Climate Care is 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 – a rainwater retention basin in Berlin – the programme is a result of in-depth cohabitation with the constructed water infrastructure, its human culture and its multi-species overlays.

    Design and facilitation of a fog catcher workshop at Floating Berlin, as part of the Climate Care 2021: the Rewilding Years festival. Guest artist, collective fabrication and installation (15 people).

In addition to the rainwater and basin filtration systems, a fog catcher is built on the heights of the Floating University site, overlooking the Rain Palace (one of the building on site). With the idea of collecting, filtering and storing the water present on the site, building a fog catcher during Climate Care festival adds an extra layer to the installation and understanding of the site. The water stored here is that of the sky, the one present in the atmosphere.

Inspired by Espinosa’s fog catchers invented in Chile in the 60’s, the installation will allow the water that makes up our Berlin sky to be caught and stored, in order to be filtered, just like the rainwater collected, before being drunk by the site’s users. Fog catchers, particularly adapted to desert, coastal and mountainous areas, collect water from the atmosphere by condensing it along a mesh net suspended on frames, responding to the variation of temperatures.
What waters will we collect in Berlin? How many will it be, over the seasons? Can we imagine using the heights of a city buildings to collect cleaner water than the rainwater in the future ?
Here, the installation will be the means to materialize and reflect on the different forms of presence of water in the city, and the ways to enhance it.

Lightweight and low-tech but no less intelligent, this fog- catcher will be built in co-creation while sharing techniques and visions. Like a sensitive observatory, the data and water collected can be analysed to understand yet another layer of the Floating site. Softly marking the sky as a hybridisation of a meteorological measuring tool and a 3d see-through flag, floating above the Rain Palace.

About Floating Berlin :
On the site of the Floating University, the rainwater collection basin serving the former Tempelhof airfield,  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 (Haraway) or a third landscape (Clément).

Floating e.V. is a self organised space and group, where practitioners from a wide range of backgrounds meet to collaborate, co-create and imaginatively work towards futures.