taz. die tageszeitung
17.10.2025
Providers of cultural programs for children and young people demonstrated in front of the House of Representatives to protest against cuts in their sector.
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taz. die tageszeitung
02.09.2025
Between fries and the diving board, the public pool is a place where utopia is lived. It is a piece of summer that always seems on the verge of being lost. An essay.
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taz. die tageszeitung
14.10.2023
Child and youth welfare services need more staff and more money. With Berlin's State Secretary for Youth, Falko Liecke (CDU), that's not going to happen.
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taz. die tageszeitung
24.9.2022
Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi's novel ‘The First Wife’ has been translated into German. We talk to her about feminism, tradition and the middle class.
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taz. die tageszeitung
11.07.2023
Every fourth child in Berlin is affected by poverty. What does this mean for families, and what solutions are needed? A visit to the Arche in Hellersdorf.
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taz. die tageszeitung
18.06.2025
Dismissed employees, obstructed works councils: In the face of increasing economisation, independent welfare organisations are hindering trade union work.
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taz. die tageszeitung
23.08.2018
Theatre and meditation in prison: this is not a luxury, but can be a ray of hope and a form of therapy. A journey behind bars.
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taz. die tageszeitung
25.05.2017
More and more young adults are homeless. Many are struggling to get by in Berlin, like Mario, Lucy and Pat.
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As a method of collective memory, poetic documentation begins by asking people questions at conferences and gatherings. From these questions—along with quotes from workshops, presentations, and speeches—I compose poems. When read aloud, people recognize their own sentences, images, and concerns. Poetic documentation thus becomes a shared archive: a way of capturing collective thought, emotion, and experience in a form that is both reflective and creative.
The sun shines; by the big room, coats
of the divided birch tree folded, pleated
like compost.
There’s no nuclear knowledge,
in the inbetweenness of wind and dune.
Would you know your name if it wasn’t for the
ones calling?
A bottle opens, feet swing.
As my fingers are typing,
my back is holding me.
My back knowing to hold me
While my fingers know to press p-r-e-s-s.
A baby shouts.
Within it a sprinkle, a bird, a river, a
snale.
Paper rustles, ice cream drips in my muskles,
the smell of hand-crème scatters through
space.
What is P?
The sixteenth letter of the alphabet?
The distance across the center of a circle?
Here, in the open hands, P is held as
processes, practices, projects, public,
program, person, prompts.
You know this moment,
when a child gives you a
drawing and says:
“This is you.”
And it really hits you?
So do the following:
Find a person.
Ask them to tell you what
they really want.
And then draw.
We are coming out of winter.
We are coming out of a thousand colds.
But the hostile environment is not nature,
it’s not the cold.
It’s the Empire.
If we want to continue doing what we are doing,
we need to breath.
The thousand breaths that it takes
for one word to be coming
out of your mouth
echoing the images that you keep within.
Mountains as natural landscapes
around a city.
The sensation of protection
they give,
their permance within ever
changing scenarious.
Nature is not silent at all.
Nature is
not the ideal.
It’s just not wanting to be
heard,
like humans do.
It has it’s own reason, it’s
own time.
The root of conflict is competition.
The money produced in the arts
is not owned by the artists.
The cash flows into blast furnances.
Workers do the following:
With eleven they pick grapes.
With thirteen they clean the dishes at the restaurants.
With fifteen they are afraid to quit at a sandwich store.
With twenty they hand out flyers.
With twenty-four they help packing croceries.
With thirty they work in a bowling center.
With thirty-two they work as a nursery.
With sixty they make coffee.
In between people are displaced from their home countries.
The war is no longer declared,
but continued.
Axioms of the current:
Behind a screen, one is always
present, always distant.
And all is temporary, any way.
[...]
Excerpts of poetic encounters at University Hildesheim
Aspiration is not a goal. It is a feeling.
Feelings: waves crashing against the bow of the body,
roaring foam pearls in the blue light of the moon.
A wave without breaking is a feeling without a body;
a wave without an ocean, a face without life.
Don't bend your head too high.
With your neck stretched out, it becomes difficult to feel anything at all, except the slight tugging of the pinched skin.
A sharp edge of the sea.
The biblical challenge of not
cutting your bare toes when you go into the water,
carefully feeling your feet,
concentrating on balancing your body on the rock.
You cannot find balance if you do not know that when you fall, the hands of others will hold you.
This hard work,
finding your way to the shore, the transition from land to sea.
This hard work, the transition from
one state of matter to the next.
Only then does the air reveal its nature:
the difference between air and water becomes clear—
who they are, how they differ, what they bring.
What is self-evident to some
is empty space for others.
