TA T’s Mediation program for Berlin Science Week 2025

Tieranatomisches Theater (TA T) presents: Night Sky with Open Futures

In the frame of anatomia publica — Open stage for scientific, aesthetic and social research practices

1-8 November 2025 with guest artist-researchers Marcela Moraga and po:era (Lucas Lacerda & Daniel Weyand)

For Berlin Science Week, the Tieranatomisches Theater (TA T) transforms its historic dome into a night sky — exploring planetary entanglements through art, science, fiction, and cultural heritage on a living stage for collaborative futures.

Event location:
TA T – Tieranatomisches Theater (Zentrum für Kulturtechnik, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
Campus Nord – Haus 3
Philippstr. 13
10115 Berlin

Event details:
Sat 1 – Sat 8 November 2025 | Opening hours: 2pm – 9pm
Monday & Tuesday closed| Free entrance
Opening: 1 Nov · Installations: 5 Nov · Artist Talks: 6 Nov · Guided Walks: 7 Nov · Finissage: 8 Nov
Languages: English & German

 

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Curatorial concept

For over 250 years, the Tieranatomisches Theater (TA T) has offered science an impressive stage. anatomia publica, one of TA T’s core public programmes, reclaims this historic architecture—not to dissect bodies, but to explore the anatomy of research itself.
Instead of a closed academic setting, the Theater becomes a Wissenstheater—a place where knowledge is not only produced but also performed and shared.

As part of Berlin Science Week, anatomia publica present “Night Sky with Open Futures”, a five-day special program that transforms the theater into an immersive stage for cosmological imagination. It invites the public into living, experimental environments where futures are speculated, knowledge is embodied, and science is reoriented toward relational care. Anchored in the 2025 festival theme “Beyond Now,” our focus turns to planetary entanglements — shifting perspective from extractive to collaborative futures.

To look at the sky is never a neutral gesture. Whether through telescopes, stories, or woven patterns, we project futures — and inherit pasts that are still ahead of us. Within this horizon, our program features two interdisciplinary artistic research projects by anatomia publica residents Marcela Moraga and po:era (Lucas Lacerda & Daniel Weyand). Together, their works situate this shared gesture of looking upward, tracing how our ways of seeing through the stars are shaped by science, fiction, and cultural heritage. Under the dome of the Tieranatomisches Theater, the night sky reveals itself as both archive and oracle — a space for listening, speculation, and shared worldbuilding, where stories, data, and memory intersect.

Our title borrows its rhythm from Ocean Vuong’s “Night Sky with Exit Wounds” — a book that looks at the aftermath of violence and survival through language that is both celestial and corporeal. Where Vuong writes from the ruins of inherited histories — colonial, diasporic, and queer — Night Sky with Open Futures turns that wound toward possibility.

Paz Ponce
Curator for Public Programmes & Outreach
TA T – Tieranatomisches Theater

 

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Featured Artistic Research Projects

 

 

Marcela Moraga — „What happens in the sky, happens on earth. Cosmology of an oasis“

Location: TA T Rotunda — accessible during opening hours

In her textile-based research station, Marcela Moraga explores how the Lickanantay people of Chile’s Atacama Desert understand the sky and the land as deeply connected. Developed in collaboration with women weavers from Chiu Chiu and with the Lay Lay Indigenous Association in Calama, the project interlaces oral memory, environmental conflict, and sky observation into evolving constellations of knowledge.

At its heart lies a critique of Western extractivism and the dominance of Western scientific worldviews—how mining and modern astronomy have reshaped the desert’s landscapes and cosmologies. Reframing the oasis as a technology of observation and survival, Moraga reflects on how cooperative practices and Indigenous ecological knowledge might inspire alternative relationships between science, land, and care.

Visitors encounter woven constellations, archival materials, and field notes, as well as a playful learning space for children that translates cosmological heritage into accessible and imaginative forms.
The project also resonates with research developed within the Zentrum für Kulturtechnik (ZfK), in particular with Das Technische Bild, whose investigations into instruments of vision and image-based knowledge form a conceptual bridge between laboratory and landscape.

 

 

 

po:era (Lucas Lacerda & Daniel Weyand) — CALADRI

Location: TA T’s Historic Auditorium & Library — active from dusk

CALADRI is a speculative research project where astrophysics and fiction converge. Rooted in real scientific data, it imagines a slowly rotating exoplanet where life can survive only within a migrating twilight belt between scorching light and frozen darkness. Within this fragile zone, two societies move in constant adaptation — preserving their knowledge in underground echo chambers that archive climate rhythms and celestial signals to transmit memory across deep time.

Through sound, video mapping, and narrative fragments, po:era invites visitors to enter an immersive field of perception — part planetarium, part performance.
From dusk onward, the Historic Auditorium transforms into a participatory environment where audiences are invited to listen, speculate, and join worldbuilding sessions exploring coexistence between science and fiction.

In parallel Po:era hosts the fourth edition of the site-specific art festival ONSITE which explores the speculative futures of three cultural sites in Berlin: a museum, cinema, and theatre. Po:era’s world-building project CALADRI – developed in collaboration with Miguel Chaparro as part of their research of Anatomia Publica – will kick off the festival program on 6 November at Tieranatomisches Theater.

Together, these two artistic research positions compose the special programme Night Sky with Open Futures, transforming the Tieranatomisches Theater into a space for listening, speculation, and shared worldbuilding across disciplines.

 

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Visitor Experience

During opening hours (14:00–21:00), visitors are invited to explore the Tieranatomisches Theater as a landscape of observation and imagination.

Marcela Moraga’s research station can be experienced in the Rotunda (ground floor), while po:era’s immersive installation activates from dusk (18:00–21:00) in the Historic Auditorium and Library (first floor).

