NEWS

19/7/2025

3 to 5 PM: Workshop with Joachim Perez

5:30 PM: Panel discussion

7 PM: Performance with Jeremy Wade

Admission free

No registration required

On Saturday, 19 July 2025, from 3 PM Bärenzwinger Berlin invites you to a theme day entitled “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 grief, memory and spirituality. The artistic positions explore how grief 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 one another – across loss, distance and time. The day brings together artistic, activist and collective practices that resist forgetting and instead linger with the vulnerable, the unresolved and the fragile.

Collective Threads: Textile Workshop with Joachim Perez
The event kicks off from 3 to 5 PM with the bilingual, open workshop Collective Threads with artist Joachim Perez. Participants will work together with discarded textiles – as an exercise in memory, repair and connectedness. Perez’s practice combines hand-sewn textile architectures with diasporic narratives and intergenerational exchange.
This is a drop-in format: interested parties can come and go as they please. The workshop is open to all age groups. No prior knowledge is required.

Panel Discussion: Queering Grief & Loss
At 5:30 PM, a panel discussion follows with Sarnt Utamachote (researcher, filmmaker, curator), Francis Seeck (professor at TH Nürnberg, author, and anti-discrimination trainer), and Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi (crazinisT artisT) (performance and installation artist, LGBTQIA+ activist from Ghana).

Queer grief often speaks to the loss of a life imagined differently – of futures that have been dismantled or denied. Drawing on José Esteban Muñoz’s theory, it explores mourning as a longing for what has not yet been possible. LGBTQIAs+ are frequently rendered invisible in death and mourning – particularly queers who face legal and social obstacles that criminalize their identities or deny them the right to grieve.
What infrastructures or alternative practices of grieving exist for queers? How can we mourn and die outside of heteronormative, bureaucratized funeral cultures? Who is considered “worthy” of burial? And who tends to the graves if ties to one’s family of origin are broken?
Prof. Dr. Francis Seeck, Sarnt Utamachote, and Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi will discuss current developments around queer cemeteries in Berlin, the deaths of young queers due to substance abuse in nightlife scenes, and rituals of care within queer mourning groups – all while considering intersections of class, gender, and race.

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

Performance with Jeremy Wade
The event will conclude at 7 PM 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 shared pause, physical sensation and ritual gesture.

Since September 2017 the former bear pit of the heraldic animals of the city of Berlin has re-opened as a cultural venue for site-specific contemporary art in Berlin-Mitte.

A refurbishment is soon to expand its potential uses.