Exhibition
Opening: September 25., 6 pm
Opening times: September 25.– October 4., Thu-Sun, 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 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 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: Hors-Sol
Installation, mixed media/objects
“Hors-Sol” teleports listeners to a swarming airspace using live airplane data. Position, speed, altitude, and heading of planes at the location are streamed in real time and translated into sound. Each plane is given a voice and a place in space.
The work inhabits the access stairway as a multichannel sound installation, with speakers distributed along its length. Visitors experience the work on arrival and departure, as they descend into the basin or climb back toward the city.
(The French hors-sol evokes life sustained without soil, floating somehow outside grounded realities.
Website: www.simonhill.fr
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.
Simon Hill © 2026
Zeliha Dogusan: Artık
Audiovisual Installation
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. Artık — a Turkish word meaning both “remainder” and “from now on” — listens to what is already happening within it, using soil microphones and microscopic cameras as instruments, letting the site’s own material generate its sound and image.
The work is driven by a cyclic feedback between nature and the unnatural: matter produced by infrastructure is taken up, read, and transformed by non-human processes not as subject matter, but as method. What grows here is a third nature, neither wild nor built. This activity reads its environment the way a system reads its own unresolved outputs. It doesn’t file them away but keeps transforming them, feeding back into new states of matter, sound, image, and the body that encounters them. Decomposition as recomposition. The past is actively digested, circulating into something unresolved and alive, in a loop with no clear beginning or end.
Zeliha Dogusan is a sound and visual artist from Istanbul, 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. Recent works include Sapovnela, a collaborative performance with Tamara Maghlaperidze exploring memory, healing, and damage, presented at the Goethe-Institut Georgia through the UdK–Goethe Georgia residency program, and The Body Looks Back, a performance that transforms the body into both medium and observer, presented at Studio dB, Berlin.
Zeliha Dogusan © 2026
Helen Hines: Apocatastasis Votum
Sculptural installation
Fill a vessel with water and a wish. When the water is gone, the wish is freed.
Apocatastasis Votum is a nest of ceramic and hypertufa vessels on the dock of the Floating University’s retention pond, a body of water that is a hybrid toxic industrial runoff and protected eco-urban habitat. The vessels are malformed, unable to hold water. A central vessel feeds the others through a network of veins: oxygen and charcoal. Apocatastasis is the heretical doctrine that everything will be restored — every wound healed, every corruption reversed. Clean water. The pond as it was. Votum is the offering left at the shrine before the miracle: a vow paid to a god who has not yet arrived. Together they hold the wish in a condition of permanent almost. You are invited to bring your wish to the water.
On 25 September, 18:00, the sculpture is activated by eleven voices. Each has kept a small vessel through the full moon cycle, tending water and wish in the quiet. On the opening evening, we gather in voice.
Hand-thrown and sculpted ceramic, bone-dry clay, hypertufa, soil, silicone tubes, charcoal, gauze, rainwater, urban silt, twigs, twine and jute.
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.
Helen Hines © 2026
Vicente Yáñez: camanchaca
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/unclear sound source and an ethereal sculptural body made of mist, intends to bind an intermodal phenomenon as a sole gesture. The witness experiences these seemingly unrelated events, becoming part of this eerie equation, synthesizing both shape and form into a resonant memory.
The piece also rubs against fragments of the Andean imaginary, using pipes as resonant bodies; and mist, which folds into the deep gray morning landscape of the South American Pacific coastline.
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.
His interests revolve around media and systems theory, building worlds that are fractured and recompose themselves through the experience of the witness.
His mixed-media, acousmatic and spatial sound works have been presented at Hošek Contemporary, MONOM, the Zeiss-Großplanetarium Berlin, the Cité des sciences Paris, among others. His research has been supported through residencies at EMS Stockholm, PiNA/LeSerre (Koper/Udine) and NOTAM Oslo, the latter funded by the EU and the Goethe-Institut.
Vicente Yáñez © 2026
Yuchin Chen: To Break with the Circularity
Sound Installation
Mouth calls for the waters to fall upon the earth, mouth swallows all the waters that have risen into a great flood. The installation activates and intervenes in the rain retention basin through vocal practices of rain prayer, water rituals, mythologies and realities of drought and flood. Reflecting on climate control, computational models, and human vulnerability, the work calls forth traditions of negotiating with, adapting to, interpreting, and imagining water as ways of living with uncertain futures.
Website: https://chen-yu-chin.github.io/index.html
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.
Yuchin Chenz © 2026
