taz. die tageszeitung
17.10.2025
Providers of cultural programs for children and young people demonstrated in front of the House of Representatives to protest against cuts in their sector.
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taz. die tageszeitung
02.09.2025
Between fries and the diving board, the public pool is a place where utopia is lived. It is a piece of summer that always seems on the verge of being lost. An essay.
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taz. die tageszeitung
14.10.2023
Child and youth welfare services need more staff and more money. With Berlin's State Secretary for Youth, Falko Liecke (CDU), that's not going to happen.
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taz. die tageszeitung
24.9.2022
Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi's novel ‘The First Wife’ has been translated into German. We talk to her about feminism, tradition and the middle class.
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taz. die tageszeitung
11.07.2023
Every fourth child in Berlin is affected by poverty. What does this mean for families, and what solutions are needed? A visit to the Arche in Hellersdorf.
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taz. die tageszeitung
18.06.2025
Dismissed employees, obstructed works councils: In the face of increasing economisation, independent welfare organisations are hindering trade union work.
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taz. die tageszeitung
23.08.2018
Theatre and meditation in prison: this is not a luxury, but can be a ray of hope and a form of therapy. A journey behind bars.
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taz. die tageszeitung
25.05.2017
More and more young adults are homeless. Many are struggling to get by in Berlin, like Mario, Lucy and Pat.
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As a method of collective memory, poetic documentation begins by asking people questions at conferences and gatherings. From these questions—along with quotes from workshops, presentations, and speeches—I compose poems. When read aloud, people recognize their own sentences, images, and concerns. Poetic documentation thus becomes a shared archive: a way of capturing collective thought, emotion, and experience in a form that is both reflective and creative.
The sun shines; by the big room, coats
of the divided birch tree folded, pleated
like compost.
There’s no nuclear knowledge,
in the inbetweenness of wind and dune.
Would you know your name if it wasn’t for the
ones calling?
A bottle opens, feet swing.
As my fingers are typing,
my back is holding me.
My back knowing to hold me
While my fingers know to press p-r-e-s-s.
A baby shouts.
Within it a sprinkle, a bird, a river, a
snale.
Paper rustles, ice cream drips in my muskles,
the smell of hand-crème scatters through
space.
What is P?
The sixteenth letter of the alphabet?
The distance across the center of a circle?
Here, in the open hands, P is held as
processes, practices, projects, public,
program, person, prompts.
You know this moment,
when a child gives you a
drawing and says:
“This is you.”
And it really hits you?
So do the following:
Find a person.
Ask them to tell you what
they really want.
And then draw.
We are coming out of winter.
We are coming out of a thousand colds.
But the hostile environment is not nature,
it’s not the cold.
It’s the Empire.
If we want to continue doing what we are doing,
we need to breath.
The thousand breaths that it takes
for one word to be coming
out of your mouth
echoing the images that you keep within.
Mountains as natural landscapes
around a city.
The sensation of protection
they give,
their permance within ever
changing scenarious.
Nature is not silent at all.
Nature is
not the ideal.
It’s just not wanting to be
heard,
like humans do.
It has it’s own reason, it’s
own time.
The root of conflict is competition.
The money produced in the arts
is not owned by the artists.
The cash flows into blast furnances.
Workers do the following:
With eleven they pick grapes.
With thirteen they clean the dishes at the restaurants.
With fifteen they are afraid to quit at a sandwich store.
With twenty they hand out flyers.
With twenty-four they help packing croceries.
With thirty they work in a bowling center.
With thirty-two they work as a nursery.
With sixty they make coffee.
In between people are displaced from their home countries.
The war is no longer declared,
but continued.
Axioms of the current:
Behind a screen, one is always
present, always distant.
And all is temporary, any way.
[...]
Excerpts of poetic encounters at University Hildesheim
Aspiration is not a goal. It is a feeling.
Feelings: waves crashing against the bow of the body,
roaring foam pearls in the blue light of the moon.
A wave without breaking is a feeling without a body;
a wave without an ocean, a face without life.
