The colours of water: purple
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| free admission |
| 14 years and older |
| German |
| Humboldt Lab, 1st floor |
| Belongs to: On Water |
The opening weekend of the exhibition ‘On Water’ from 9 to 12 October 2025 will focus on the ‘colours of water’. Although water is usually depicted as blue, it actually comes in a wide variety of shades – such as grey, black or red. Many of these colours have specific meanings or serve as technical designations.
Taking up the multicoloured nature of the wet element, the colourful opening weekend will focus on three of these colours and their associations: on Friday on rivers (green water), on Saturday on water in the city (purple water) and on Sunday on drought (brown water).
purple water
When a city is reflected in rain, puddles or waterways, the water can appear colourful. These shades of colour tell of the diverse interconnections between history and architecture, culture and infrastructure with this essential element. Viewed from the water, Berlin reveals itself as an experiment between staging and concealment, between thoughtless consumption and laborious balance in the use of resources. Saturday is dedicated to water in the city: from historical and current challenges to Berlin’s visible and invisible water architecture to bathing and swimming in urban spaces.
Programme
Participants
Irina Engelhardt is Professor of Hydrogeology at the Technical University of Berlin. Previously, she worked at the Technical University of Freiberg, the Jülich Research Centre and the Technical University of Darmstadt, among others. Her research focuses on the transport of pollutants and pathogens in groundwater and the development of large-scale groundwater models.
She led the BMBF joint project ‘MedWater’ and has been coordinating the ‘SpreeWasser:N’ project to secure water availability in Berlin-Brandenburg since 2022. She has also served as an expert on the German Bundestag’s Environment Committee and chairs the EGU programme group ‘Subsurface Hydrology’.
With her Sustainable Food Art, Anja Fiedler creates current social issues to ‘bite into’. In her participative, often multi-sensory performances, she serves up culinary delights that become tempting and thought-provoking fare thanks to facts and multi-sensory elements. In her performances, she invites people to ponder, reflect and visualise together. anja-fiedler.de
Vitor Garcia de Almeida is a trained artist and performer. He gained his first experience in the creative processing of everyday materials, which are often discarded without a second thought, in the workshops of the samba schools in Rio de Janeiro. Since the early 2000s, he has been experimenting with a wide variety of materials for costume and prop construction for his own company, Stelzentheater Skaramouche.
He studies cultural studies at Humboldt University in Berlin and has since combined his practice of material processing with an examination of resource consumption in our society. The artistic use of objects created from discarded materials is intended to contribute didactically to promoting a critical view of the unbridled consumption of our time. For the Humboldt Laboratory, he realised two series of workshops on the topic of sustainability and art.
Timothy Moss is a senior researcher at IRI THESys at Humboldt University in Berlin and an honorary professor at Leibniz University in Hanover. He researches urban energy and water systems from historical and social science perspectives. His book Remaking Berlin. A History of the City through Infrastructure, 1920-2020 was published in 2020. He is currently leading a DFG project on ‘usable pasts’ in Berlin’s infrastructure history as a catalyst for today’s transformation processes.
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