On behalf of things, species and voices that disappear. Mexiko City and Berlin in Resonanz
12 October 2026 – 14 February 2027
Opening: Sunday, 11 October 2026. 6 pm,
Performance: Victor del Oral „Lesen in Rotation“
Featuring: Eckhard Böttger, Susanne Britz, Manfred Butzmann, Angelica Chio, Sandra Contreras, Anselmo Fox, Nathalie Grenzhaeuser, Arturo Hernández Alcázar, Günter Horn, Klaus-Dieter Kerwitz, Sophie Natuschke, Victor del Oral, Charlotte E. Pauly, Gert Pötzschig, Michael Rohrbeck, Joachim Scholz, Anita Stöhr Weber, Mario de Vega, Michael Zschocher Curated by Susanne Britz und Arturo Hernández Alcázar

The exhibition Overwrite! on the upper floor of Schloss Biesdorf brings together nine contemporary artists from Mexico City and Berlin to reflect on processes of social and ecological change and to seek possibilities for new forms of thinking and acting. The dialogue is expanded through selected works from the Museum Utopie und Alltag / Kunstarchiv Beeskow. Overwriting is an ambivalent practice: it can mean erasing, suspending, or even imposing. But it can also be a form of opening and listening, of rewriting what has been in order to open up pathways to the new. In this sense, overwriting acts not only on the past but also intervenes in the present and shapes the future. It is a poetic, political, and material practice. The exhibition proposes thinking through the tentacular, the anomalous, the unstable—through that which does not fit into the categories of hegemonic knowledge yet remains an active part of meaning-making and shared life. The works assembled here try out other languages: hybrid languages, signs that evade logos, forms of inscription that do not search for a single truth but for an opening toward the enigmatic. Drawing from diverse media and interwoven discourses, the artists trace lines that speak of flight as well as situational and porous ways of living, testifying to a shared experience of fragility. Mexico City and Berlin share a long history of exchange marked by moments of distress and solidarity. During the forced exile of German intellectuals under the Nazi regime, Mexico became a refuge for critical voices. Yet ideas of National Socialism also reached Mexico, finding resonance in conservative circles and nourishing a right-wing imagination tied to the most reactionary aspects of conservatism. A complex, multi-layered cultural exchange emerged, leaving lasting traces in the artistic, social, and political landscapes of both countries. The exhibition takes this history as a starting point for a new dialogue that, from the present, asks about the meaning of overwriting. The exhibition venue itself—Schloss Biesdorf, former residence of the Siemens family—is part of this history of tensions. Siemens established one of the first connections between Europe and America via a submarine cable, a feat of thencutting-edge technology that brought distant regions closer together. Yet this technical expansion had a shadow side: the colonial logic underpinning modern progress, based on resource extraction and cultural homogenization. In this context, the theme of overwriting today also means questioning the foundations of technoscientific and economic development that continue to produce displacement, inequality, and destruction. Overwriting can thus also be an act of reparation: not to restore what was lost as it once was, but to make it visible from another perspective. From an ethics of care, from a politics of difference, and from a poetics that seeks not to close but to open. This exhibition functions as a model for speaking in many voices, for testing ways of acting responsibly beyond fixed boundaries. It is an invitation to overwrite the grammar of the present and to imagine, together, other forms of rooting, listening, and existence. With the support of the Cultural Institute of Mexico in Germany.