For three days in November, zero point inhabits a labyrinth of rooms and hallways in HAU3, allowing sonic and cinematic landscapes to evolve and expand through its spaces and momentary communities to be built through collective acts of sharing. Audiences will be welcomed into a dreamlike fugue that decomposes and recomposes, incidental sounds will spiral into collective choirs, and topographies longed for, haunted, and imagined will shape energetic architectures. Through concerts, discussions, meditative practices, and manifestations of alternative futures, audience and invited artists will trace out a shared trajectory in the search for new formats of collective action and encounter.

A project from Meg Stuart, Descha Daemgen, Abraham Hurtado
In collaboration with: Pia Achternkamp, María José Arjona, Rabih Beaini, Zénoë Benoit, Heikel Ben Mlouka, Mariana Carvalho, Descha Daemgen, Milan Daemgen, Mor Demer, Josèphine Evrard, Ezra Green, Victor Guezennec Schmidt, Selu Herraiz, Abraham Hurtado, Vivian Ia, Marcio Kerber Canabarro, Diego Lobenal, Trompo

Nico Dardano, Nico de Rooij, Meg Stuart, Kaya Vieira Freeman, Mikey Woodbridge
Technical coordination: Tom de Langhe
Production assistance: Delphine Vincent, Andrés Agudelo.

Nico de Paula Lefort presents Chaosmos—a project developed at Morphine Raum and zero point—as it emerges through songs of wind, stones, wood, breath, and strings. Chaosmos, or the immanent plane, is a space of virtualities and possibilities not yet experienced as shapes, sounds, words, creations. It is the common pool from which songwomen and songmen, shamans, artists, philosophers, and scientists shape cosmologies, cosmopolitics, nature-culture—the non-idiomatic space of free improvisers.

Based in Berlin, Niko de Paula Lefort works as a musician, musical instrument developer, field recordist, radio and sound artist. Also known as NikoLFO, he is resident host on Archipel Stations Community Radio and a co-founder of the record label Portals Editions.

For Mor Demer’s public presentation at zero point, she will share her topological and choreographic research project TO MEND, a rhizomatic study she began in 2021 alongside her father, Gadi Demer, that recently completed its initial series of twelve mending actions across the city of Berlin. Following one person's odyssey as it expands into a portrait of a city, an intergenerational journey through the tissue of humanity and the cosmos, TO MEND is an artistic vessel for critical inquiry that stimulates embodied discourse around cultural thinking, establishing an ever-evolving relationship of reappraisal and “healing” in the public space of the urban body.

Mor Demer is a choreographer, dancer, and researcher. Dwelling at the crossroads between the profane and sacred, her research in healing and transformative work explores how experimental fields of knowledge can influence choreography to evolve into cartographies of scientific, artistic, spiritual, and social practice.

Public presentation of María José Arjona’s residency at zero point, alongside a performative action with Meg Stuart and reworked soundscape by Selu Herraiz. During her residence, the very materiality and ground of zero point’s Wartenburgstr. studio became a means of cosmological rebirth. Tracing the paint specks on the old floorboards—the residue of the atelier’s long history of art-making—into a stellate topography, Arjona orients a new universe into being.

Arjona’s practice, rooted in long-durational performance, incorporates to her research on time and temporality, the creation of horizontal structures for social interaction between the body, forces, matter and non-human entities in natural and urban settings. Approaching traveling as laboratory and space for experimentation, the artist offers a conglomerate of poetic gestures and political-oracular signs, functioning as relational technologies to think and imagine--collectively--structures to affirm life in times of extreme violence and segregation.

zero point hosts an experiment in alternative portraiture. Inspired by Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests, these portraits invert Warhol’s focus on the celebrity figure. Replacing his hermetic slow-movement imagery with a dynamism of rich affect, this first iteration of Video Lab captures the imagined and constructed celebrity-selves of a small community of artists.

Inspired, too, by zero point’s home on Wartenburgstr., a public gallery in a domestic residential setting, participants worked the architecture of the space, allowing its contrastive elements—the grand windows, the cozy kitchen, the high-end sculpture and furniture—to refract public personas into a kaleidoscope of private selves. 

Directed by Meg Stuart 
Filmography: Anders Bigum and Kris Limbach
Costume Art Direction: Claudia Hill
Assistant Art Direction: Andrés Agudelo
Make-up: Benerice Ammann
Executive Producer: Abraham Hurtado
with: Pedro Aybar, Asya Ashman, Jayson Batut, Abraham Hurtado, Vania Rovisco, Meg Stuart, Tiran Willemse
Editing by Abraham Hurtado

Two friends, Maxi and Henrike, meet at zero point to discuss current work in progress. Henrike and Maxi will chat about current trends in unfeeling and provisional histories of e.g., trans dissociation and bourgeois coldness. Test-driving thoughts and bringing in more material (a rom-com?), they open up an archive of not feeling it.

