Life Review: a Near Death Experience Psychodrama Adventure in the Archive of Your Life

with Freya Rose

September 22nd + September 24th 2026

6pm-9:30pm
Altes Finanzamt Schönstedtstraße 7, 12043 Berlin-Bezirk Neukölln

When you die, what will have mattered about how you lived? 

Research into Near Death Experiences (NDEs) has found that when people die and are resuscitated, they commonly report having left their physical bodies, gone somewhere else, and then re-experienced their entire life in perfect detail, not only from their own perspective, but from the perspective of others who were affected (positively or negatively) by their choices. This is commonly known as a ‘life review’. There is no judgment or punishment, and no imposition of any religious or social moral code. Rather, the archive of one’s choices is offered back to one as an imprint of one’s character, a self-portrait, that prompts one to reflect - is this who I really want to be?

These workshops take the motif of life review as a foil for co-creative reflection on the traces we leave on one another’s lives. In the first workshop, we reflect on our beliefs about death, co-research the life review phenomenon through interactive engagement with the NDE archive, and begin to connect with a felt sense of what truly matters about the lives we have lived thus far. The second workshop invites us into an interactive psychodrama experience that highlights the greater meaning and impact of our choices. Together we will co-create a transpersonal life review, a collective archive that can serve as a point of inspiration for becoming the people & the community that we most aspire to be

Activities will include somatic grounding & resourcing, solo reflection, writing and drawing, imaginative play, psychodrama, theatre sports, as well as paired & group sharing

Freya is a somatics and ritual practitioner with an interest in the emotional and spiritual foundations of community health and social justice organising. Freya creates facilitated containers that open space for the transformation of inner and outer worlds. Freya’s creative work is participatory and involves embodied exploration of core human experiences such as grief, shame, joy and liberation, through the media of voice, movement, imagination, touch and stillnes.

freyarose.cc/

Plant Resonance: Singing to, with and from plants

with Maya Land

September 29th + October 1st 2026
4pm-7pm
Bulgarische Garden
Meeting point: https://maps.app.goo.gl/kBFxicCiaLW6etGZ6

“Only a wise child can understand the language of flowers and trees”
Hellen Keller

For those wanting to revive or deepen their relationship with plants beyond the phytochemical properties, this workshop series offers a space of grounding, opening and sensing where participants will connect with a chosen plant and learn something intangible. We will sense into the visual, olfactory, tactile and auditory living fields to explore the weird and wonderful world of plants. The experience will focus on song as a vibrational expression inherent to Earth and present in all expressions of Earth including plants and people. This practice resonates with a global tradition of songs that humans have received from particular plants and that have been/are sung during harvest and use of an herb; however we will not be orienting around a particular tradition. The first workshop will focus on sensory gating and offering praise in the form of song. The second workshop will focus on translating what we receive from a plant into a vocal expression. Maya will be available throughout the sessions to provide their knowledge around plant uses and properties as well as foraging tips!

Maya Land is an herbalist, bodyworker, artist and certified Heilpraktiker. 
They have been practicing various lineages of traditional European herbalism over the past 10 years, offering consultations at a community clinic and mixing herbal teas at an apothecary. 
Maya has offered educational plant workshops and continues connecting//learning with plants in their small garden. 
They are currently interested in investigating lyrical harvesting techniques and continuing to develop respectful relationships with plants and the living world.

Becoming Others 

with Gio Sordini

October 13th and 15th
6-9pm

Altes Finanzamt Schönstedtstraße 7, 12043 Berlin-Bezirk Neukölln

"Becoming Others" is a two-day workshop exploring the power and potential of monstrosity, more-than-human drag and creature play. What do creatures, freaks and monsters reveal about ourselves and our society? And how can we encounter and embody “others” and our own monstrous parts with the help of (queer) performance?

On the first day, we will approach the monster conceptually by constructing an exquisite corpse: Stitching together bits of what has been thought and written about monstrosity, otherness and creature kinship through various disciplines and times, by collaging quotes, texts and illustrations into new combinations.