All spaces are barrier-free and wheelchair accessible.

Information about the artistic research projects is available in German and English.
Please note that the immersive experience CALADRI by po:era is presented in English only, and the Artist Talks are held in English due to the international composition of the guests and audience of Berlin Science Week.

The installations can be experienced independently throughout the week, with moments of artist and curator presence announced in the daily programme below.

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Programme Highlights — Night Sky with Open Futures

(within the framework of anatomia publica × Berlin Science Week)

Date: Saturday, November 1 — Opening
Time: 18:00–21:00
The opening evening introduces anatomia publica — Open stage for scientific, aesthetic and social research practices and presents the two featured artistic research projects:

• Marcela Moraga, What happens in the sky, happens on earth. Cosmology of an oasis (Rotunda, ground floor)
• Po:era (Lucas Lacerda & Daniel Weyand), CALADRI (Historic Auditorium & Library, first floor)
  → Artists and anatomia publica curator are present.

 

Date: Wednesday, November 5 — Open Installations
Time: 14:00–21:00

Both artistic research projects are open for self-guided visits.

→ Public access to Rotunda and Auditorium & Library spaces.

 

Date: Thursday, November 6 — Artist Talks: Dialogues under the Night Sky
Time: 16:00–17:00 — Artist Talk: Caladri
with po:era (Lucas Lacerda & Daniel Weyand)
Location: Object Lab, Zentrum für Kulturtechnik (HU Berlin)
Part of anatomia publica × Berlin Science Week
Organized by TA T – Tieranatomisches Theater

Caladri is a work in progress by po:era, a duo exploring how fiction can become a research method. Rooted in real astrophysical data, the project imagines the slowly rotating exoplanet Caladri, where life can only exist within a narrow twilight belt between scorching light and frozen darkness. There, two human societies live in constant migration—adapting, communicating, and reimagining coexistence under extreme conditions.

The world of Caladri is not a utopian ideal society, but a speculative space of resonance in which present challenges on Earth—such as climate change, resource distribution, and shifting borders—are seen anew through the lens of another world and another time.
How would humans evolve under extreme climates?
What might a constantly migrating society look like?
How could knowledge travel across centuries?

Taking place in the Object Lab, this artist talk invites scientists and visitors from interrelated fields—such as anthropology, climate research, geography, or astrophysics—to join a shared speculative exercise. The conversation begins with Caladri’s open research questions and an object brought by the artists—a simple material trace that connects their fictional world to the realities of Earth.

From there, invited researchers take the role of respondents—a format borrowed from performing arts and research symposia, where companions from other disciplines offer reflections rather than analyses. Their responses are resonant rather than explanatory, linking scientific perspectives with poetic or imaginative ones.

Together with the audience, the talk unfolds as a kind of science theater—a shared speculative space where knowledge and wonder meet, and where artistic worldbuilding and scientific inquiry might inform one another and become part of the same constellation.
→ Moderated by Paz Ponce (anatomia publica curator) in dialogue with Felix Sattler (TA T head curator).

Time: 18:30–19:30 — Artist Talk: What happens in the sky, happens on earth. Cosmology of an oasis
with guest artist-researcher Marcela Moraga and astronomer Basilio Solís Castillo
Location: Object Lab, Zentrum für Kulturtechnik (HU Berlin)
Part of anatomia publica × Berlin Science Week
Organized by TA T – Tieranatomisches Theater

In this artist talk, Marcela Moraga continues her research on the cosmology of the Lickanantay oasis culture in Chile’s Atacama Desert, where observation of the sky, weaving, and care for the land form a single system of knowledge.
Astrophysicist Basilio Solís Castillo, himself a member of the Lickanantay community, introduces this worldview and the ways in which illuminated and dark zones of the heavens mirror earthly life. Their dialogue asks how an academic astronomer encounters vernacular astronomy and whether the oasis can be understood as a technology of observation and survival.

Linking artistic, scientific, and heritage perspectives within the transdisciplinary environment of the Zentrum für Kulturtechnik, the discussion expands to the role of instruments that mediate vision, drawing on publications from Das Technische Bild (Imagination des Himmels, Instrumente des Sehens, Scientific Fiction) as a material bridge between laboratory and landscape.

Extending this dialogue, artistic researchers from ZfK are invited as respondents—resonant voices who open the exchange toward questions of decentring the West, technological mediation, and wayfinding systems and their representational models, situating the discussion within broader reflections on heritage as a dynamic and transformative practice.

Together with the audience, the talk invites reflection on forms of seeing, knowing, and imagining—between sky and earth, fabulation and fact.

→ Moderated by Paz Ponce (anatomia publica curator) in dialogue with Felix Sattler (TA T head curator).

Time: 18:00–21:00 — po:era immersive participatory installation
Historic Auditorium & Library, Tieranatomisches Theater
→ Artists present.

Time: 19:30–21:00 — Marcela Moraga textile-based research station
Rotunda, Tieranatomisches Theater
Following the talk, visitors are invited to continue the conversation through the material traces of Marcela Moraga’s installation—a textile-based research station where oral memory, environmental conflict, and sky observation are interwoven into evolving constellations.
→ Artist present.

 

Date: Friday, November 7 — Open Installations
Time: 14:00–21:00
Both projects remain accessible for self-guided visits.
Time: 18:00–21:00 — po:era immersive installation (Auditorium & Library).
→ Self-guided visit; no artist presence.

 

Date: Saturday, November 8 — Marcela Moraga Research Display
Time: 14:00–18:00
The final day of Night Sky with Open Futures focuses on Marcela Moraga’s research station in the Rotunda.
Visitors are invited for individual exploration and reflection.
→ Artist is present.