Henrike Kohpeiß is a philosopher based in Berlin. She is interested in critical theory, Black Studies, feminism and affect theory and works and teaches at Freie Universität. 

Maxi Wallenhorst is a writer (and a dramaturg and translator) living in Berlin. Recent work has appeared in Texte zur Kunst, e-flux journal as well as in Elif Saydam's „Two Cents" (Mousse, 2022).

“For three days zero point hosts an experiment in radical relaxation. The space will be transformed into a composed space where you will find cakes, drinks, the option of a foot bath and massage, projections, and continuous live ambient music. The music we work on is inspired by traditional Indian music (dhurpad), traditional Portuguese music (fado), and contemporary ambient music. Electronic instruments such as synthesizers are mixed with acoustic instruments: voice, trombone, clarinette, and tanpuras, as well as poetry and spoken word. We invite you to come and meet our world that wants to become, for a moment, ours collectively, where public space including its strangers can still feel like home, where care and calmness are precious without expense, where happenings allow for gift and surprise, where we hope to be able to connect.”

How much space do we need to live, to exist? What is the scale of our needs? Human infrastructure manifests superhuman scales. Inhabited spaces and functional spaces. Our life depends on a complex network of infrastructure: ports, roads, highways, airports, factories, industrial estates, warehouses, crops, greenhouses, etc. The landscape is less and less natural. The world is becoming more uniform. The infrastructure extends, devouring every meter of free landscape. Is our only possible future an endless net of infrastructure: a combination of the physical, digital, chemical, and pharmaceutical?
—Andrés Agudelo

Giuliana Grippo has a process-led practice that explores the physical-temporal engagement of body and material. Her work examines the symbiosis of man-made materials and organic matter, seeking to build tension within vulnerable structures. For Alternative Futures, she plays with ephemeral elements and fragile objects to construct a symbolic ecosystem that brings back the memory of a desert landscape.

We will work with a speculative relationship to one’s own body and the bodies of others to grasp what our bodies contain. Feminisms are the groundwork for a dancing methodology initiated from deep inside the body’s internal organs. We will work with a system of perception-action through five distinct energetic modalities. We will articulate movement from individualized sensation remaining forever unknown and perpetually subjective, abandoning representations often projected onto a body’s surface. We will sustain cathartic events towards states of self and flesh.

Moriah Evans’ work positions dance and choreography as a speculative process. Developing movement from the unseen, yet felt, worlds of a body’s materiality and affective interior space, Evans’ projects question default hierarchies between flesh, body, self, and subject. Drawing on both feminist critiques of visuality and somatic choreographic practices, Evans’ work expands a relation to dance beyond the visible, towards different ways of sensing ourselves and our relations to one another. 

Public presentation of Diego Lobenal’s residency at zero point, alongside a performative action with biologist and artist Salvador Marino, who seeks in his work to combine organic and non-organic materials as a coextensive materiality. 

Within a two-week frame, artists from AADK SP use the space of zero point to present their practices. Alternative Futures is a format that aims to bring together artists and art spaces from diverse geographical locations and backgrounds with the intention of connecting them through the exchange of artistic interests and practices. With this format zero point will be able to map a new network of art spaces in Berlin and abroad, and, in the process, help to connect them.

For zero point, Andros hosts a physical practice and discussion about violence and dance. With a seemingly unending prevalence of harm done by bodies on other bodies, how can we create spaces which engage with practices of violence without flattening them into representations, or perpetuating cycles of harm ourselves?  Proposing a broader consideration of what we call dance in order to call in, rather than call out violence, Andros is looking for ways that violence can be better aligned with practices of care.

Andros Zins-Browne is a multi-disciplinary artist and choreographer living and working in New York City. His work deals with the interrelation of bodies, politics, and physical materials where the borders between each dissolve and begin to take on each other's properties.

“Capital's capacity for adaptation and organization around the individual makes it impossible to separate the host from its symbiont. The individual is subjugated by symbols of desire and, in turn, feeds on them; the symbiont creature grows ever larger. Will we, finally, be able to feed on symbols and their production? Or will they slowly and sleepily engulf us?”

For his residency, artist Diego Lobenal transforms zero point into a large system/organ that presents the symbols of our everyday as modes of techno-feudalistic machinery, and visitors as possible victims of the symbolic.  

zero point research on the Spree. 
with Meg Stuart, Pia Achternkamp, and Abraham Hurtado
Documentation by Kris Limbach
Editing by Abraham Hurtado

Within a two-week frame, artists from AADK SP use the space of zero point to present their practices. Alternative Futures is a format that aims to bring together artists and art spaces from diverse geographical locations and backgrounds with the intention of connecting them through the exchange of artistic interests and practices. With this format zero point will be able to map a new network of art spaces in Berlin and abroad, and, in the process, help to connect them.

“My focus is on how subjects are modified by territory. The place where the reality of folklore is transformed. Body modifications act as a hallmark of a group, a feeling of new belonging, like so many other protests capable of reconfiguring the future.”

Derek Van Bulcke is an audiovisual artist interested in the materiality of the digital and the expressiveness of noise. Understanding popular music, dance, and, more specifically, flamenco as a field of cultural production and as a reading tool for decoding emerging territorialities, an analysis and re-reading of commonplace folk practices is carried out.

Meant to enfold a meal, a conversation, and an artistic exchange, What’s Cooking? places the artist in the role of host and chef. It is an artist’s talk and dinner that purposely avoids presentation of a finished product in favor of the spark of communal discovery: what is percolating in the mind of our host?

Visceral and ecstatic, this death meditation visualizes the body’s dematerialization through the elements. Amongst other benefits, this practice of morality salience heightens and amplifies the connection to one’s own values.

During my stay at zero point I tried to look for coincidence(s) and submerge myself into the tune of its music. A coincidence is made of two or more things, it is a relation that tells a story of difference and sameness with no apparent causality. It has the potential for disrupting the fabric of the everyday with the occult and the magical. Like a secret message delivered in the most unexpected corner. Sometimes I am in tune with it; other times, I am deaf and blind. It takes practice, though. An object that repeats, a color that repeats, a sound that repeats, a word, a taste, a gesture, a texture, a person. A clue. A key. A sky full of clouds replicating and coming to you. zero point has two rooms with two huge windows (like two eyes that look into the Berlin sky; like twins that never saw each other; like ears listening) separated by a thin, tall, white wall and a door between them. During the time there I struggled with being inside the two beautiful rooms. I needed to walk in order to help my brain think and so that’s what I did. 

The first iteration of zero point’s Blind Date format brought together choreographer Shannon Cooney, musician Doug Weiss and sound artist Mariana Carvalho to explore the movement practice of Sway with a visiting public. Developed out of Cooney’s research into “amplifying”, wherein the synchronization of a person’s movements with their felt sense of a fluid rhythm in their body is amplified by another dancer/mover, Sway is an interpersonal practice that heightens and expands our empathic synchronization with the naturally occurring rhythms and impulses of our body.

And if the landscapes you carry with you would grow out of your pockets to spread in space and touch the ceiling? And if you would access the memory of cut branches, by helping them remember how it was to be hanging high? And if you could fold all the dreams of a room to have them dissolving into conversations? And if you could lay down to listen to the soft pressure of little things that usually you find on the ground? When was the last time you could not just see but also touch or re-organise a prayer? And if you had expanded time to be with a friend while listening to the movement of landscapes? —Márcio Kerber Canabarro

Within a two-week frame, artists invited by AADK SP used the space of zero point to present their practices in collaboration with Berlin-based artists. They mentored one another and shared their current artistic work and research. At the end of two weeks, Selu Herraiz, presented his process to the public.

Meant to enfold a meal, a conversation, and an artistic exchange, What’s Cooking? places the artist in the role of host and chef. It is an artist’s talk and dinner that purposely avoids presentation of a finished product in favor of the spark of communal discovery: what is percolating in the mind of our host?

The zero point poetry salon is an opportunity for people to meet each other’s worlds, be it in the form of a song, a short poem, a long idyll, a morsel of text, a shared password, a love letter to the future. A space of reflection and refraction, the salon commits itself to the flashes of revelation that come from intent engagement with the written and spoken word.

NFTs are widely misunderstood. Decried as an (impoverished) aesthetic genre, they are, in fact, simply a mechanism of creation that, amongst other things, nurtures new communities and playfully challenges our modes of value production.

In Sonic Resonance, a group of artists, healers, and performers offered a dynamic healing artwork for one individual. It was a somatic sound offering that harnessed the ability of soundwaves to transform the recipient’s sonic horizon, constructing a cinematic landscape, a new invisible topography, that was restorative and, quite literally, world altering.