...upcoming 👀

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.

Gio Sordini is a transmasculine artist and designer currently based in Berlin. Through their alter ego, Femmeboyant, and drag collective Creature kin, they explore monstrosity, absurdity and more-than-human embodiment as queer tools for playful reconfigurations.

Creature kin:
instagram.com/creature.kin/

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

living school guest event with siegmar zacharial

Giving your body as a resonant space for others 

October 24th
1-2.30pm

Altes Finanzamt Schönstedtstraße 7, 12043 Berlin-Bezirk Neukölln

How do we stay in relation when different realities, needs, histories and griefs collide? How can we listen without rushing towards agreement, resolution or repair?

This embodied workshop draws on the somacoustic practice of Practicing Futures While Grieving. At its centre is a binaural listening session composed through voice work and intimate spatial recordings. It invites listening with the whole body—through vibration, sensation and proximity. We begin with sound, breath and grief, making room for the many things that can be present at once.

We approach the body as a living archive, carrying memories that exceed files and classifications. Through listening and shared reflection, we explore how different histories can resonate, and how solidarity might grow through staying within their complexity.

No prior experience is needed. All grieves are welcome. All bodies are welcome.

living school guest event with siegmar zacharial

Staying in relation - learning from plants as allies 

October 25th
1-3.30pm

RSVP on the form https://forms.gle/yVoD2kYRCucrzCuN6

What can solidago and ivy teach us about sharing space, finding support and living through change? Solidago spreads, flowers abundantly and feeds visiting insects; ivy climbs, clings and grows through its relations with other bodies. Their ways of living invite questions about belonging, dependency, boundaries and the difference between support and taking over.

Drawing on the practice of SocialBody Apothecary, we approach plants as allies and knowledge holders. Through close observation, sensory encounters and shared conversation, we bring plant knowledge carried in our bodies, families and places into dialogue. Whose knowledge has been preserved, whose has been dismissed, and how can we pass it on with care?

Together, we learn the steps of making a salve with solidago and ivy. Medicine-making becomes a practice of attention: to materials, to the histories of everyday care, and to our responsibilities towards each other.

No prior knowledge is needed. Participants are welcome to bring plant stories, questions and memories, and will leave with a small jar of salve.

 Siegmar Zacharias is a Berlin-based performance artist, artistic researcher and certified death doula and herbalist. Her work moves between performance, somacoustic listening and radical pedagogy, exploring grief, conflict, intimacy, plant inteligencies and collective transformation. Her somacoustic listening practice investigates how sound and voice act on the nervous system.TogetherwithSHelleyEtkin she has developed the SociaBody Apothecary.

plant weaving & abolitionism as feminist practices 

with Derek MF Di Fabio

October 24th
3.30-6.30pm
+ 
October 25th 
4.30-7.30pm

+ optional walk to collect plants before the workshop

Altes FinanzamtSchönstedtstraße 7, 12043 Berlin-Bezirk Neukölln

What can we read from the presence or absence of plants? Which plants grow in a specific place, and how? What are the stories that brought them there, and then into our hands?

Plants and their presence are shaped by the cultural and political production of land: who owns it, who can use it, who is kept out. Looking closely at plants becomes a way to approach abolitionist questions. What was once shared, like land, water and plants, has been divided, privatized and fenced, and this has shaped the lives of human and non-human communities alike. Starting from the plants around us, how can we imagine other ways of living together, with presence and accountability?

The workshop is very practical and believes in thinking-while-doing. Plant weaving will accompany us. We will weave together while discussing some prompts and memories in smaller groups, so that personal stories and histories of land can meet in the making.

We will weave with plants collected a few days before, and with some that are dry. The workshop will take place at Altes Finanzamt.
On a weekday before it, the participants are invited to a walk where we will collect the materials used in the workshop. The day may depend on the weather.

Derek MF Di Fabio (they/them) researches how knowledge is transmitted between bodies, generations and environments, questioning the power structures that shape these exchanges. Through workshops, sculptures, performances, sound works, scenographies, walks and events, their practice produces experiences that can be reactivated as shared memory, beyond fixed notions of identity, authorship and place.
Di Fabio was born near Milan and lives in Berlin. 

A graduate of the Dutch Art Institute, they developed a thesis on prison abolition as a practice of quantum transfeminism. They have collaborated with the collectives Abolitionist Jelly, Cherimus and Motel Lucie. They exhibit regularly with Almanac Projects; recent presentations include projects at Museo Castello di Rivoli, Museo Madre in Naples and MAMBO - Museo d'Arte Moderna di Bologna.

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.

Alex Viteri Arturo (1987, Équateur/Colombie) is a performer and dance researcher, collaborating regularly with visual artists, educators, scientists, and choreographers. Often with the collective iLAND — interdisciplinary Laboratory for Art, Nature and Dance.

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.

