floatopia – Dystopia Berlin 2026

Sound Studies UdK floatopia

Exhibition

Opening: September 25., 6 pm
Opening times: September 25.–27. and October 1.- 4. 4-8 pm
Venue: Floating Berlin

For the second time at the DYSTOPIA Biennale, the master’s program “Sound Studies and Sonic Arts” of UdK Berlin is organizing its own “Student Section” under the direction of Prof. Georg F. Klein. Six students have developed site-specific works for the floating university, the area designed by raumlabor berlin within the rainwater retention basin of the former Tempelhof Airport.
The works address site-specific water and environmental themes, transforming them into audible and visible artistic interventions. The underground inlet pipe plays an acoustic role, as do the electromagnetic tower signals from the old airport, which are still present. Rain prayers and water wishes place the current climate crisis in an universal context, and the body of water—which is simultaneously a protected habitat, industrial runoff, and a hybrid urban wilderness—is brought into new cycles, making the processes of decomposition and transformation visible and audible.
The artistic reflection of the basin and the adjacent airport as a body raises questions about aging, memory, identity, trauma, and healing, reflecting the state of our world with a dys-utopian undertone.

Martina M. Yáñez : Luftzeug
Installation, mixed media/objects
Luftzeug is a listening device designed to dialogue with the air and the skies. By installing a floating antenna in floating university, the piece wonders about the historical role of the air and sky as both natural mediums and warfare systems. Being in within the facilities of former Tempelhof Airport, Luftzeug proposes a form of listening to geopolitical tensions as historical cycles who repeat themselves through different planetary surfaces. Designed to be seen from above and heard from below, Luftzeug explores the blurred boundary between listening and monitoring, between earthy inhabitation and human control. Between ground, water and air.

Martina M. Yáñez is a chilean sound artist and researcher whose work focuses on interactions with nature and its phenomena. By exploring both human and non-human perception, she has developed a speculative work around territorial sensitivities as the central axis for large-scale planetary interactions. Whether as live performances, listening devices or sound installations, her work draws urgency to propose collectively alternative ways of inhabiting biological, cultural and social environments.

Simon Hill: fountain (working title)
Installation, mixed media/objects
The work explores the basin through its metabolic relation to the former airport, to the past it carries, and to the infrastructure it continues to feed. The basin is approached as the remaining functional organ of a body in transition. It still performs its core tasks of collecting, draining, filtering, and canalising water, as it has since its beginning, while the larger body around it has changed and its future is still uncertain. Reading the basin and the airport as a body opens questions of aging, memory, identity, trauma, and repair.

Simon Hill is a French sound artist and engineer based between Berlin and Paris. His practice explores the relationships between humans, nature and technology through installation, instrument design, interactive systems, fixed-media composition and audio software creation. His work focuses on embodied interaction, playfulness, and intuitive exploration, treating technology as an organic, visceral extension of the body while questioning our fascination and addiction towards it

Zeliha Dogusan: mold (working title)
The soil at this urban basin sits beneath and between sediment, sludge, the slow accumulation of what a city produces and cannot fully account for. This is a gut, the place where the technosphere encounters what it has made. The audiovisual interactive installation, inspired by the activity of mold and mycelium, listens to what is already happening within it—using soil microphones, microscopic cameras, and decomposition itself as instruments. What emerges at this urban basin is a living feedback loop, a third nature between infrastructure and its consequences, a non-human response growing in the gaps of the city and what came before it. Mold reads the site the way a system reads its own unresolved outputs — not to file them away but to continuously transform them, feeding back into new states of matter, sound, and image that remain permanently unfinished. Decomposition as recomposition. The past is actively digested, circulating into something unresolved and alive.

Zeliha Dogusan is a sound and visual artist from Istanbul/Turkey, currently based in Berlin. Building on her background in instrumental music, electronic production, and visual art, she continues to incorporate varied visual and sonic approaches while exploring new experiments in multidisciplinary forms. Her practice spans listening practices, sonic archives, performance art, and interdisciplinary creation, anchored by an ongoing engagement with the politics and philosophy of sound. She integrates theoretical inquiry with embodied exploration, focusing on the relationship between sound, memory, archive, language, and the body.

Helen Hines: Apocatastasis Votum
Sculptural installation
There is an obscure tradition: fill a vessel with water and your wish, wait for the water to evaporate, and the wish will be set free.
Apocatastasis Votum is a nest of ceramic and hypertufa vessels places on the dock of the floating university‘s retention pond. A body of water that is simultaneously protected habitat, industrial runoff, and hybrid urban wilderness. The vessels are cracked, malformed, unable to hold water. The wish has nowhere to be held.
This is the nature of the post-dystopian wish: a hope that persists despite one knowing that it cannot come true.
Each vessel is a small resonant chamber. Whispers travel the hollow body walls and return slightly changed, as if they were never entirely yours. Every wish joins a chorus of the ones made before it. In this way, the chamber never fully empties.
Apocatastasis is the heretical doctrine that all fallen things will eventually be restored. Votum is the vow paid to a god who has not yet arrived. Faith extended in advance of any evidence. Together, Apocatastasis Votum holds the wish in the condition of permanent almost.
You are invited to bring your wish to the water.

Helen Hines (born in Atlanta/USA) is a Berlin-based artist working in sound, film, performance, and sculpture. Her practice is process-driven and tactile: built around decay, grief, and somatic inquiry. She has a background in existential philosophy at Yale University with a focus on the age of extinction risk. She works with materials that transform under their own will: clay, sound, soil, body, voice.

Vicente Yáñez: mist (working title)
Sound installation. Mist generating piezo mechanism, pneumatic-propelled resonant pipe.
This work aims to uphold a space for a presence. But more than this, is a failure to become presence. The link between a distant sound source and an ethereal sculptural body made of mist, intends to bind a intermodal phenomenon as a sole gesture, timed as synchronous but geographically separated across the basin. The witness experiences these seemingly unrelated events, becoming part of this eerie equation, synthesizing both shape and form into a resonant memory.

Vicente Yáñez is a Chilean artist and musician based in Berlin. His body of work ranges from music for contemporary dance, film and chamber music to sound installations, 3D virtual animated environments and Ambisonics. Recent projects are focused on spatial sound and virtual realities. His interest in immersive media stems from questions posed around subjectivities, architecture and attentive listening. Using these media he attempts to summon spaces that leave traces for individual/collective narratives to emerge.

Yuchin Chen: To Break with the Circularity (working title)
Sound Installation
Dispersed across the rain retention basin, the three-channel sound installation questions how societies construct knowledge, belief, and technologies to live with uncertain futures. Drawing on vocal practices of rain prayer, water rituals, and mythologies of drought and flood, the installation activates and intervenes in the water-governing infrastructure by sounding the negotiations between human and natural forces while reflecting on environmental control, uncertainty, and human vulnerability.

Yuchin Chen is a Taiwanese artist working across sound, video, writing, performance, and installation. Her practice explores narratives in various experimental contexts between personal, collective and mediated experiences.
She is particularly interested in deconstructing and re-examining analogue and digital media, reflecting on the relationships between technology, sensory experience, and embodiment, and approaching listening as ways of connecting and opening up imagination.