ONSITE Festival

ONSITE

In parallel to Berlin Science Week, between 7 – 9 November, the artistic residents of Anatomia Publica, Lucas Lacerda and Daniel Weyand (Po:era), will host the site-specific art festival ONSITE SF which explores the speculative futures of three cultural sites in Berlin: a museum, cinema, and theatre. Po:era’s world-building project CALADRI - developed as part of their research of Anatomia Publica - will kick off the festival program on 6 November at Tieranatomisches Theater.

ONSITE Residency & Festival is a short-term laboratory of site-specific experimentation and collaborative creation. Through intuitive cartography, shared practices and collective not-knowing, multidisciplinary artists develop personal and communal approaches to a territory, space or institution. The festival takes place in changing locations in partnership with local cultural institutions and in a participatory dialogue with the neighbourhood. The fourth edition of ONSITE invites 15 international artists, creators, researchers, and practitioners to develop and present site-responsive works in relation to one of the three partcipating sites: Museum Kesselhaus Herzberge, Kino Central, and the theatre Acker Stadt Palast.

The artists of this year’s ONSITE SF will engage with speculative storytelling as a method for artistic research and site-specific creation. Building on Donna Haraway’s idea of SF - not only as science fiction, but also as speculative fabulation, science fact, string figures, and speculative feminism – the presented works draw from the histories and presents of each site and its surroundings to imagine what could be. These speculative gestures project utopian, dystopian, satirical, or mythic futures. They are interested in the friction and resonance between inner and outer worlds, between past and potential, between inherited structures and wild imaginaries. SF, in this sense, becomes a tool for territorial storytelling (story-futuring, sensory fantasy, survival futures, subversive frameworks) – one that welcomes more-than-human perspectives, queer ecologies, and decolonial timelines.