We will then begin creating our own monstrous alter egos through storytelling, writing and drawing in personal zines.

On day two, we will finally fully transform into our monstrous personas with the help of make-up and a series of group movement and improvisation games. We will end the day with the possibility to play and interact as our creatury selves.

Creature kin:
instagram.com/creature.kin/

Similar past workshop:
https://www.instagram.com/p/DJWcgjfM9XJ/

abolitionist as a feminist practice (tbc) 

with Derek MF Di Fabio

October 24th and 25th 2026
TBA

Altes Finanzamt Schönstedtstraße 7, 12043 Berlin-Bezirk Neukölln

Zine Making workshop (tbc)

with Alex Viteri Arturo

October 27th + October 29th 2026
6-9pm

Altes Finanzamt Schönstedtstraße 7, 12043 Berlin-Bezirk Neukölln

Which memories and stories have we reclaimed during our weeks together at the Living School? What did we think-feel as we dug up the archive? In this zine workshop, we will come together to document our journey; the words, shapes and wonders from our shared times at the School. We will collectively create fanzines for our archive and to invite others to play with us.

We will use the unruly medium of zines—mini-magazines made from a single sheet of folded paper. Zines have a rich history rooted in self-publishing, grassroots community-making, and sharing alternative stories outside of traditional systems. Through a series of playful, quick-moving exercises, we will bypass the fear of the blank page to scribble, doodle, and wonder away. By folding, cutting, drawing, and collaging, we will weave together thoughts, words, fragments, and learnings from our previous Living School sessions into handmade booklets.

I promise to make our space cozy: there is no such thing as a "bad" drawing! We will practice documenting history from our own unique perspectives, insisting that our bodies are central to how we remember. Together, we will make copies, swap pages, build connections, celebrate each other, the relationships and sense of place we have grown together.

alexviteriarturo.cargo.site/

eXPERIMENTAL ARCHIVING: PAST, PRESENT, FUTURE OF ALTES FINANZAMT 

with Lo Moran

December 15th + December 17th 2026
6-9pm

Altes Finanzamt Schönstedtstraße 7, 12043 Berlin-Bezirk Neukölln

Using socially engaged, community based and participatory artistic research and archival methods we will explore the past, present and future of the Altes Finanzamt building from the perspective of the underground and the grassroots. The workshop is built around three loose prompts; one for the past, one for the present, one for the future. Participants will learn community archiving strategies they can carry into their own work.

Our task will be to collectively archive, creatively interrogate and interpretively document the histories, current life and future imaginings of the building. Using methods like speculative archiving and participatory community research (talking to people in the building, being friendly and inviting them to participate or contribute with small gestures, oral histories or objects), we will curate and create our own objects. We will be unearthing and dreaming together of the rumors that have not been captured in traditional bureaucratic records, examining crevices of the architecture, institutional materials and spaces, and reading between the lines for fugitive stories scattered through time.

There will be preliminary historical and archival research for participants to work with, and perhaps some oral histories from former and longstanding Altes collective members about the space. Ideally we will create small interventions and temporary installations throughout the building from the archival objects we make and collect.

lomoran.com/

TELEPATHY OF OBJECTS, or, MATERIAL DOCUMENT

with Zack Darsee

November 3rd + November 5th 2026
6-9pm

Altes Finanzamt Schönstedtstraße 7, 12043 Berlin-Bezirk Neukölln

How is a poem a document of the real? This workshop is a scavenger hunt of language, starting from the real. Taking from documentary, speculative, and conceptual poetic practices, we will let language and the telepathy of objects lead us into a generative, collaborative writing practice. We will seek to translate objects and documents into language, and document-language into poetry – be it concrete or linguistic. Considering the poet as sculptor, collector, censor, documentarian, translator, archaeologist, and psychic, we will gather evidence of our world, real and speculative, to build a temporary archive of its traces; through generative prompts, we will also attend to the properties of our own surroundings, personal archives, and the materiality of translation that histories demand. Participants should bring an archival document, a piece of found language, or a personal object to work with on the first session.

