Ways of Staying With – Thementag mit Workshop, Talk & Performance

In the organizer's words:

Workshop: 3 - 5 p.m.
Talk: 5:30 pm
Performance: 7 pm

On Saturday, July 19, 2025, Bärenzwinger Berlin invites you to the open theme day Ways of Staying With as part of the exhibition This, too, is a way of keeping each other close. The exhibition brings together queer, anti-colonial and embodied perspectives on shared mourning, remembrance and spirituality. The artistic positions ask how mourning can become a place of relationship, resistance and continuity.

Ways of Staying With is dedicated to the question of what it means to stay with each other - to care for each other across loss, distance and time, especially when one is denied the right to grieve. The day brings together artistic, activist and collective practices that resist forgetting and instead dwell on the vulnerable, the unresolved and the fragile.

Collective threads: textile workshop with Joachim Perez

The bilingual, open workshop Collective Threads with the artist Joachim Perez will kick off the event from 15:00-17:00. Together we will work with discarded textiles - as an invitation to remember, repair and connect through threads and fabrics. Perez's practice ties in with the Aids Memorial Quilt based on community work by ACT UP, which commemorates the many people who have died of Aids and has quickly developed from an activist-motivated remembrance project into an archive of care. The focus is on the symbolic gesture of meshing, connecting and networking individual stories and memories into a collective network. It is a drop-in format: interested parties can come and go as they please. The workshop is open to all ages. No previous knowledge is required.

Panel discussion: Queering Grief & Loss

A panel discussion with Sarnt Utamachote (researcher, filmmaker, curator), Francis Seeck (professor at the TH Nuremberg, author and anti-discrimination trainer) and Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi (crazinisT artisT) (performance and installation artist and LGBTIAQ+ activist from Ghana) will follow at 5:30 pm

Queer mourning often tells of the loss of a past life, which was accompanied by expectations that have now crumbled and the horizon of imagined and as yet impossible futures, in the theory of José Esteban Muñoz. LGBTQIAs+ are often invisible in death and mourning - queers in particular feel disenfranchised in their need to mourn by laws that criminalize their sexuality or gender identity or people who fundamentally deny them the right to mourn. But what infrastructures and alternatives to mourning exist for queer people? How can people die and grieve appropriately outside of the heteronormative, bureaucratized funeral culture? Who is considered "worthy of burial"? And who takes care of the grave when there is no longer any contact with the family of origin? Prof. Dr. Francis Seeck, Sarnt Utamachote and Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi are invited to talk about current developments in queer cemeteries in Berlin, the death of young queers through drug abuse in the party scene and care rituals within queer mourning groups, taking into account social class, gender and race.

The conversation will be held in English and moderated by Maxime Lübke.

Performance with Jeremy Wade

The event will conclude at 19:00 with a collective performance by Jeremy Wade, consisting of three participatory rituals. The focus is on community, systemic care and support in times of loss, grief and crisis. The performance creates a space for communal pause, physical sensing and ritual gesture.