Zita Leutgeb
About
Selected works
2. Echoes, Ghosts, Songs & Soils
Location: Akademie der Künste Berlin, Germany
Year: 2025/2026
Category: Curatorial fellowship JUNGE AKADEMIE
Performance programme co-curated with: Zita Leutgeb
Exhibition curated by: Clara Herrmann, Linnéa Meiners
Team: Raphael Bruning, Marie Graftieaux
part of the JUNGE AKADEMIE’s exhibition “Vessel & Voyager”
As part of the JUNGE AKADEMIE’s exhibition “Vessel & Voyager”
Performance-Programme with 12 artists
25 April 2026, 15:00–23:00
📍 Akademie der Künste, Hanseatenweg 10, 10557 Berlin
The performance programme “Echoes, Ghosts, Songs & Soils” takes place as part of the JUNGE AKADEMIE's exhibition “Vessel & Voyager” and transforms the Akademie der Künste on Hanseatenweg into a breathing, singing, vibrating resonance vessel. In four chapters, spaces are created for encounters, lingering and exchange between performers, visitors, artists and their works.
Concerts, readings, performances, participatory installations and audiovisual works embed the leitmotifs of the exhibition – vessel and voyager – in an immersive, performative event. “Echoes, Ghosts, Songs & Soils” is carried by a chorus of protesting voices, the unfolding of soundscapes and songs, the pulsation of bodies and territories, and the articulation of intimate spheres through language.
With the fellows:
Logan February, Huihui Cheng, Isabel Cruz, Jug Đorđević, Claudia Durastanti, Éléonore de Duve, Regina Menke, Hrishikesh Pawar, Sinan Samanli, Sophie Seita, Diána Vonnák, Franziska Wenning
And the artists:
ensemble mosaik, Lea Barletti & Annette Kopetzki, Rachel Elizabeth Skipor, Anja Gast, Rémy Bocquillon & Maximilian Jean-Luc Ahl, Sasha Amaya, Saeed Asadsangabi & Eve Singleton et al.
Curated by Clara Herrmann and Zita Leutgeb (curatorial fellow)
About the programme:
In her choreographic work, dancer Isabel Cruz enters into a dialogue with her late father. Inspired by the feel of the Akademie building, physical resonance spaces and contemplative moments for mourning unfold.
Choreographer and dancer Hrishikesh Pawar returns to the role of dancer and presents two autobiographical works choreographed by Akademie member Arila Siegert.
Through a web of perceptions that connects the many layers of a life, writer Éléonore de Duve brings the world of her protagonist Sophia to life: her tragedy and, behind it – backwards in time – the possibility of a new beginning.
The sound-based, participatory performance by theatre director Jug Đorđević is inspired by the protest movements against the Serbian government in response to the Novi Sad railway station accident.
Composer Huihui Cheng creates a performative listening space at the intersection of sound, theatrical gesture and visual projection with two pieces.
In his concerto for string quartet, composer Sinan Samanli unfolds sound as a fluid landscape, referring to images of waterfalls and cascades.
The ecofeminist performance by director and choreographer Franziska Wenning and the audiovisual reading by writer Claudia Durastanti merge inscribed stories of bodies and territories. In the twilight between day and night, dance and literature open up a space in which connectedness with the ground, gravity, magical thinking and transcendence can be experienced anew.
Artist and researcher Sophie Seita activates the graphic scores of her installation “the swamp under the forum” in the exhibition hall through a performance. The “swamp” becomes a metaphor for permeability and what the forum tries to suppress, the installation a playground for language and sensation before and after collapse.
Poet Regina Menke reads texts from the poetry cycle Schild und Spiel und Idylle, gekehrte und um- (Shield and Play and Idyll, Turned and Turned). The texts revolve around springtails, gaps in teeth, the difficulty of distinguishing between the pronouns “I” and “you”, and the question of whether the landscape should be more tangible.
The poems from Nude Imperative by Logan February move between the poles of love and devotion, discipline and inner conflict, and immanence and transcendence.
The writer Diána Vonnák reads, accompanied by the music of Kin Teal, from the series Alien, Ghost – audio meditations on the dilemmas of witnessing and complicity, on grief, guilt and anger. It confronts the mountains of linguistic debris, reports, memos and analyses we produce to channel the raw reality of war onto desks in courts or ministries, to news headlines, and academic journals.