*I hope to use these objects and documents to build up a collaborative, speculative, textual reality, which may or may not culminate in a short printed booklet, as “documentation” of our constructed, perceived, and collected/collective world.

zackdarsee.com

What we make together

with Sandhya Daemgen

November 14th + November 15th 2026
6-9pm

Altes Finanzamt Schönstedtstraße 7, 12043 Berlin-Bezirk Neukölln

What happens when children and adults come together to invent a temporary society? Through a series of guided experiments with drawing, painting, movement and singing, we will explore who decides what happens, how we make rules, and how we live with each other’s different desires. What happens when everyone—regardless of age—is invited to follow their own ideas, make proposals, lead, follow, refuse, or change their mind? What can we learn from one another when different ways of moving through the world meet? Together we will negotiate what happens as we go, while a large collective artwork grows throughout the workshop—remaining at the end as an artifact of the temporary society we created together.

Sandhya Daemgen is an artist, choreographer and educator based in Berlin who works across performance, visual art and music. Her work explores how people come together through movement, sound, play and collective making. She creates participatory situations in which people of different ages and experiences can experiment, make decisions and shape what happens together. She is particularly interested in listening, participation and the social possibilities of artistic practice. She currently teaches at the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK).

WORKSHOP (TBA)

with Noa Gokul 

November 17th + November 19th 2026
6-9pm

Altes Finanzamt Schönstedtstraße 7, 12043 Berlin-Bezirk Neukölln

(tba soon:) 🚧

Courageous Listening

with Katie Lee Dunbar

December 1st + December 3rd 2026

(workshop tba soon:) 🚧

Katie Lee Dunbar is a Berlin-based queer feminist performance artist, activist, and researcher Katie Lee Dunbar explores disparity, intimacy & the personal/political through dance, voice, memory, sound, text & installation. Dedicated to inclusive creative environments, their collaborative projects include arted, mitkollektiv & Queer Family Album.

queerfamilyalbum.com 

mitkollektiv.de

Grassroots Gathering | Archive as Teacher

with MINQ

Monday, January 11th + Monday, January 18th + Monday, January 25 2027
6-9pm

Altes Finanzamt Schönstedtstraße 7, 12043 Berlin-Bezirk Neukölln

This workshop brings Priya Parker's The Art of Gathering into conversation with Dope is Death (Donovan, 2020) and another documentary (tba), using both as archive material for thinking about how we gather, teach, and build together. We combine each screening with reflections from the book and discuss the needs of our various communities. In the end, participants will have identified a need in their community and begun planning a gathering to support it. The idea is to give folks the tools to organize their own community gatherings.

In today's political climate, one that is doubling down on "divide and conquer", we need to stick together and create more opportunities for face-to-face interactions so we can remember, or even discover, who our people are, a fundamental element of any revolution. Toni Cade Bambara says it plainly in TCB: "sister is a verb." Alexis Pauline Gumbs pushes the same idea further, saying that sisterhood isn't inherited; it's built through action, and it isn't limited by gender. That's one of this workshop's guiding themes: showing up, holding space in love, tending to one another, again and again, until it becomes a habit rather than an event. The reason for gathering doesn't need to be explicitly political, but it should be clear. 

(Image: The Young Lords occupy the Lincoln Hospital, 1971)

MINQ is a DJ, sound artist, performer, researcher, and community organizer based in Berlin. Their artistic practice moves across sound, music, performance, and installation. They recently completed a master’s degree in Sound Studies and Sonic Arts at the Universität der Künste Berlin, where their research focused on collective performance and sound art for d/Deaf audiences. Drawing from Black queer feminism and transformative justice, MINQ investigates how sonic-somatic practices can create connection and support processes of transformation.

instagram.com/soundslikeminq/

soundcloud.com/soundslikeminq