Sensing Loss
Partners: Cement Fields (Chatham, England), Three Rivers (Bexley, England) and Floating University Berlin (Berlin, Germany)
Image © Cement Fields & Floating University Berlin Wetland 2024 Photo Sam Taylor
“Continuing our collaboration, Cement Fields and Floating University Berlin will be joined by Three Rivers to explore ecological loss with artists, activists and communities in the UK and Germany. We’ll come together to share experiences of environmental degradation caused by infrastructure and building projects in our unique local contexts. Developments in these contested post-industrial landscapes are often presented as ‘green’ or sustainable, but commonly threaten the rich biodiversity and vast ecological, social and cultural significance held in these sites. In Berlin, Bexley and North Kent, we will collectively explore how artistic practices can provide tools and strategies for processing and challenging the loss of access and agency that arises in the face of these sweeping developments.”
Cement Fields and Floating University
Sensing Loss is a Tier Two partnership supported by Cultural Bridge. Find out about the Tier One partnership.
About the partners
Cement Fields
Cement Fields is a visual art organisation working collaboratively with artists and communities to create ambitious new art along the Thames Estuary in North Kent.
Our programme is an exploration of place and process, defined by the multiple shifting landscapes that stretch along the Thames from Dartford to Whitstable. It’s a place where boundaries blur, where busy urban centres sit alongside industrial sites, where waters slow in marshes and wetlands, and the major arteries of rivers and roads connect rural areas and seaside towns.
We invite artists, participants and audiences to use North Kent’s unique contexts to ask radical questions and explore new ideas. Through this interaction we create experimental new art and develop imagination, skills and pathways into creative careers.
Cement Fields is proud to be a National Portfolio Organisation, supported using public funding by Arts Council England, and the University of Kent.
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cementfields/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CementFields/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/cement-fields/
Three Rivers
Three Rivers is a community-led arts organisation exploring culture, class and climate in the London Borough of Bexley and a member of Arts Council England's Creative People and Places programme.
Since 2021 it has supported thousands of people to become 'mates with their place' by imagining community and friendship beyond the human through long-term projects including Tump 39; where it is working with Thamesmead residents to reimagine a disused Victorian ammunitions dump as a new space for arts and ecology, and Beneath the Pavement, The Marshes; which brought artists and activists together with local environmental groups to campaign on behalf of Bexley’s threatened marshlands.
In 2025 Three Rivers became the first organisation in the UK to become a Zoöp and pioneer a groundbreaking model of collaboration between human and other-than-human-life.
Floating University Berlin
Floating University Berlin is a natureculture learning site on and in the rainwater retention basin of former Tempelhof airport, a fully functioning urban infrastructure and campus run by non-profit organisation, Floating e.V.
It is in solidarity with the site's history and the lineage of alternative narratives for urban development that the Floating e.V’s mission is to open, maintain, and take care of this unique site while bringing non-disciplinary, radical, participatory, and collaborative programs to the public. In other words, it is a place to learn to engage, to navigate, and to embrace complexity and entanglements of the world.
Since 2019 the project has been run by Floating e.V, a self-organised group, where diverse practitioners meet to collaborate and co-create more equitable and inclusive futures.
