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
I.
Aspiration is not a goal. It is a feeling.
Feelings: waves, tossing and foaming at the bow of bodies.
A wave without refraction is a feeling without a body;
a wave without ocean, a house emptied by people.
With your neck bent high, it becomes difficult to feel anything at all
except the thin pull of pinched skin.
I wish for a room with an even floor for us to crawl like cats and be found just as lovely when we tumble and fall. I wish for a room with lilies spread across, plums and apples on wooden ceilings, when necks bend high just for seconds.
I wish for a room. Truth is simple.
We are each other's focus.
But it is still too easy to turn away when there are no spaces
where we can seek each other out.
To walk through loss under the oak tree on an autumn night, to know that it is impossible to categorise the infinite, to place the pillars of future memory in the bowl, this space is needed.
No one can ever lay a fingerprint on the part of us that's infinite.
I wanted to ask this:
Where do these children go after they leave the institutions?
A small lake near the old school in Grönlied, rust-red like the water in front of this house, blueberry bushes, branched, with upright, angular to narrowly winged green stems, a place so green that I can be happy.
A homemade stool made of cherry wood, three parts.
A sharp edge of the sea. The biblical challenge of not cutting your bare toes on the sharp edges of the rocks when you enter the water, the cautious feeling of your feet, the concentrated balancing of your body on the stone. You need free sight. You need to know that you will end up in someone's hands. The hard work of slowly finding your way to the shore so that you can gently enter the water.
This transition from land to sea.
This hard work, the change from one state of matter to the next, the seemingly sharp distinction between air and water; they show who they are; how they differ, what they bring.
Workers wish for a room, still.
Repeat after me:
Out of grief we found a voice.
Not just for us but for all.
With the neck bent high, it becomes difficult to feel anything at all
except the thin pull of pinched skin.
The self-evidences of some are the blanks of others.
A gap bridged; concreted over with everything but concrete:
privatized monsteras, or children, or families, or lands, or nations, or thin papers, massive cups, unknown taxes, or apartments, or islands, or schools, or straits, or sellable cargo.
The blank space that labor brings
and the bones of the past,
the root beneath the ground
are not seen –
or don’t want to be seen.
The not speaking.
Or the not wanting to speak.
The speaking.
Or the wanting to speak.
Hands-on solutions in post-transition.
Forced displacements in post-institutions.
Who calls whom?
Who questions whom?
Who knows more
about whom?
To be a research subject is not a priviledge.
An elephant, blue, on a bag –
on a desk a dragon, green, golden, silver.
Cucumbers contain of water.
Like bodies.
Listen
when you see someone
sitting underneath a Marula tree, speaking.
They might talk to someone
you haven’t known.
I wish for a room,
that rests like a tree in permanence.
[...]
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 in community and for community,
how to call out what’s wrong,
how to lie in bed and not hurt,
how to draft,
how to puzzle,
how to calculate how many are there,
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.
You don’t have to give voices, you need to echo them.
At 12, they do laundry duty.
At 15, they have cooking duty.
And 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
to stretch 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.
So don’t care about a bad mark,
because one bad mark
always holds the possibility
for the next to be better.
Pandemics shift causes.
Let it be Corona —
or loneliness.
Children get lost —
on their routes.
From southern —
to northern Mexico.
Chile burns, Germany burns —
economic, political, social.
The streets remember —
what thr papers forget.
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 I found a voice.
Not just for me but for all.
What if you are made responsible for your parents’ actions?
Song of an imprisoned mother:
Tell my daughter
That I love her!
The world has told her,
“Your mother is a monster.”
Tell my twin sons
That they are the ones
For whom my fire burns.
I love them in tonnes.
Song of an abandonent daughter:
Tell my past
That I have not forgotten!
The world has told me,
“There is no room for your memory here”
Tell my future
That my past is a fire that burns
It would have warmed me
If you would let it.
You can’t choose your family. But you can choose your band.
anna.kuecking@gmail.com
Annas socially engaged practice unfolds in theatre workshops, 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, disability, and family separation.
Here documentary, non-linear, and multidimensional storytelling are combined with movement practices and methods of collective remembering and invention. All of their projects unfold in dialogue with communities and local networks, highlighting the fragile simultaneity of vulnerability and resilience, care and transformation, within contemporary social and political conditions.