Lo Moran creates interdisciplinary projects that are often socially engaged, participatory and collaborative. They aim to experiment with and question the systems we are embedded in by organizing situations of connection, openness and nonhierarchical learning. They are working towards accessibility and reimagined ways of being together by investigating the spectrum of transgression and belonging through social forms, performance, printmaking and illustration, educational work and developing archival methodologies. Lo has also been involved in creative projects within disability art communities for the last 13 years and has been creating experimental music since 2018 under the name soft fantasy. They intentionally embrace fluidity and chaos to contribute to emergent futures and radical approaches.

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.

Zack Darsee (U.S.A., 1991) is a poet, publisher and educator based in Berlin. He is the author of From The Pocket of Agent Dickinson (Inside the Castle, 2025), a lysergic neo-noir co-written word for word in alternation with Elise Houcek. He is the co-director of the Berlin Writers’ Workshop, and is currently the writer-in-residence at Callie’s. As a teacher, he commonly facilitates experiments with the materiality of language; towards the speculative, free and surreal. Alongside Nadia Marcus, he runs Tabloid Press. This work continues.

zackdarsee.com

Family-Centred Living School

with Katie Lee Dunbar and Sandhya Daemgen

Saturdays 14th + 21th + 28th November + 5th December 
3-5pm 

Altes Finanzamt Schönstedtstraße 7, 12043 Berlin-Bezirk Neukölln

Family-Centred Living School is a four-week workshop series for families who want to connect in a joyful and laid-back way.
Over four consecutive Saturdays, we will spend two hours together painting, drawing, dancing, and singing - creating time to reflect, connect, play, and create as families.
The workshops are facilitated by artists and parents Katie Lee Dunbar and Sandhya Daemgen, who bring their artistic practices and experiences as parents into the workshops. Katie and Sandhya will take turns leading the sessions, and both speak English and German and can facilitate a multilingual space.
The series is for anyone wanting to connect with other families in a creative and community-oriented way.
There are 10 spots for caregivers/caretakers, attending together with their adults/child/children.

*We understand family broadly, including parent-child relationships, kinships, caregivers, and care receivers.

What we make space for

with Sandhya Daemgen

Saturdays 14th + 28th November
3-5pm 

What happens when children and adults make space to play, experiment and create together?

A series of creative stations with visual art materials, arts and crafts, analogue and electronic instruments, sound and movement will offer different places to begin. Through playful invitations and games, we can move between them—creating alone, alongside one another or together, following our own interests and rhythms.

There is nothing in particular we need to make or achieve. It’s a space to meet other families, be creative, play and experiment, while making room for our different ways of doing things. What might we discover, and what might we learn from one another along the way?

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).

A moment for us

with Katie Lee Dunbar

Saturdays 21th November + 5th December 

As caregivers, it's easy to constantly take care, and sometimes it's easy to feel alone with that. We hope that in coming together, we can share what our different experiences are as caregivers in a neo-capitalist society, while having fun and continuing to grow community.

In this facilitated workshop, we will have time for reflective writing exercises, offering a space to reflect and connect to ourselves. Then we will create together through painting games, dance breaks and call-and-response singing.

Everything we create- text, painting, movement and memories will be a part of creating a living archive of our coming together, and who knows what we create together might end up on a wall or shared somewhere -- if we feel like it. Most importantly, this is A Moment For Us.

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

Telling ghost stories: memory and encounter with the unseen

with Noa Gokul 

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

Altes Finanzamt Schönstedtstraße 7, 12043 Berlin-Bezirk Neukölln

This workshop series explores ghosts, spirits, creatures and other liminal beings as figures that carry memories, histories, fears, desires and forms of knowledge across generations. Often inhabiting the space between life and death, human and non-human, reality and imagination, these beings can unsettle the social orders that determine what is remembered. Ghost stories are often dismissed as superstition or fiction, yet they can hold different forms of cultural knowledge. A ghost may remember what a family refuses to speak about. A creature may embody a landscape that has been transformed or destroyed. A created monster can become a vessel for a fear, an inherited memory, or a possibility that has not yet found language. 

The first day is a creative encounter with a ghost, spirit, creature or other liminal entity through autofiction, writing a blend of autobiography and fantasy. Through writing, drawing, painting, or other forms of making, they will explore their entity. The second day gathers in a campfire setting in Gemeinschaftsgarten auf dem bulgarischen. Participants are invited to bring their ghost or creature into the circle and share a “ghost story” in different forms that emerged. 

The entities encountered support us to approach personal and collective histories indirectly, through metaphor, fiction and imagination. Participants are invited to use cultural practices of protection and boundary-making around spirits, using words, gestures, objects, or rituals that help them feel grounded and safe. The workshop is an imaginative space: participants remain in control of how they engage with their entity and how they close the encounter. 

Activities include grounding, personal reflection, multi-media art making, and storytelling. Participants are also invited to bring a personal object related to their history to include in the story.

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

... what had happened:

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 Rose 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.