BE_LONGING – BEYOND COMMUNITIES & Finissage of “Den Himmel schweben lassen”

All the participants who have accompanied this year, together with Spore, invite you to engage with this important topic and honor the commitment of everyone involved, across both parts of the program taking place this weekend. 

One of these groups are the careleavers* within the frame of the AWAKE-Fellowship who warmly invite you to BE_LONGING – BEYOND COMMUNITIES: a reflection on belonging beyond the promises and limits of "community." Emerging within AWAKE, a fellowship for careleavers*, the event is shaped through careleaver* perspectives — by people who have grown up in (youth care) systems and carry forms of knowledge shaped by institutional life, transition, rupture, resistance, and survival.

From this point, the event turns toward broader questions of connection, relation, and solidarity. What does it mean to long for belonging while also staying with the exclusions, boundaries, and power relations that communities often reproduce? What connects us beyond shared labels and inherited definitions? And how might spaces of encounter open up that do not depend on sameness, certainty, or simplified ideas of togetherness? 

The event opens a space for exchange and collective reflection on belonging as something that is not fixed, but continually coming into being — shaped through process, negotiation, struggle, and re:imagining. Rather than presenting belonging as a harmonious or settled condition, “BE_LONGING – BEYOND COMMUNITIES” approaches it as a political and emotional practice, marked by care and violence, exclusion and resistance, rupture and connection. In this way, the event invites us to think beyond communities: toward forms of relation that can hold complexity, contradiction, and vulnerability, and make room for other ways of being, and being with one another.

Program 

18.04.2026

12:00 pm   |   Exhibition opening –  Careleavers*

Atrium

12:30 pm   |   Opening of the finissage “Den Himmel Schweben lassen” – João Albertini           With: Können wir darüber reden? Sichtbar machen und agieren (in DE) (Can we talk about it? How to make visible and act) – Stadtteilmütter Neukölln and Migrantas e.V.

Atrium

3:00 pm  |  “Was uns nährt” panel (in DE) (What nourishes us), (registration required) – Careleavers* 

Classroom

5:00 pm  |  Closing with DJ bruderkong and open buffet – Careleavers* (open for all) 

Classroom

19.04.2026 

12:00 pm  |  Hangout & DJ-Set by FATGIRL tigris – Careleavers*

Atrium

3:00 pm  |  Community Talk: Holding Space – Careleavers* (registration required)

Classroom 

3:00 pm  |  Premiere of the documentary film „Silver Horizon – Es ist nie zu spät für ein Musical“ – Den Himmel schweben lassen 

Auditorium

Spore spent a year and a half working on a musical project with the 60+ Leisure Center. This documentary film offers personal insights into the creative process and illustrates what people aged 65 and over can achieve together. Above all, it shows how this work has moved them. 

6:00 pm  |  (Un)gleiche Muster: Zine-presentation – Den Himmel schweben lassen

Auditorium 

From June to December of 2025, the group (Un)gleiche Muster collected experiences related to classism, precarious wage labor, and care. In this zine, we reveal the patterns we recognized, document them, and reinterpret them. Come by, take a look inside, and bring the zine home with you.