Don't bend your head too high.
With your neck stretched out, it becomes difficult to feel anything at all, except the slight tugging of the pinched skin.
A sharp edge of the sea.
The biblical challenge of not
cutting your bare toes when you go into the water,
carefully feeling your feet,
concentrating on balancing your body on the rock.
You cannot find balance if you do not know that when you fall, the hands of others will hold you.
This hard work,
finding your way to the shore, the transition from land to sea.
This hard work, the transition from
one state of matter to the next.
Only then does the air reveal its nature:
the difference between air and water becomes clear—
who they are, how they differ, what they bring.
What is self-evident to some
is empty space for others.
This hard work that leaves gaps: broken bones in the cracks of history, the tangled roots under the earth, are not seen—or do not want to be seen.
Listen
when you see someone
sitting underneath a Marula tree, speaking.
They might talk to someone
you haven’t known.
Walk through loss on an autumn night,
the sudden realization: impossible to categorize the infinite. No one will ever be able to put a fingerprint on the part of us that is infinite.
[...]
Youth is not Youth.
They know how to say yes,
how to say no.
They know how to dry a tear,
how to read the room,
how to act,
how to call out what’s wrong,
how to not hurt,
how to draft,
how to puzzle,
how to calculate,
how to ask questions when no one does,
how to build dragons of paper and metal,
how to sing and make music with plastic cups,
they practice philosophy.
While others work part-time jobs,
they have laundry duty and cooking duty
and are not paid.
Playing The ground is Lava
with eight other children
stretching the evening,
protesting against the notion of humanity
to calculate a life that can’t be calculated.
How poor,
when you don’t feel how thin the ground is.
This unimaginable life experience—
time runs, like the Ural river,
you are in movement, anytime.
You don’t have to give us a voice.
You need to echo our voices.
[...]
Pandemics shift causes.
Let it be Corona —
or loneliness.
Children get lost —
on their routes
from southern —
to northern Mexico.
Chile burns, Germany burns —
And the streets remember
what the paper forgets.
And as long as people must leave —
because an administration says so,
as long as people ask for registers —
to decide who belongs and who does not,
as long as names are written down —
to be crossed out again —
this is not a free country.
You are not free.
This is not a free country.
You are not free.
Repeat after me:
Out of grief we found a voice.
Not just for us but for all.
Naguru Go Down Boxing Match Uganda
anna.kuecking@gmail.com
Annas socially engaged practice unfolds in theatre and writing workshops, community care and embodied practices as well as empowerment spaces. In their artisctic work Anna investigates emerging formations of the archive within the entanglement of body, community, environment, and institutions. Their auto-ethnographically informed research explores intergenerational experience, class dynamics, (dis)ability, family separation and kinship as solidarity and accountability.
In Annas work documentary, poetic and multidimensional storytelling are combined with movement practices and methods of collective remembering and invention. All of Annas projects unfold in dialogue with communities and local networks, highlighting the fragile simultaneity of vulnerability and resilience, care and transformation.
