Wedding Affairs

WEDDING AFFAIRS – Nachbarschafts-Nachmittage is a programme offering space for artistic and creative exchanges between SAVVY Contemporary and our neighbours in Wedding. With these weekly openings, taking place regularly in the SAVVY space, we hope to create conditions that allow neighbourly relationships of trust and mutuality to bloom.

WEDDING AFFAIRS recognises the neighbourhood of Wedding to be a complex crossing of people, lives, histories, practices, concerns, and dreams. Family stories, community traditions, intergenerational customs, and friendships and relationships of exchange across cultures circulate and define life in this Kiez, from the Platz to the Park, from the Späti to the monthly Flohmarkt. These exchanges mirror and link with the ones in process at SAVVY as well, and with WEDDING AFFAIRS we attempt to strengthen these connections.

The WEDDING AFFAIRS programme opens its doors each Wednesday afternoon with specific aim of holding space for the neighbourhood’s children and youth, women and queer communities, elders and workers. Through regular encounters and meeting each other over art and craft practices, we hope to find answers together to the question: What does it mean to be a good neighbour?

First Season [May–June]

Humans think they know with certainty where their being ends and someone else’s starts. With their roots tangles and caught up underground, linked to fungi and bacteria, trees harbour no such illusions. For us, everything is interconnected.

Elif Shafak, The Island of Missing Trees

Wedding Affairs accompanies the year’s exhibitions through thematic and programmatic connections. The first offerings take a cue from the exhibition Cures: Chronic Promises. Where the exhibition examines the work of artists in collectives and movements who have offered utopian proposals or promises for decolonisation, Wedding Affairs manifests these questions as ones that centre everyday practices of communal healing, highlighting non-Western approaches to bodily and spiritual wellness that aim to connect the individual with the environment of which they are a part.

Healing, for the first season from May to June 2024, begins with a consideration of the wider environment of the neighbourhood. As spring takes hold, the programme turns to non-Western curative remedies and medicinal practices based on knowledge of the earth and of the body. Through a series of inter-linked workshops, Wedding Affairs proposes regular encounters for neighbours to engage in garnering knowledge about identifying and picking herbs and plants, making herbal tinctures and remedies, drying or preserving these for future projects and sharing family healing remedies. Alongside these, the SAVVY pillars will consider and present other practices through film screenings, colonial archives, readings and books, and radio or sonic activations.

Neighbours and other participants are welcome every Wednesday to continue working on projects started previously in the Wedding Affairs living and working space at SAVVY.

Previous workshops you find here: