Water is life, but it can also destroy. The exhibition “On Water. WaterKnowledge in Berlin” will show current research projects of the Berlin University Alliance (BUA) on the topic of water from October 10, 2025 in the Humboldt Labor. These will be flanked by artistic positions that deal with the element of water and vividly convey its versatility.
Without water, there is no life, they say. But the opposite is also true: too much water can be devastating and destructive. It all depends on the right balance.
However, as soon as you move into other dimensions and regions, water becomes a challenge – also for sciences. Water is not a passive object of research, but a powerful counterpart that calls for new and different ways of thinking about scientific and social practices. Embedded in a parcours from the sea to the stars, from vortices to artificial icebergs, the exhibition On Water. WasserKnowledge in Berlin presents research projects from the Berlin University Alliance that deal with the element of water. As different as the research projects are, they all represent attempts to learn from the amazing properties of water and to use it to find ways to meet the challenges of the present and the future.
Context
The present is characterized by too much or too little water: cycles and systems that have long been taken for granted are shifted, irritated and vulnerable.
The disruption of the aquatic balance also challenges science. The exhibition “On Water” shows that no science alone would be able to grasp the complexity of the interrelationships associated with it. It is often the interaction of the most diverse forms of knowledge that leads to an understanding and new solutions. This includes learning from each other, whether it be hard sciences or the exchange and discussion with people who have lived through traditions and experiences and bring their own form of knowledge. One of the great challenges of the future is to establish forms of dialog and cooperation that are suitable for meeting each other at eye level.
The motif of water also has an epistemological dimension: looking at an object in isolation in order to create reliable knowledge is a proven methodological practice. At the same time, however, this isolation always means a loss of contextual knowledge.This is why many innovative fields of research today are characterized by the desire to liquefy overly rigid assumptions, which are often at the beginning of positive knowledge production, in favour of more complex models and thereby expand the contexts to be included. On the one hand, this makes the basis for orientation more uncertain, on the other hand, it seems more suitable for representing and understanding the processes of change in nature and society. The motif of liquefaction loses its metaphorical dimension when it comes to describing manifestations of water as a separate actor in a complex process. This often involves a balancing of forces and quantities. Against this background, scientific research appears to be an attempt to correct imbalances, impending irreversible tipping points and destructive asymmetries through targeted measures and to learn from water in its diverse interrelationships with humans, nature and technology.
Taken consistently, this perspective promises solution concepts for fundamental challenges of the present, whether at the level of basic research or concrete application practice in local and global context.
The ethnologist and linguist Franz Boas (1858-1942), whose interdisciplinary and explicitly culturally relativistic perspective was and still is trend-setting for the challenges of transdisciplinary research on both a local and global scale, is a godfather in the conception of the exhibition. With its combination of narrative, mathematical and technical aspects, his doctoral thesis “Contributions to the knowledge of the colors of water” (1881) in the field of physics, is a striking example of the idea of combining abstract questions with vivid motifs, which also guides the exhibition. His 1886 habilitation lecture at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin, “Die Eisverhältnisse des arktischen Ozeans” (The ice conditions of the Arctic Ocean), was again dedicated to water, but now as a geographer and anthropologically oriented. Boas’ life-world motif of the colourfulness of water forms a basic motif for the potentials and limits of the generalization of knowledge.
Structure of the exhibition
The exhibition develops its argument along lifeworld motifs of encounters with water: in the sea, on the coast, in the city, in the river, in the bath and so on. On all these levels, the aim is to balance out too much and too little water. The exhibition uses exemplary research projects to bring science to life and make it tangible. Researchers from the Berlin University Alliance, for example, deal with puddles in the city, with vortices in rivers and street fountains in Berlin, with the melting of glaciers in the Alps, the bathtub as a therapeutic place or life on and in rivers. The voices of the scientists can be heard in the form of an audio track in which they talk about their fascination with their research on and with water. This makes it possible to experience the diversity and complexity of water knowledge in Berlin. But not just limited to there: the exhibition also presents selected research projects that deal with solutions to water scarcity in Egypt and Kurdistan, taking local knowledge into account. In addition, a legal initiative will be shown that deals with the question of how the Spree could be given rights. Across the many research projects, there are signs of a changeing understanding of science that takes the dynamics and inherent logic of water seriously and also recognizes the limits of knowledge. Science is beginning to adapt to water.