Comparative Literature, Philosophy, Art History
• Focus: African Art
• Bachelor thesis: Antagonistic Remembering in the Works of Ugandan Authors Stella Nyanzi and Jennifer Makumbi
10/2017 – 05/2019 – Theatre Pedagogy (BuT), Theaterwerkstatt Heidelberg
01/2025 – present – “Den Himmel Schweben Lassen”, Spore Initiative Berlin invited by fantastic João Eduardo Albertini
• Organisation of workshops and events, communications, curatorial work
11/2024 – 02/2025 – Artist in Residency Leopoldplatz, Kulturamt Mitte
• Project lead & artistic direction: Sketching Homes
• Fundraising, budget management, public relations, workshop and exhibition projects
• Work with refugee children and young people in youth welfare
09/2023 – 03/2025 – Project Lead “Hauptrollen – Heroes of Foster Care” (Aktion Mensch)
• Fundraising, budget management, theatre rehearsals, workshops, community work
• Organisation of conferences and training formats
• Editorial work for the magazine FamilienBande
03/2024 – 12/2024 – Artistic Director “Moments of Care” (IMPACT Funding)
• Concept development, fundraising, editing, public relations, budget management
• Editing, proofreading and production of the publication Darling, you are always needed
• Author and director of the theatre piece Kaspar Hauser Killjoy
Assistant director/dramaturgy: Mietsachen (HAU), Ortsbesuch (Maxim Gorki Theater), Schwarze Ernte (HAU), Pans Schatten (Schalktheater Zürich), Ein Sommernachtstraum (Schalktheater Zürich) Dein Gesicht ist eine wunderbare Bühne für mein Drama (TD), Mir ist alles viel zu laut und alles viel zu leise (TD), Liegt Europa in mir? (tjg dresden), Matrix der Demokratie / Quizzy (heimathafen Neukölln)
• Moderation and Workshops: Drosos Foundation, Single-Parent Conference, Careleaver e. V., Spore Initiative, African Book Festival Berlin, University of the Arts, Berlin, kunsthochschule weißensee, Berlin
• Performances & Theatre: Water Bodies (HKW, 2024), From Flowers to Fists (Theaterhaus Jena, 2024)
• freelancing Theatre pedagogy workshops in schools & holiday programmes (since 2017)
As an expression of the idea that the personal is political, as a counter-movement to administration and its formalized gazes, and as an attempt at a subaltern practice, Moments of Care archived and engaged with experiences in youth care through a Messenger group and artistic workshops.
In subway stations and doorways, during walks and conversations, we gathered to explore a fleeting form of encounter that cannot be fully captured or recorded—a form of thinking without railings and speaking without barriers, enacted against or through experiences of powerlessness.
The resulting publication, Darling, you are always needed, positioned itself as a counter-archive to youth care files, which often portray the people they are meant to protect in deficit-focused ways. The restrictions faced by those who seek access to their own files, and the often pathologizing descriptions contained within them, remain insufficiently addressed in political and social discourse.
Hosting events and conversations
with João Eduardo Albertini, 2025
Spore Initiative Berlin
11.05.2025
Workshop
How is it even possible to be a mother under capitalism? What expectations are placed on mothers, how do these expectations shape our lives – and for whom? What if we imagined motherhood as a form of collective care that exists beyond the biological family: involving neighbours, friends, and other significant relationships? Together, we enter into an exchange about our own biographical ties and critically engage with the concept of “motherhood.”
All participants bring an image of a person who has “nourished” them in some way – someone who could be called, or once was, a mother figure. This may be a biological mother, a foster or chosen mother, a friend, neighbour, or even a historical or literary figure. Together, we begin to surround these images with words, materials, and colours. In doing so, we dedicate ourselves not only to what these people created, enabled, protected, or carried – but also to what was ambivalent: their burdens, contradictions, limits, and absences.
Conversation: Of Mothers Who Are (Not) Mothers – Care, Origin, Capitalism
Anna and Mila both grew up in the child welfare system. In a personal conversation, they approach experiences of loss, longing, and coming of age within a welfare state. They ask: What does it mean to lose mothers – and to receive professionals or foster caregivers in their place? What role does the so-called Father State play – and how does it shape our ability to trust, to care, and to allow ourselves to be cared for? Which other mothers have we found – and how can we hold on to them?
(Un)equal Patterns: An Open Evening on Class Issues and Solidarity Structures
Spore Initiative Berlin
22.10.2025
Open Studios, Discussion, Conversation.
No pattern grows from a single strand. Only the diverse – hands, movements, voices – weaves us together. Some surfaces hold us as if floating, others create ruptures, tear open, divide, impose, dominate. The open group (un)equal patterns has, over the past months, brought together different positions to reflect on experiences of classism and to strengthen organisms of solidarity. Taking their own fields of work in art and culture, social work, and academia as a starting point, the group has sought to understand how classism shapes both life and labor.
