ISBN: 978-3-9825585-5-4
21 x 29 cm (softcover, spiral bound)
48 pages
Published: November 2025
→ les presses du réel (EU)
BERIT FISCHER is a transdisciplinary cultural practitioner: an artist, curator, scholar, writer, and an editor. She has been working internationally since 1999. Previously based in New York and London (1997 – 2009), she now works from Berlin. She holds a Ph.D. from the Winchester School of Art/Southampton University, UK. Her practice based doctoral research asked how curatorial practice can activate spaces and conditions for a micropolitical and holistic making of social empathy as an approach for a post-representational practice. In 2023 she published the practice-based research Towards a Micropolitical and Holistic Post-Representational Practice: A Case Study. It offers a new perspective to the field of contemporary post-representational practice with the specific angle of examining how the curatorial can activate spaces and conditions for a micro-political and holistic making of empathy and offers new terminology, that of “intra-curation” and “affective transformative curation”.
Her research interests include civic engaging, somatic, and listening practices, feminist- and eco-pedagogies, critical spatial practices, and a holistic and experiential knowledge production to permeate the status quo. Her practice often unfolds in forms of affective encounter and relational learning that strives to activate agency and an active micropolitics, fields of action and spaces for critical consciousness raising and engagement. In 2016 she founded the Radical Empathy Lab, an on-going nomadic and artistic social-and research-laboratory for ecological, alternative, and holistic knowledge production.
She is the founder and curator of the socio-ecological festival curriculum (Re-)Gaining Ecological Futures at the Floating University in Berlin. Together with Dr. Thomas Kampe, Dr. Raffaele Rufo and Minou Tsambika Polleros she is the co-founder of the International Forum for Eco-Embodied Arts (Ifeea.earth). An emergent forum that seeks to build sustainable learning communities in response to global ecological crises and the resulting inequalities and uncertainties by creating spaces for gathering, sharing, developing and embodying arts-based eco-oriented knowledges.
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Fluid Compos(t)ings
by Berit Fischer
A newly published interview of Brandon LaBelle with curator, artist, and researcher Berit Fischer offers insight into her transformative approach to contemporary art practice that challenges conventional notions of empathy and ecological awareness. Conducted between 2022 and 2023, the conversation explores Fischer's pioneering work in creating embodied, transdisciplinary experiences.
Fischer discusses her Radical Empathy Lab and the (Re-)Gaining Ecological Futures curriculum at Floating University Berlin, where she facilitates "affective encounters" grounded in alternative pedagogies and experiential knowledge production. Reframing empathy as "affective translation" Fischer articulates her vision of what she terms "energetic ecological citizenship"—a holistic knowledge formation engaging both body and mind.
Her post-representational curatorial and artistic approach emphasizes unmediated, embodied experiences that foster critical consciousness and interconnectedness, challenging anthropocentric worldviews. The interview also addresses Fischer's 2023 co-founding of the International Forum for Eco-Embodied Arts (IFEEA) and explores themes of technology, spirituality, and political love as agents for social and ecological transformation in an age of ecological crisis.
Complementing the interview the publication also includes an original essay by Fischer, which elaborates the notion of "fluid compos(t)ings" as a conceptual and practical methodology.
