FLOATING UNIVERSITY AND CLIMATE CARE: THEORY AND PRACTICE ON A “NATURECULTURE” LEARNING SITE

Abstract

A soft and caring infrastructure collaborates with the existing environment and its agents. Such is the case of the Floating University in Berlin. On the site of the Floating University, a diverse range of animals, plants, and algae have taken root and given birth to a unique landscape: a man-made environment reclaimed by nature where polluted water coexists with the relatively new presence of the university, forming a ‘natureculture’ or a ‘third landscape’. This text develops the case of the Floating University and ‘Climate Care’, a festival engaged with theory and practice at the intersection of climate challenges, ethics of care, and environmental humanities. Emerging from weathering the conditions of its site, the program is a result of in-depth cohabitation with the constructed water infrastructure, its human culture, and its multispecies overlays. This non-natural-natural site
is complex and evocative, and acting as its custodians brings many questions we hope to address: How do we hold space and sites for the complexity of our moment How do we seek, create, and implement planetary alliances on a locally complex site