This hard work that leaves gaps: broken bones in the cracks of history, the tangled roots under the earth, are not seen—or do not want to be seen.
Listen
when you see someone
sitting underneath a Marula tree, speaking.
They might talk to someone
you haven’t known.
Walk through loss on an autumn night,
the sudden realization: impossible to categorize the infinite. No one will ever be able to put a fingerprint on the part of us that is infinite.
[...]
Youth is not Youth.
They know how to say yes,
how to say no.
They know how to dry a tear,
how to read the room,
how to act,
how to call out what’s wrong,
how to not hurt,
how to draft,
how to puzzle,
how to calculate,
how to ask questions when no one does,
how to build dragons of paper and metal,
how to sing and make music with plastic cups,
they practice philosophy.
While others work part-time jobs,
they have laundry duty and cooking duty
and are not paid.
Playing The ground is Lava
with eight other children
stretching the evening,
protesting against the notion of humanity
to calculate a life that can’t be calculated.
How poor,
when you don’t feel how thin the ground is.
This unimaginable life experience—
time runs, like the Ural river,
you are in movement, anytime.
You don’t have to give us a voice.
You need to echo our voices.
[...]
Pandemics shift causes.
Let it be Corona —
or loneliness.
Children get lost —
on their routes
from southern —
to northern Mexico.
Chile burns, Germany burns —
And the streets remember
what the paper forgets.
And as long as people must leave —
because an administration says so,
as long as people ask for registers —
to decide who belongs and who does not,
as long as names are written down —
to be crossed out again —
this is not a free country.
You are not free.
This is not a free country.
You are not free.
Repeat after me:
Out of grief we found a voice.
Not just for us but for all.
Naguru Go Down Boxing Match Uganda
anna.kuecking@gmail.com
Annas socially engaged practice unfolds in theatre and writing workshops, community care and embodied practices as well as empowerment spaces. In their artisctic work Anna investigates emerging formations of the archive within the entanglement of body, community, environment, and institutions. Their auto-ethnographically informed research explores intergenerational experience, class dynamics, (dis)ability, family separation and kinship as solidarity and accountability.
In Annas work documentary, poetic and multidimensional storytelling are combined with movement practices and methods of collective remembering and invention. All of Annas projects unfold in dialogue with communities and local networks, highlighting the fragile simultaneity of vulnerability and resilience, care and transformation.
Comparative Literature, Philosophy, Art History
• Focus: African Art
• Bachelor thesis: Antagonistic Remembering in the Works of Ugandan Authors Stella Nyanzi and Jennifer Makumbi
10/2017 – 05/2019 – Theatre Pedagogy (BuT), Theaterwerkstatt Heidelberg
01/2025 – present – “Den Himmel Schweben Lassen”, Spore Initiative Berlin invited by fantastic João Eduardo Albertini
• Organisation of workshops and events, communications, curatorial work
11/2024 – 02/2025 – Artist in Residency Leopoldplatz, Kulturamt Mitte
• Project lead & artistic direction: Sketching Homes
• Fundraising, budget management, public relations, workshop and exhibition projects
• Work with refugee children and young people in youth welfare
09/2023 – 03/2025 – Project Lead “Hauptrollen – Heroes of Foster Care” (Aktion Mensch)
• Fundraising, budget management, theatre rehearsals, workshops, community work
• Organisation of conferences and training formats
• Editorial work for the magazine FamilienBande
03/2024 – 12/2024 – Artistic Director “Moments of Care” (IMPACT Funding)
• Concept development, fundraising, editing, public relations, budget management
• Editing, proofreading and production of the publication Darling, you are always needed
• Author and director of the theatre piece Kaspar Hauser Killjoy
Assistant director/dramaturgy: Mietsachen (HAU), Ortsbesuch (Maxim Gorki Theater), Schwarze Ernte (HAU), Pans Schatten (Schalktheater Zürich), Ein Sommernachtstraum (Schalktheater Zürich) Dein Gesicht ist eine wunderbare Bühne für mein Drama (TD), Mir ist alles viel zu laut und alles viel zu leise (TD), Liegt Europa in mir? (tjg dresden), Matrix der Demokratie / Quizzy (heimathafen Neukölln)
• Moderation and Workshops: Drosos Foundation, Single-Parent Conference, Careleaver e. V., Spore Initiative, African Book Festival Berlin, University of the Arts, Berlin, kunsthochschule weißensee, Berlin
• Performances & Theatre: Water Bodies (HKW, 2024), From Flowers to Fists (Theaterhaus Jena, 2024)
• freelancing Theatre pedagogy workshops in schools & holiday programmes (since 2017)