We begin by spending time in the space we work with: resting, moving, listening, sharing everyday life, asking questions, and building relationships. Through conversations, field recordings, mapping, and artistic experimentation, we explore a territory’s social, historical, material, and ecological layers.
A territory may be a neighbourhood, a forest, a museum, a theatre, or the overlapping worlds within and around an institution. We engage with its memories and tensions, its human and non-human inhabitants, and our own position within these relationships. Documentary encounters meet fiction and speculation, opening possibilities for experiencing a familiar place in new ways to imagine what it might become.
Ways to work with us:
- Artistic creation: Commission a new work or invite us to reimagine an existing creation in dialogue with your context. Combining sound, storytelling, and live or recorded situations, we invite audiences to listen closely and discover connections between their own experiences and the worlds around them. Outcomes may include live performances and theatre pieces, immersive walks, sound installations, film or other forms developed through the encounter.
- Curation: Open a site to diverse perspectives through a residency, exhibition, festival, public intervention or a new curatorial collaboration, shaped by the site and the participating practitioners.Through ONSITE, our established residency and festival format, or newly developed curatorial projects, we create time for individual research, collective exchange, and collaborative experimentation.
- Learning & mentorship: Explore site-responsive practice through workshops, summer schools, participatory creation, or individual mentorship. We share tools for site-responsive creation with beginners, experienced artists, and practitioners across disciplines. Mapping, recording sound, filming, storytelling, writing and collective reflection become ways to develop projects and deepen your artistic practice.
Formats & collaborations
Format Scope & budget Performances & existing works Site-responsive adaptation for a single engagement or presentation series; fee reflects research, team, travel, equipment and number of presentations. New artistic commissions Focused creation periods (1-5 months) or longer institutional collaboration; project budget as a whole or in development phases. Residencies & curatorial projects From a focused residency to an ongoing curatorial partnership; curatorial fees and programme budget developed together. Workshops &
summer schoolsFrom three days to five weeks; programme fee reflects preparation, duration, group size, and facilitation team. Participatory processes Recurring encounters over several months; scope and budget agreed in phases. Individual mentorship A focused session or ongoing exchange; fees agreed per session or series.
Shaping a collaboration
Each proposal develops through dialogue. We agree the format, working period, and budget in relation to the local context, available resources, and scope of involvement. Collaborations may take the form of commissions, co-productions, institutional partnerships, or jointly developed funding proposals.
Tell us about your place and what you would like to explore: contact@poera.de