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)
Regie und Text: Anna Kücking
Dramaturgie: Juliane Kroner
Bühne: Louis Caspar Schmitt
Musik: Eldar Tagi
Video und Licht: Vincent Heppner
Öffentlichkeitsarbeit: Lena Pozdnyakova
Hands-On: Luise Willer, Aaron Reudenbach
Performance: Alina Sokhna M’Baye, Olivia Purka
Kaspar and Emire grew up in the child welfare system — in group homes and foster families, surrounded by labelled Kellogg’s boxes, grinding visits to government offices, and sentences no one wants to hear. Years later, they meet again in Berlin. But much has changed since they lived together in the facility. How do you preserve and connect memories when the people involved are no longer present? Who gets to remember, and who doesn’t? And what does it mean to grow up outside your parents’ home in a society that treats “family” as its highest virtue?
From Kaspar Hauser to Harry Potter to Momo — children who do not grow up with their parents are central figures in literature and pop culture. As charismatic and mythic characters, they hover between ideas of autonomy and self-determination, resistance and adaptability. But what is life truly like for children who do not live with their parents? What do young people who grow up in the child welfare system experience — and how do they remember these experiences as adults? How can they recall a childhood that, due to constant transitions, hardly anyone can witness?
Kaspar Hauser Killjoy renders experiences from youth welfare as an associative fabric, expanding representational approaches through self-articulated perspectives. It insists: family is what we do together. Uncontrollable, vulnerable. Without a head, without borders, without a state.
Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und gesellschaftlichen Zusammenhalt
As an expression of the idea that the personal is political, as a counter-movement to administration and its formalized gazes, and as an attempt at a subaltern practice, Moments of Care archived and engaged with experiences in youth care through a Messenger group.
In subway stations and doorways, during walks and artistic workshops, we gathered to explore a fleeting form of encounter that cannot be fully captured or recorded—a form of thinking without railings and speaking without barriers, enacted against or through experiences of powerlessness.
The resulting publication, Darling, you are always needed, positioned itself as a counter-archive to youth care files, which often portray the people they are meant to protect in deficit-focused ways. The restrictions faced by those who seek access to their own files, and the often pathologizing descriptions contained within them, remain insufficiently addressed in political and social discourse.
Artist in Residency Leopoldplatz, Kulturamt Mitte 2024
with Lena Pozdnyakova and Eldar Tagi (there, there)
What does it mean to inhabit a place? To shape it, to claim it—to call it home? Together with more than fifteen children from marginalized communities, we explored Leopoldplatz through artistic interventions that challenged spatial orders and opened new ways of engagement. While plenty of children go to school, play, and grow up in Germany, repressive residency policies threaten their future—many will be deported from a city that has already become their home.
In response, we played games that fostered belonging, creating moments of safety, visibility, and agency. We transformed Northern European play carpets—structured city maps that represent rigid urban planning—into a complexe landscape : pulsating, organic, infused with colors, scents, and memories that transcended national borders.
Alongside Careleavers—young people from the youth welfare system—we explored the meaning of home, producing a radio feature interwoven with music created by refugee children. Both groups share experiences of displacement, navigating the loss and reconstruction of home more than once. Their perspectives are essential in envisioning a world where movement and play know no borders.
This project—featuring workshops, public interventions, interactive carpets, a radio feature, and more—was funded by Kultur Mitte as part of the Artist in Residency at Leopoldplatz.
Spore Initiative Berlin
Hosting events and conversations
with João Eduardo Albertini
How is it even possible to be a mother under capitalism? What expectations are placed on mothers, how do these expectations shape our lives – and for whom? What if we imagined motherhood as a form of collective care that exists beyond the biological family: involving neighbours, friends, and other significant relationships? Together, we enter into an exchange about our own biographical ties and critically engage with the concept of “motherhood.”
All participants bring an image of a person who has “nourished” them in some way – someone who could be called, or once was, a mother figure. This may be a biological mother, a foster or chosen mother, a friend, neighbour, or even a historical or literary figure. Together, we begin to surround these images with words, materials, and colours. In doing so, we dedicate ourselves not only to what these people created, enabled, protected, or carried – but also to what was ambivalent: their burdens, contradictions, limits, and absences.