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Spore Initiative Berlin
19.09.2025
For the project Blickwinkel, 24 care leavers, foster children, parents, foster parents, foster siblings and foster care professionals spent a year compiling their expertise and experiences. The aim was to prepare them for the transition to foster families in a realistic and optimistic way, while keeping in mind all those involved and their specific perspectives. Because every perspective is valuable and must be (allowed to be) part of successful transition processes.
Register
Illustrators Eva Wünsch and Luisa Stömer and copywriter Gregor Hinz have created two illustrated books: one about arriving in a foster family and one about leaving, or care leaving. The two books, Blickwinkel auf das Ankommen – Hallo Pflegefamilie (Perspectives on Arrival – Hello Foster Family) and Blickwinkel auf das Auszug – Ciao Pflegefamilie (Perspectives on Leaving – Bye Bye Foster Family), were be presented for the first time at the release event.
Beyond Nation and Violence – Othering the Family
Spore Initiative Berlin
23.10.2025
Discussion
During the 2025 federal election campaign, while “Bürgergeld” (basic income support) was heavily polemicized and recipients were stigmatized as “total refusers,” the perspectives of children and young people growing up in such households remained invisible. Yet around 65% of young people in youth welfare come from families dependent on transfer payments.
Polarization, blame, and the individualization of poverty, precarious working and residency conditions, and illness—as seen in the 2025 election campaign—impact young people directly. But what if things were different?
What would critical social work look like if it didn’t operate from a deficit-oriented perspective, but instead created spaces and possibilities beyond evaluation and economic principles? How might law and youth welfare be reimagined as systems of unconditional protection? We are searching for places where barriers have been dismantled and spaces have opened up—where grief can be shared, and diverse forms of togetherness can find a home: intersectional, just, transformative.
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Future Families, Summer Schools in August and September
Director and text: Anna Kücking
Dramaturgy: Juliane Kroner
Stage design: Louis Caspar Schmitt
Music: Eldar Tagi
Video and lighting: Vincent Heppner
Grafic and Illustrations: Lena Pozdnyakova
Hands-on: Luise Willer, Aaron Reudenbach
Performance: Alina Sokhna M’Baye, Olivia Purka
Kaspar and Emire grew up in the child welfare system — in group homes and foster families, surrounded by labelled Kellogg’s boxes, grinding visits to government offices, and sentences no one wants to hear. Years later, they meet again in Berlin. But much has changed since they lived together in the facility. How do you preserve and connect memories when the people involved are no longer present? Who gets to remember, and who doesn’t? And what does it mean to grow up outside your parents’ home in a society that treats “family” as its highest virtue?
From Kaspar Hauser to Harry Potter to Momo — children who do not grow up with their parents are central figures in literature and pop culture. As charismatic and mythic characters, they hover between ideas of autonomy and self-determination, resistance and adaptability. But what is life truly like for children who do not live with their parents? What do young people who grow up in the child welfare system experience — and how do they remember these experiences as adults? How can they recall a childhood that, due to constant transitions, hardly anyone can witness?
Kaspar Hauser Killjoy renders experiences from youth welfare as an associative fabric, expanding representational approaches through self-articulated perspectives. It insists: family is what we do together. Uncontrollable, vulnerable. Without a head, without borders, without a state.
Hero(n)es of Foster Care offered a safe space for foster children to share their experiences, where they could freely explore and develop in a playful manner. Such regular formats for coming together are not yet structurally anchored in foster care, but they offer extraordinary opportunities to become aware of one's own history and to determine it for oneself. At the enter was the idea of a safer space – a place where people with similar experiences can come together and exchange experiences and ideas. Therefore, the project was less about the end result and more about the process: talking and moving together, practicing and discovering new roles, and consciously playing with the body and one's own perception. Nevertheless – or perhaps because of this – the results were fantastic, clever and sensitive, funny and serious at the same time.
with Lena Pozdnyakova and Eldar Tagi
there, there, 2025
What does it mean to inhabit a place? To shape it, to claim it—to call it home? Together with more than fifteen children from marginalized communities, we explored Leopoldplatz through artistic interventions that challenged spatial orders and opened new ways of engagement. While plenty of children go to school, play, and grow up in Germany, repressive residency policies threaten their future—many will be deported from a city that has already become their home.
