__matter Festival 2025
Matter shapes our existence, although we tend to forget about its activity in everyday life. The __matter Festival 2025 shines a new light on material agencies. From April 10, 2025, it presents exhibitions, workshops and debates at twelve venues across Berlin, radically changing our understanding of materials as passive, ahistorical substances.
The festival’s contributions demonstrate that materials are a vibrant part of our living world. They connect human and non-human agents, times and places. They are dynamic and have a memory of their own. Realizing material agencies will create a sustainable alternative to prevailing extractivist and energy-consuming technologies, and sparks a fresh perspective on the challenges posed by human-induced climate crisis. Discover the full program here
Our Society-Environment Research Group will contribute to the festival with the exhibition Blazing Heath/Heideglühen, a multi-channel audiovisual installation that examines the complex history and contested afterlife of former military training sites in Brandenburg, Germany.
Following the Soviet troop withdrawal in the early 1990s, these sites were transferred to nature conservation organizations under the »Naturerbe« (Natural Heritage) initiative, which aims to preserve their original state — a notion subject to interpretation. Shaped by decades of tank maneuvers and gunfire, these landscapes bear the scars of destruction, yet paradoxically foster the resurgence of species once thought extinct. Now functioning as »living laboratories«, they serve as sites for studying species adaptation and experimental conservation practices.
Exhibition: 18–20 July 2025 12:00–8:00 pm (Free admission)
Vernissage: 17 July 2025 7:00–10:00 pm
The exhibition also includes the roundtable »Refiguring Nature in a Datafied World«, which explores how environmental data shapes our understanding of landscapes. This event debates the politics and materiality of data in environmental governance, revealing its contested nature. Experts will discuss how data mediates our engagement with nature, influences decision-making, and reflects broader socio-political issues. Join us for an insightful conversation about the aesthetics and political dimensions of environmental data and its material impact on the environments we seek to understand, preserve, and transform.
Roundtable: 20 July 2025, 3:00–5:00 pm
ZK/U Berlin – Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik, Siemensstraße 27, 10551 Berlin
Credits
»Blazing Heath/Heideglühen« is a collaboration of ZK/U – Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik with the DFG-funded Cluster of Excellence »Matters of Activity«