Sensing Loss is a collaboration between Cement Fields, Floating University Berlin, and Three Rivers exploring ecological loss in three sites across the UK and Germany.
The project draws connections between locations in Berlin, Bexley, and North Kent, liminal spaces on the edges of urban expansion, where nature and industry intertwine. Infrastructure developments in these contested post-industrial landscapes are often presented as ‘green’ or sustainable, but commonly threaten the rich biodiversity and vast ecological, social, and cultural significance held in these sites.
An international community exchange, the project brings together artists, activists, and communities to share lived experiences of environmental degradation caused by infrastructure and building projects in their local contexts through a hybrid programme of in-person and online events.
Exploring how artistic practice can provide tools and strategies for processing and challenging the loss of access and agency that arises in the face of sweeping changes, the programme opens up new perspectives grounded in international understanding and solidarity. By providing space to acknowledge, explore, and learn from loss it seeks to imagine new methods of resistance for communities, activists and artists facing similar challenges, and re-centre contested sites as places to nurture resistance, care, and learning.
Sensing Loss is funded by Cultural Bridge, which celebrates bilateral artistic partnerships between the UK and Germany through the collaboration between Arts Council England, the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, British Council, Creative Scotland, Fonds Soziokultur, Goethe-Institut London and Wales Arts International / Arts Council of Wales.
It continues the partnership forged between Cement Fields and Floating University Berlin through our previous Cultural Bridge funded, peer-to-peer exchange programme, Wetland.