In response, we played games that fostered belonging, creating moments of safety, visibility, and agency. We transformed Northern European play carpets—structured city maps that represent rigid urban planning—into a complexe landscape : pulsating, organic, infused with colors, scents, and memories that transcended national borders.
Alongside Careleavers—young people from the youth welfare system—we explored the meaning of home, producing a radio feature interwoven with music created by refugee children. Both groups share experiences of displacement, navigating the loss and reconstruction of home more than once. Their perspectives are essential in envisioning a world where movement and play know no borders.
This project—featuring workshops, public interventions, interactive carpets, a radio feature, and more—was funded by Kultur Mitte as part of the Artist in Residency at Leopoldplatz
There, there
For the School of Commons program, There there proposed a series of listening experiences to be developed. The project is envisioned to be launched on lumbung radio and is released in 2024, after a year of collaborative work in 2023.
The format is defined as a listening experience that explores cultural practices of radical inclusion and openness to various voices and perspectives driven by the notion of solidarity and care while addressing complex topics of migration, struggles under oppressive regimes (institutional, social, and political), and surviving under the conditions of climate change and late capitalism. Given that these downing paradigms overlap, the project finds its positionality on terrains of what could be referred to as “optimism in despair.” With the project, we hope to create a virtual space where productive discussions and artistic experiments could drive constructive forms of gaining agency and participation/ taking political action.
With various interpretations at hand, the project of radical openness to diverse voices and stories, and engages with the following themes:
1) There there – as a form of repetition and the power of sonic expression – is open to various contributions through sound pieces, sonic arts, field recordings, sonic explorations, and commentaries.
2) There there – as a temporal aspect and projection of the future driven by “optimism in/over despair” – is open to conversations and reflections on forms of futurity.
3) There there – as a reference to spatial, planetary, and geographic conditions – is open to stories and explorations about migration and transitioning.
4) There there – as a form of relational work and practices of care – addresses participatory forms of engagement as a form of decolonial project, immanent critique, and decolonial thinking through art and practice.
On a regular basis, There there releases episodes that take on contrasting formats (addressing specific interpretations of “There there” mentioned above), organizes public events and fosters collaboration. This is aligned with the lumbung radio’s values by proposing the format of radical openness, with only one predicament of accentuating care and solidarity notions. By thinking and testing various non-hierarchical formats for experience sharing and knowledge dissemination, There there aspires to learn through practice.
Driven by all the values mentioned above, the project also incorporates various local and trans-local sub-programs: collaborations, community workshops, shared listening sessions, educational projects, discursive formats and more.
The release of There, there podcasts will be announced here and on the lumbung radio website.
We are part of the lumbung inter-local online community, therefore a few words about them:
lumbung Radio is an inter-local online community radio part of documenta fifteen. It’s an open online broadcast that comprises of an inter-local network of distinct radios and audio practices. It operates in no specific time zones, and streams multiple languages, music, and art. Each participating radio station depends on its own means of production, way of thinking, learning, and sharing. lumbung Radio operates as a decentralized network of nodes that uses internet without its hegemonic agency. The intention is producing an audiophonic common space built on the multiplication of the existing practices of its contributors.
We contemplate the soothing power of words, the flavors and scents that beckon us to unwind, and the calming influence of repetitive actions like chopping.
In this immersive 2-hour hybrid event, taking place in Berlin, Zurich, Vienna, and online, we aim to defy the ceaseless pace of society by embracing rest as an act of resistance. Through guided psychosomatic exercises, we collectively decelerate, savor the act of communal dining, and gently remind one another to breathe.
