Reading List # 131
An entirely subjective list of things happening in Berlin
July 15
The Middle East in an Age of War and Climate Breakdown
with Adam Hanieh
The Middle East once again stands at the centre of global war and a widening economic crisis. This lecture places the current moment in the longer history of fossil capitalism and the rise of American power from the mid-twentieth century onward. It examines especially the rise of the Gulf states and their crucial place in sharpening geopolitical rivalries as well as the relative decline of US hegemony. It concludes by reflecting on what these developments might mean for global progressive movements in an age of war and climate breakdown.
Adam Hanieh is a professor in the Department of Development Studies and director of the Middle East Institute at SOAS, University of London. He is the author of several books on issues of political economy and the Middle East, including Crude Capitalism: Oil, Corporate Power, and the Making of the World Market (Verso Books 2024), which was co-winner of the 2025 Best Book by an International Scholar, Global and Transnational Section of the American Sociological Association.
The talk will be followed by a Q&A moderated by Nick Wilcke.
Free admission.
(EN)
7 pm | KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Auguststr. 69
July 15
Res Sigusch: “Unbegründete Ängste”
Reading and talk. Moderated by Georgina Fakunmoju.
The thirty-year-old Christian Lotz lives a queer single life in a small town in Saxony. Every Sunday he meets his parents for a champagne breakfast, and during the week he works at a gym. Muscular and handsome – his mother raves that he looks like David Beckham in the early 2000s – he is plagued by inner insecurity and worries about basically everything: How does he come across to others? Why can’t he find the right man? What does the future hold in times of climate change, right-wing extremism, and pandemics? And isn’t he perhaps already terminally ill, as his daily internet searches would have him believe? His answer is always the worst-case scenario. Thus, an existential fear grows within Christian that soon knows no cause. Only when his situation becomes impossible to ignore does he open up to those around him – and learns: Misery loves company. And sometimes all it takes is a spark of courage.
(DE)
7 pm | Bezirkszentralbibliothek Pablo Neruda, Frankfurter Allee 14 A
Note: We falsely announced this event in our June newsletter. This time it’s really happening!
July 18
Olga Hohmann: The Bird Feeder, with Naomi Abukha, Henriette Kupke & Florian Hein
In The Bird Feeder, the focus is on our relationship with animals in public urban space. Berlin’s residents affectionately call their city pigeons the “rats of the sky” – perhaps the animal people encounter most often, aside from flies or clothes moths: alive, injured, or dead. We know them in almost every possible state: alone or in groups, cooing outside windows, gathered beneath U-Bahn bridges, flying low overhead, or appearing unexpectedly on our doorsteps. Yet these “rats of the sky” are only one of many non-human creatures with whom we live in a quiet symbiosis every day, alongside rats, foxes, squirrels, the swans on the Landwehr Canal, and the hares in the Hansaviertel. Sometimes it is not entirely clear who is host and who is parasite.
Olga Hohmann works with a vocal ensemble and is costumed by Eva Noeske. She writes essays, prose miniatures and meandering texts intended to be read aloud. In an almost musical form, she combines more or less fictional narratives with found material, which coalesce into a rhythmic murmur. Slogans, aphorisms and flashes of insight are treated as equal in the hierarchy.
(DE)
2 pm | Tropez, Sommerbad Humboldthain, Wiesenstraße 1
July 19
Research Exchange with the Pomo Weavers Society & the Floating University Berlin
You are warmly invited to a research-in-progress exchange around topics of fire ecologies, tending the wild, ancestral knowledges of artmaking and weaving, decolonial restitutions, transhistorical memory, more-than-human kin, and restorative relations to land.
“Now / make room in the mouth / for grassesgrassesgrasses” quotes Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas (2017). Her poem stretches towards living relatives: plants that sit at the very center of many Native American lifeworlds—between material and spoken languages. Imagine these grassesgrassesgrasses woven into baskets as a living archive of culture and ecology, taking on forms of delicacy, strength, utility and ornament. These vessels hold nourishment, seeds, medicine and the stories of ecosystems flourishing under the co-cultivations among humans, animals and elements. Every weaver is also a wildland cultivator. Baskets are an art form connected to the living weaver and their environment.
Celebrated tribal culture keepers Sherrie Smith-Ferri and Silver Galleto from Indigenous Pomo Country in California will share stories and creative practices of weaving upon the occasion of the first reunion in over 120 years between Pomo people and an important collection of baskets and regalia held by the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. They will share insights from their research visit in dialogue with artists Caitlin Berrigan and Garance Maurer, and with the reeds around the reservoir of Floating University.
You will also be invited to take part in the conversation to share about your own work and research, as we are actively seeking connections for institutional and individual collaborations to move this international project forward and re-establish continuities across historical gaps and living, contemporary art practices.
Floating will propose some refreshments and food. Accessible and open to all bodies. Event in English.
Please RSVP with your interest and access needs by 16 July 2026.
(EN)
4-8 pm | Floating University, Lilienthalstr. 32