeability and what the forum tries to suppress, the installation a playground for language and sensation before and after collapse.

Poet Regina Menke reads texts from the poetry cycle Schild und Spiel und Idylle, gekehrte und um- (Shield and Play and Idyll, Turned and Turned). The texts revolve around springtails, gaps in teeth, the difficulty of distinguishing between the pronouns “I” and “you”, and the question of whether the landscape should be more tangible.

The poems from Nude Imperative by Logan February move between the poles of love and devotion, discipline and inner conflict, and immanence and transcendence.

The writer Diána Vonnák reads, accompanied by the music of Kin Teal, from the series Alien, Ghost – audio meditations on the dilemmas of witnessing and complicity, on grief, guilt and anger. It confronts the mountains of linguistic debris, reports, memos and analyses we produce to channel the raw reality of war onto desks in courts or ministries, to news headlines, and academic journals.

Assistants can pick up blind and visually impaired visitors from the Bellevue S-Bahn station or the Hansaplatz U-Bahn station during the programme and accompany them to the Akademie building on Hanseatenweg.

Please register for this service by 24 April by contacting Franciska Schmitt at f.j.c.schmitt@googlemail.com.

Live audio description in German via headphones will be provided by Swantje Henke, with consultation by Dirk Sorge (Berlinklusion), for the following performances:

4 pm: Isabel Cruz
6 pm: Huihui Cheng
8 pm: Claudia Durastanti