Our food-prep-and-sharing session is hosted by the Focus Group and includes the following projects in the 2023 SoC cohort: > In the Eye of the Sea (Jara Nassar, Jamie McGhee) > living library of becoming (Miwa Negoro) > Dancing in front of the king (Pooya Kazemi, Erfan Safari) > There, there (Luise Willer, Lena Pozdnyakova, Germain Calsou, Anna Kücking, Sabrina Herrmann, Eldar Tagi, Maria Aus and other members of There, there working group) > language (as a technology that) re-/animates (dis-/jointed) cartographies (Monika Dorniak) > Oyoun Curators* Lab (Louna Sbou, Ihisa Theresa Adelio, Nina Martin, Dami Choi, Arjunraj) > Post-structuralist Fun Pack (Andrea Liu)
There, there invites you to join for a moment of (self-)care and contemplation in strollings around urban contexts, searching for glimpses of nature to make time and space for rest.
An exploration of the moment where seemingly conflicting culture-nature relationships provide a moment of witnessing, rest, and connection. These hybrid spaces, found in various shapes from Colombia to Germany, Kazakhstan to Uganda, present a liminal space between imagination and reality of the world in the process of becoming. Inspired by artist Alvin Lucier, collected sounds will be played and amplified through portable and varied in scale “environments” – pots and other objects to echo as lines of sound but also resonant bodies.
Embedded in these, we will draw attention to the connection between the involuntary nature of hearing and the voluntary, selective nature of listening, as suggested by sound artist and composer Pauline Oliveros in the 1970s. The communal practice of listening as relational to local environments has been rooted in the experiences and cosmological ideas of indigenous groups around the world. We notice in our own lives, this has been neglected in the rapid pace of living we experience today. Together we will search for the various ambient sounds that are external to the interior, reflecting the intertwining and dialogicity of body and environment. The obscure sonic landscapes and listening experiences draw on cultural portraits of places in junction with urban nature as convivial ecosystems with their peculiar habitats of humans, non-humans, and more than humans.
Sound installation with recordings from Almaty, Berlin, Bogota, Kampala, Paris, Venice and more September 21st, 16.00-17.30h at Gerichtstrasse 45, 13347, Berlin or live broadcasted on: https://lumbungradio.org
There, there Sonic Inclusions working group: composition by Germain Calsou sounds by Sabrina Herrmann, Eldar Tagi, Semalye Thii and others words by Margarita Ariza Aguilar, Andrea Heredia, Anna Kücking objects by Lena Pozdnyakova organization and production Lena Pozdnyakova, Luise Willer, Liza Kin
The Story of Touch
In an imaginative, fugitive and embodied practice we want to move thoughts and feelings. We want to read to each other, listen, envision stories and be in touch. There, there invites you to a series of reading sessions, where small groups practice slow and immersive reading of texts related to forms of solidarity and care through embodied practices, accompanied by a set of somatic rituals. In intimate small groups with interchangeable roles based on personal preferences, we will practice immersive reading and listening. Then we will assemble as a group and, driven by what was heard and felt before, we will use collective imagination to create a common poem.Kinestetic writings
In care work, the term kinesthetics refers to a method that involves learning and developing movement sequences together that are tailored to individual abilities. It makes mobilization easier and more pleasant for both the carer and the person in need of care. When moving together, individual (physical) preferences and limitations are equally incorporated into the movement. The kinesthetic writing method aims to combine writing with joint movement and the perception of impulses. It aims to be a friendly space in which abilities and disabilities can be explored and further developed. It wants to be an anti-patriarchal and horizontal space that resists the pale gaze of violent judges. Kinesthetic writing moves (body) language through impulses and studies impulses through and in movement. It sees itself as an artistic and activist experiment and as an ongoing approach. It wants to perceive, reject, love and create words and movements, worlds and memories.
Contrary to what we are led to believe, most of the treasures we long for are already around us. We don't have to hunt for them, seize them, or snatch them from the ground. We can carefully approach what arouses our admiration and perhaps even try to communicate it to others. In a game entangled with the environment, we want to turn the familiar yet overlooked into something we get to know differently. We invite you to join us in searching for the obvious, discovering its precious nature, and preserving its value.