Conversation: Of Mothers Who Are (Not) Mothers – Care, Origin, Capitalism
Anna and Mila both grew up in the child welfare system. In a personal conversation, they approach experiences of loss, longing, and coming of age within a welfare state. They ask: What does it mean to lose mothers – and to receive professionals or foster caregivers in their place? What role does the so-called Father State play – and how does it shape our ability to trust, to care, and to allow ourselves to be cared for? Which other mothers have we found – and how can we hold on to them?
Spore Initiative Berlin
Hosting events and conversations
with João Eduardo Albertini
Register
Illustrators Eva Wünsch and Luisa Stömer and copywriter Gregor Hinz have created two illustrated books: one about arriving in a foster family and one about leaving, or care leaving. The two books, Blickwinkel auf das Ankommen – Hallo Pflegefamilie (Perspectives on Arrival – Hello Foster Family) and Blickwinkel auf das Auszug – Ciao Pflegefamilie (Perspectives on Leaving – Bye Bye Foster Family), will be presented for the first time at the release event.
Spore Initiative Berlin
Hosting events and conversations
with João Eduardo Albertini
Spore Initiative Berlin
23.10.2025
Discussion
During the 2025 federal election campaign, while “Bürgergeld” (basic income support) was heavily polemicized and recipients were stigmatized as “total refusers,” the perspectives of children and young people growing up in such households remained invisible. Yet around 65% of young people in youth welfare come from families dependent on transfer payments.
Polarization, blame, and the individualization of poverty, precarious working and residency conditions, and illness—as seen in the 2025 election campaign—impact young people directly. But what if things were different?
What would critical social work look like if it didn’t operate from a deficit-oriented perspective, but instead created spaces and possibilities beyond evaluation and economic principles? How might law and youth welfare be reimagined as systems of unconditional protection? We are searching for places where barriers have been dismantled and spaces have opened up—where grief can be shared, and diverse forms of togetherness can find a home: intersectional, just, transformative.
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Spore Initiative Berlin
22.10.2025
Open Studios, Discussion, Conversation.
No pattern grows from a single strand. Only the diverse – hands, movements, voices – weaves us together. Some surfaces hold us as if floating, others create ruptures, tear open, divide, impose, dominate. The open group (un)equal patterns has, over the past months, brought together different positions to reflect on experiences of classism and to strengthen organisms of solidarity. Taking their own fields of work in art and culture, social work, and academia as a starting point, the group has sought to understand how classism shapes both life and labor.
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Over the course of a year, foster children from Berlin have come together and returned to these questions again and again through artistic means. They have researched, imagined, and created — through four summer schools, three short films, one performance, a zine, and an audio piece.
For the School of Commons program, There there proposed a series of listening experiences to be developed. The project is envisioned to be launched on lumbung radio and is released in 2024, after a year of collaborative work in 2023.
The format is defined as a listening experience that explores cultural practices of radical inclusion and openness to various voices and perspectives driven by the notion of solidarity and care while addressing complex topics of migration, struggles under oppressive regimes (institutional, social, and political), and surviving under the conditions of climate change and late capitalism. Given that these downing paradigms overlap, the project finds its positionality on terrains of what could be referred to as “optimism in despair.” With the project, we hope to create a virtual space where productive discussions and artistic experiments could drive constructive forms of gaining agency and participation/ taking political action.
With various interpretations at hand, the project of radical openness to diverse voices and stories, and engages with the following themes:
1) There there – as a form of repetition and the power of sonic expression – is open to various contributions through sound pieces, sonic arts, field recordings, sonic explorations, and commentaries.
2) There there – as a temporal aspect and projection of the future driven by “optimism in/over despair” – is open to conversations and reflections on forms of futurity.
3) There there – as a reference to spatial, planetary, and geographic conditions – is open to stories and explorations about migration and transitioning.
4) There there – as a form of relational work and practices of care – addresses participatory forms of engagement as a form of decolonial project, immanent critique, and decolonial thinking through art and practice.
On a regular basis, There there releases episodes that take on contrasting formats (addressing specific interpretations of “There there” mentioned above), organizes public events and fosters collaboration. This is aligned with the lumbung radio’s values by proposing the format of radical openness, with only one predicament of accentuating care and solidarity notions. By thinking and testing various non-hierarchical formats for experience sharing and knowledge dissemination, There there aspires to learn through practice.
Driven by all the values mentioned above, the project also incorporates various local and trans-local sub-programs: collaborations, community workshops, shared listening sessions, educational projects, discursive formats and more.
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