hydroLOVEgy: remembering with water explores the river Rhine as living archives. Through embodied perception exercises, collective reflection, and a short scientific input from hydroecology/geography, the workshop invites participants to engage with the Rhine from various perspectives: as a geographical or hydrological river system, but also as a vital, affective entity and hydrosocial assemblage.

At the center of the gathering are questions such as: How does water remember? How do rivers archive and transmit traces of histories? How do they shape personal and collective memories? How do we remember ourselves as watery bodies that are inseparably connected to other water bodies? And how can we become attentive again to the shared hydrocommons that connect human and more-than-human life?

Meeting point: Biergarten Schänzchen, Rosental 105, Bonn
When: 15:00 – 17:00 CET
No registration needed

hydroLOVEgy is a series of artistic-curatorial gatherings that invite polydisciplinamory into contemporary water research; hydroLOVEgy offers circular time travels into the hydrocene and arranges sensual dates between humans and other water bodies, such as rivers, aquifers, lakes, ponds, canals, or swimming pools; if needed, hydroLOVEgy also facilitates direct encounters with water ghosts; conceived by Nada Rosa Schroer with invited guests. The aim of the workshop is to create a space in which participants can connect to the Rhine through different forms of knowing and sensing. Here, (hydro-)relational curating is understood as a polydisciplinamorous practice that creates a space of multimodal attention, inviting participants to encounter the river beyond purely functional or rational modes of engagement and to become part of a meshwork of hydrorelations.

---

Nada Rosa Schroer is an independent curator based in Cologne and a research associate at the Institute of Art and Material Culture at TU Dortmund University. In her PhD research she brings together hydrofeminist storytelling and curatorial practice, with a focus on (post-)industrial water bodies and the development of curatorial research methods for rethinking human–water relations collectively.
is Research Associate at the Institute of Art and Material Culture, TU Dortmund University and Independent Curator.

She previously worked as a curator at the LWL Museum of Art and Culture and the LWL Industrial Museums, and collaborated with institutions including the Academy of the Arts of the World, the Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum, PACT Zollverein, and the International Photoszene Cologne. Since 2020 she has regularly collaborated with Temporary Gallery Cologne, where she co-curated several programmes and exhibitions, including Towards Permacultural Institutions (2022), Curating Transformation (2023), and All of the Critters (2024).

She has led several third-party funded research projects, including Curating Water Multiplicities (2025), and recently presented her work at conferences such as the AAA, DGSKA, DGEKW, POLLEN and EASA. She co-edited Towards Permacultural Institutions: Exercises in Collective Thinking (2023) and Curatorial Learning Spaces: Art, Education and Curatorial Practice (2023).

Tanya Gautam holds a BA in English Literature, Philosophy and Psychology from Pune University, India, and an MA in English Studies from the University of Heidelberg, Germany. Her research interests lie in investigating the role contemporary eco-poetics, lyric poetry in particular, can play in cultivating socio-ecological change and creating eco-political impact. During her doctoral studies at MESH, Tanya aims to look at the works and lives of some contemporary eco-poets from Australia and the USA to further imagine local practices that can mend and strengthen the ways humans interact and engage with the more-than-merely-human world. The working title of her PhD project is —

“The Living Lyric: Contemporary Eco-poetics and the Eco-Political Praxis of Attention, Communication and Activism in a Time of Climate Crisis”.

Tanya is a reaearch associate in the project EcoLit. Before joining the MESH team, she worked as research associate in the EUniWell project (European University of Wellbeing). Tanya is also passionate about organising cultural events and creative writing workshops. In the past, she has worked as a kindergarten educator, journalist and editor and continues to pursue her passion for poetry as a spoken word artist and poet.

Katharina Höreth is a Ph.D. candidate at the GIUB, University of Bonn. In her research she focuses on Human-Water Interactions, natural water resources and management and makro litter in large river system.

This session of the Global Heritage Lab Seminar Series forms part of the research–exhibition project Knowing Plants: Ecologies of Memory and Practice.