Dissident Paths: Walking Together as a Method

When does walking become a refusal, a reclaiming, a reimagining? What stories does the city whisper when you move through it at different paces? What forms of knowledge emerge when we walk together, rather than alone?

Dissident Paths: Walking Together as a Method is a curatorial project unfolding over a year, by means of collective movement along traced, imagined, and yet-to-be-discovered paths across Berlin. Walking can be both a necessity and a gesture of dissidence, a refusal to accept the given infrastructures of a world increasingly defined by polarization and devastation. Walking through the city can change perceptions and awareness, at once exposing barriers and impossibilities, whilst also opening up new routes. Movement, in both its bodily and political forms, holds the potential to reshape our sense of belonging and collective agency.

This in-motion program emerges from timely questions, addressed from multiple directions: How do pathways, thresholds and urban networks reflect existing power structures? Who moves freely and unhindered, and who is forced to find alternative ways? What invisible histories, suppressed narratives, and unspoken solidarities might walking reveal? If walking connects us to the more-than-human world, how might it allow us to attune ourselves to the city’s forgotten ecologies, its vanishing commons, its fragile futures? Can walking become a way to reimagine our urban environments, making them more just, porous, and collectively held?

Between May and October 2025, across five chapters titled PATHS, a total of 23 walks will take place. Led by invited artists, collectives, poets and cultural theorists, these contributions take on multiple formats, expanding the idea of the walk towards performances, readings, open-air film screenings, workshops for children and adults, sound interventions, foraging, board game sessions, after-parties, and more. Each of them embodies a set of socio-political urgencies, as articulated by its contributors—who come from different backgrounds and lived experiences, bringing various forms of accessibility to each event.

From each walk, the artists are invited to leave a TRACE—whether through documentation, material-making, textual reflections, or something yet to be defined. These traces will be collected and shared during a 4-day public program at nGbK in February 2026, as well as in the form of a dossier titled Walk Notations. The traces will reflect on the trajectory of the program whilst opening space for reflections and discussions about future steps.

Dissident Paths was conceptualized by two pre-formed Berlin initiatives, Cruising Curators and ReRouting. Their shared interests in experimenting with alternative curatorial methodologies led them to shape this program as an attempt to establish different forms of contact in urban spaces.

PATHS: Series of walks across Berlin
May–October 2025

PATH 1: SPACES AS THRESHOLDS (on crossovers and commons)
May 2025

PATH 2: TRESPASS & TRANSIT (on migration and access)
June–July 2025

PATH 3: STREETS AND PROTEST (on movements and demonstrations)
July 2025

PATH 4: DECELERATE (on alternative temporalities)
August / October 2025

PATH 5: CRUISE (on cruising and queer route making)
September 2025

TRACES: Public program and Walk Notations dossier launch
February 2026

See the full program at ngbk.de.
 

Contributors: Yasmeen Al-Qaisi, Elena Biserna, Mirja Busch, Rüzgâr Buşki, Suelen Calonga, Saverio Cantoni & Noah Gokul & Lo Moran & Iz Paehr, Gabriel Francisco Lemos, Carolin Genz, Jane Hwang, Mahshid Mahboubifar, Pol Merchan, Harun Morrison, Pitchaya Ngamcharoen, Marlene Oeken & Martha Schwindling, Minh Duc Pham, Liz Rosenfeld, Natthapong Samakkaew, Kaspar Schmidt Mumm, Nour Sokhon, Lauryn Youden, Alternative Monument, hand breast heart kollektiv, House’ it going? (Laura Margarete Bertelt & Uli Kneisl), Project In/Visibility (Samirah Siddiqui & Tasnim Elboute), ssssSssssssss (Ashkan Sepahvand & virgil b/g taylor)

nGbK work group: Clementine Butler-Gallie, Bengisu Çağlayan, Raphael Daibert, Luise Leon Elbern, Eirini Fountedaki, Viviane Tabach, Sarnt Utamachote

Graphic design: Paula Buškevica

Funded by Hauptstadtkulturfonds.

neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst (nGbK) is funded by the Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion.