Temporary Gallery. Center for Contemporary Art in Cologne is not only an institution, but also a network. In this series, we want to introduce you to the people who are involved in our work and make the realization of our projects possible. Today we introduce you to Nada Rosa Schroer.
Interview and editing: Nelly Gawellek
May 2025
Dear Nada, I would like to start with my favorite question: Did you have a career wish as a child? Which one was it?
As a child, my career ideas were constantly changing. I can remember that for a long time I wanted to be an animal researcher and filmmaker. After seeing works by Niki de Saint Phalle in the Sprengel Museum, I wanted to build huge figures out of papier-mâché and shoot them on canvases. As a teenager, I did a lot of journalistic work and wanted to become a radio reporter.
Today you are a freelance curator and research assistant at the Institute for Art and Material Culture at TU Dortmund University. Water plays a major role in your work and research. What are you working on at the moment?
I am currently working intensively on a research project on the transformation of water bodies in (post-)mining landscapes. I want to know how the water bodies have changed as a result of the massive interventions and which “water spirits” these interventions conjure up, i.e. which stories and (future) ideas shape the landscape and how the water shapes the landscape in reverse. If you follow the traces of water, you can also learn a lot about social power and natural relationships. In extractivist, imperial contexts, water is not only reduced to an inanimate resource, but is also used to exert ecological, political and economic violence. Water struggles based on water grabbing, exploitation and pollution are taking place all over the world, now also in Germany.
How can we imagine your research on this topic?
I carry out a large part of the research together with a group of artists and curators who, like me, are enthusiastic about human-water relationships and have developed artistic methods to explore these relationships, together we try to see the world from a “watery” perspective. The explorations often begin with our own bodies in order to trace the close relationship. This starting point can also be found in hydrofeminist discourses or non-Western cosmologies. The American poet Natalie Diaz, who belongs to the Mojave, asks: “How can I translate-not in words but in belief-that a river is a body, as alive as you or I, that there can be no life without it?” If we are literally made of water, can we still think of water and humans as separate from each other? Water as a resource on the one hand, humans as consumers on the other - this way of relating to water stands for a way of thinking in dualisms that is paradigmatic for Western modernity. There are many artists whose approaches contribute to making these complex entanglements perceptible by exploring social contexts along the traces of water, creating other approaches and sensitivities for more-than-human co-worlds and creating spaces of experience in which we perceive ourselves in relationship again instead of thinking in hierarchical dualisms. The topic has so many facets and looking at it all from a transdisciplinary, artistic perspective is very exciting.
How did this very specific, yet universal research topic come about?
On the one hand, recurring periods of extreme drought sensitized me to the existential and systemic importance of water. The planetary water cycle is becoming increasingly unbalanced due to the climate catastrophe. When the rain suddenly failed to fall for weeks on end, I also felt the personal significance. You could probably call what I have felt since then when it gets dry “hydro anxiety”. At the same time, I began to take an interest in the cultural and spiritual dimension of the element. It is no coincidence that it plays an important role in many myths of origin, is embodied by numerous deities and is perceived as a living entity with a will of its own. I think the reason for this lies in the simple truth that without water, life would not exist. It sounds like a cliché, but what follows from this is that water flows through and connects everything. Water allows us to think in terms of relationships and interdependencies, transcending temporal and spatial boundaries.
In recent years, you have been in charge of various projects and exhibitions at the Temporary Gallery that deal with the relationship between art and ecology. Where do you see the main connections? What role do you see art playing in times of a global climate crisis?
In the context of the climate catastrophe, I see art as an essential social organ - one that keeps imaginative spaces open, asks uncomfortable questions, triggers progressive movements of thought and makes philosophical complexity accessible. Art can create aesthetic, sometimes utopian spaces: places to take a deep breath, to encourage and to think ahead together. Numerous projects go beyond simply addressing the catastrophe - they test alternative practices, create communities and open up other narratives about our planetary coexistence.
In the projects Urban Rewilding: All of the Critters (2024), Curating Transformation: Allyship - Degrowth - Grounding (2023, with Aneta Rostkowska), Towards Permacultural Institutions. Exercises in Collective Thinking (2022, with Julia Haarmann and Aneta Rostkowska), and Instituting in Circles: Ecological Approaches in Art and Art Institutions(2022) focussed on how art institutions can become spaces of socio-ecological transformation. It was about art that sees itself simultaneously as a social and ecological practice; not only as something that is thematised and represented in a classic exhibition, but also creates temporary communities in collective action in order to collect ideas and test practices outside the white cube. The background was once again an examination of the world view of colonial modernism, from which classic white cubes emerged and are based on a fundamental separation of the social, ecological and aesthetic. Building on this, we wanted to think about structures and develop programmes that anchor holistic thinking institutionally. In this context, for example, we worked a lot with the NeuLand community garden in Cologne.
What is particularly important to you in your work?
At the moment, I particularly enjoy creating collective spaces for discussion, knowledge creation and somatic or sensory experience. My favorite thing is when projects are created together and develop through intensive exchange. I love exploring a topic artistically and curatorially in a group over a longer period of time and trying out different methodological approaches. Or when different ways of creating knowledge and the world come together and enter into dialog with each other. Inviting people from different “bubbles” - professions, disciplines, age groups, spaces - and exploring how meaning shifts or new perspectives open up. Or to allow different materials, objects and works of art to come together in the exhibition space. This is a constellative work that plays with atmospheres and intensities. It's about breaking up hierarchies of knowledge and materials, learning from each other, allowing yourself to be contaminated.
What is your favorite thing to do in your free time?
I need a lot of variety. I usually learn a new language and try to consume as much music, literature and podcasts in that language as possible. At the moment it's Portuguese. I also make music myself and dance samba and forró. And of course I watch art whenever I can.
What do you wish for the cultural sector in the future?
I believe that art institutions have a special responsibility in times of political backlash, censorship, austerity and an increasingly right-wing conservative culture war. Precisely because many things are moving in the wrong direction at an alarming rate, we have to keep spaces open - especially for those who are most affected by racism, anti-Semitism, anti-feminism and other forms of discrimination. It is a mental balancing act not to let go of our collective and personal visions in the face of the ongoing dismantling of civil liberties and financial cuts. We are seeing how right-wing extremists are gaining increasing support in politics, how repression and agitation are on the rise - including against cultural workers themselves. And yet - or precisely because of this - it is essential to continue working for a social, just and ecological society. We must not give in prematurely and resist by insisting on attitude, publicity and community. I would like to see courageous institutions, solidarity networks and spaces that offer protection to recharge our batteries and serve as a starting point for collective thinking, feeling and action. Solidarity is not an abstract concept, but a practice that we have to test again and again in the cultural field - with all its contradictions. What we need now is a culture of mutual reinforcement.
Foto:
Anna Kessel
