Site-Specific Art Festival
06.11. - 09.11.2025 | 16:00 - 21:00
Humboldt Universität | Acker Stadt Palast | Museum Kesselhaus Herzberge | Kino Central
Limited-capacity experiences
Two of this year’s ONSITE events are open to small groups. Participation is free.
Po:era – Caladri: A Speculative Journey to a Twilight Planet
TA T Tieranatomisches Theater, Humboldt University
— November 6 (festival launch)
— Three rounds at 18:00, 19:00, and 20:00 (≈ 40 min)
— Up to 20 participants per round
Livia Machado – The Flying Museum
Courtyard of Haus Schwarzenberg, next to Kino Central
— November 9 (festival closing)
— Two rounds at 16:00 & 17:00 (≈ 40 min)
— Up to 10 participants per round
To register, please write in the field which event and time you’d like to join, for example:
“I want to register for The Flying Museum on November 9 at 16:00.”
You can also sign up on site if spots are still available.
How can fiction become a method of research? What stories do we tell to navigate change, loss, and transformation? And what futures do we imagine for the places that sustain artistic and communal life? In a time when cultural infrastructures are increasingly under threat, ONSITE 2025 invites artists and audiences to reflect on how art can respond to this shifting landscape through acts of imagination, speculation, and care.
For its fourth edition, ONSITE expands across four locations in Berlin — TA T Tieranatomisches Theater at Humboldt University, Acker Stadt Palast, Museum Kesselhaus Herzberge, and Kino Central. Each of these sites carries a different history of artistic, scientific, and social experimentation, and together they form a constellation for this year’s site-specific investigations. The artists’ collaborative research unfolds through the framework of Situated Fabulation: a practice of telling stories that are rooted in specific contexts while reaching toward possible futures.
Twenty international artists and collectives explore questions around mental health, heritage, and death as transformation - from the personal to the planetary scale. Their works reflect on surveillance and alienation in contemporary cities, on belonging and estrangement, and on the fragile spaces that allow us to gather, create, and imagine together.
ONSITE remains a temporary laboratory for site-specif experiments and collaborative creation. This year, it becomes also an exercise in collective storytelling, mapping the thresholds between reality and fiction, memory and possibility, the body and its environment.
THE SITES
The three participating sites – museum, cinema and theatre – are not passive backdrops, but cultural organisms with porous boundaries. They are shaped by their architectural bodies, institutional memory, and the people – organizers, caretakers, neighbours, audiences – who keep them alive. Each site exists outside the mainstream art market and is sustained by passionate individuals with distinct visions and longstanding ties to their communities. At the same time, they navigate the fragility of survival in an increasingly commodified cultural landscape.
ONSITE welcomes proposals that are attuned to these layered dynamics – works that listen to the subtle textures of each site, engage with its rhythms and frictions, and respond through forms that grow from the inside out. For the public presentations, participants may use and interact with both indoor and outdoor spaces of the host institutions. We do not limit site-responsive artistic processes to the buildings of our partner institutions themselves. Artists are encouraged to explore the wider environments in which these sites are embedded – their surrounding neighborhoods, streets, and social fabrics. Proposals may engage with the broader context, acknowledging that each site exists within a complex urban ecology that shapes and is shaped by it.
Museum Kesselhaus
The historic boiler house, located on the grounds of a psychiatric hospital, holds over a century of industrial history. Once responsible for supplying heat and electricity to the hospital, it now serves as a space for deconstructive thinking, site-specific research, and as a living laboratory for diversity and ongoing transformation. The museum sees itself as part of the “third landscape” – a socio-cultural platform that embraces ambiguity and resists fixed definitions. As such, it also faces the uncertainties of a challenging future.
Kino Central
Kino Central is a hidden gem of independent cinema in the heart of Mitte. Located on Rosenthaler Straße 39, it unfolds through layered passageways, offering an evocative cinematic discovery reminiscent of a time-travel journey into Berlin’s creative past. As a socio-cultural hub integrated into the larger artistic network of Haus Schwarzenberg—which includes galleries, studios, and cultural memory sites—Kino Central provides an alternative to mainstream cinema through its independent ethos and deep connection to Berlin’s vibrant subcultures.
Acker Stadt Palast
The Acker Stadt Palast in Berlin's Mitte district is a place where established artists and newcomers meet to experiment and reflect upon contemporary discourses. The focus of the venue, established in 2012, is on the connection between contemporary dance and new music. The Acker Stadt Palast offers the independent sector a novel interface between these art forms while also being interested in diverse aesthetic forms of dance and theatre. This year ONSITE joins Pink You Fest at the venue in close collaboration with the artist duo MXM.
Po:era
ONSITE festival is hosted by the interdisciplinary duo Po:era. Lucas Lacerda and Daniel Weyand create immersive experiences at the intersection of performance, sound and audio-visual art. In their site-specific research they engage with the material, imaginary and living qualities of a space to uncover its stories and paths to the future or to create connective, sense-based encounters with its human and non-human inhabitants.
Daniel Weyand
Daniel Weyand is an anthropologist, sound artist, and author of audio walks and immersive theater formats. In addition to his artistic work as a video and sound editor for Po:era, he has been working for over ten years as a project manager at the intersection of urban practice, cultural production, and media education. In this context, he has supported young filmmakers in an exchange program between Germany and Cameroon and produced films addressing topics such as gender, privilege, and global inequality. He is currently involved in an interdisciplinary research network at Humboldt University of Berlin, where he is developing the literary and anthropologically speculative world of the fictional exoplanet Caladri—at the intersection of art, science, and social practice.
Lucas Lacerda
Lucas Lacerda is an intermedia artist and curator of ONSITE. With two decades of experience in theater and a background in TV, dance, and film production, his work as a director and performer explores hybrid forms of storytelling that merge fiction and documentary in relation to urban space. Through site-responsive performances, immersive theater, audio-video walks, and docufiction films, he engages with the city as stage, co-author, and living subject. His artistic approach is grounded in the interplay of multiple mediums, using their convergence as a method to craft site-specific experiences that respond to spatial, historical, and sensorial dimensions.
Recent works include the immersive piece Parte de Nós, created in collaboration with MAM Bahia, Museum of Modern Art in Brazil, and the participatory docufiction films Framing Grunewald and Brücke Bewegt, both developed in cooperation with Brücke Museum in Berlin.
ONSITE is a short-term laboratory of site-responsive experimentation and collaborative creation. Through intuitive cartography, shared practices and collective not-knowing, multidisciplinary artists and researchers develop personal and communal approaches to a territory, space or institution.
The four-day festival takes place in changing locations in partnership with local cultural institutions and in a participatory dialogue with the neighbourhood.
Partners:
A project by:
Funded by:
