Sensing Loss is a collaboration between Cement Fields, Floating University Berlin, and Three Rivers exploring ecological loss in three sites across the UK and Germany.
The project draws connections between locations in Berlin, Bexley, and North Kent, liminal spaces on the edges of urban expansion, where nature and industry intertwine. Infrastructure developments in these contested post-industrial landscapes are often presented as ‘green’ or sustainable, but commonly threaten the rich biodiversity and vast ecological, social, and cultural significance held in these sites.
An international community exchange, the project brings together artists, activists, and communities to share lived experiences of environmental degradation caused by infrastructure and building projects in their local contexts through a hybrid programme of in-person and online events.
Exploring how artistic practice can provide tools and strategies for processing and challenging the loss of access and agency that arises in the face of sweeping changes, the programme opens up new perspectives grounded in international understanding and solidarity. By providing space to acknowledge, explore, and learn from loss it seeks to imagine new methods of resistance for communities, activists and artists facing similar challenges, and re-centre contested sites as places to nurture resistance, care, and learning.
Sensing Loss is funded by Cultural Bridge, which celebrates bilateral artistic partnerships between the UK and Germany through the collaboration between Arts Council England, the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, British Council, Creative Scotland, Fonds Soziokultur, Goethe-Institut London and Wales Arts International / Arts Council of Wales.
It continues the partnership forged between Cement Fields and Floating University Berlin through our previous Cultural Bridge funded, peer-to-peer exchange programme, Wetland.
Floating University Berlin is a natureculture learning site on and in the rainwater retention basin of former Tempelhof airport, a fully functioning urban infrastructure and campus run by non-profit organisation, Floating e.V.
It is in solidarity with the site’s history and the lineage of alternative narratives for urban development that the Floating e.V’s mission is to open, maintain, and take care of this unique site while bringing non-disciplinary, radical, participatory, and collaborative programs to the public. In other words, it is a place to learn to engage, to navigate, and to embrace complexity and entanglements of the world.
Since 2019 the project has been run by Floating e.V, a self-organised group, where diverse practitioners meet to collaborate and co-create more equitable and inclusive futures.
Three Rivers is a community-led arts organisation exploring culture, class and climate in the London Borough of Bexley and a member of Arts Council England’s Creative People and Places programme.
Since 2021 it has supported thousands of people to become ‘mates with their place’ by imagining community and friendship beyond the human through long-term projects including Tump 39; where it is working with Thamesmead residents to reimagine a disused Victorian ammunitions dump as a new space for arts and ecology, and Beneath the Pavement, The Marshes; which brought artists and activists together with local environmental groups to campaign on behalf of Bexley’s threatened marshlands.
In 2025 Three Rivers became the first organisation in the UK to become a Zoöp and pioneer a groundbreaking model of collaboration between human and other-than-human-life.