25. Planetary Dance and Rite to Mutualism
From 8–13 September 2025, Lucky Garage became a temporary site of assembly. Through participatory workshops rooted in social ecology, radical interdependence, and the understanding of movement and migration as Earth rights, agents collectively shaped a shared ritual language.
These encounters culminated in a Rite for Mutualism, a participatory ritual enacted outdoors in the parking lot of S27 and Lucky Garage during Berlin Art Week — extending the exhibition into public space and asserting collective presence against systems of patriarchy, ecocide and genocide.
Preparatory workshops
Deep Listening — facilitated by Jo Vávra
Inspired by Qi Gong, animist traditions, and Pauline Oliveros’ Deep Listening work, the workshop offered a space for widening circles of awareness of the context and locality of the Lucky Garage surroundings.
Crafting mutations — sewing led by Ama Luma, Amin, and youth participants of S27
Soft Armour for System Rupture — earth-dying workshop led by Laraja
Scoring the Rite — choreography workshop led by Jagna Nawrocka
RITE FOR MUTUALISM took place on 13 September, from 6 PM until sunset, in a parking lot in front of Lucky Garage Studio. The ritual was open to participation and witnessing, while its score was displayed inside the garage.
Participants were invited to pause their daily activities and enter a shared act of drawing circles — around local and global realities ready to be transformed through collective movement.
Conceived as a soft yet intentional structure, the ritual held space for embodied and intuitive expression. Improvised dance and music unfolded within the framework of the score, carrying intentions of tending to wounded bodies and lands, protecting cultures pushed to the margins, and calling for systemic rupture: against genocide, ecocide, and patriarchy.
The practice was anchored by a shared question: What can I do to become part of the change I want to see in the world?
The score of RITE FOR MUTUALISM draws inspiration from the Planetary Dance, a performance ritual initiated in 1980 by American choreographer Anna Halprin. Rooted in her research into collective movement as a healing practice, the work references the Earth Run — one of nine scores structuring the annual, all-day Planetary Dance enacted globally in diverse healing and community contexts.
A score functions as a choreographic technology: it provides a designed framework for action while leaving space for interpretation, spontaneity, and collective agency.
LIOS Labs is a cultural association and translocal community of artists, activists, and researchers exploring ecological imagination and peer-to-peer education. The collective emerged in 2019 following a formative encounter with the Błędowska Desert in Poland, a landscape marked by desertification that became both the starting point and the living heart of the initiative. Today, LIOS Labs operates as a distributed network connected through residencies, outdoor laboratories, workshops, and gatherings.
The collective develops methodologies for learning-with and creating-with ecosystems affected by ecocide and environmental degradation. Through long-term collaboration, cohabitation with land, and experimental forms of co-creation, LIOS Labs reimagines relationships between human and more-than-human communities. A central strand of its research is the ritual: rituals are approached not as reenactments of fixed traditions, but as a living methodology, a collective tool for reorienting attention, restoring relational awareness, and rehearsing mutual care. Rooted in the ancient concept of ṛta — “that which sustains” — rituals become a gesture of gratitude, a choreography of interdependence, and a shared act of reconnecting with the living systems we are part of.
Jo Vávra (PL, born 1991) is a curator and cultural ecologist whose works interweave art, ecology, and community practice. She brings people together to imagine and foster regenerative ways of living. Her work explores rituals as an artistic and relational technology, informed by animist perspectives, deep ecology, and dialogues with Indigenous knowledge systems. As a cultural producer, Jo Vávra creates spaces for collective intelligence to emerge and activate the field of remembrance and reciprocity. After many years in Berlin, she now lives in Sicily, where she stewards the bioregional storytelling lab ‘TorreDelfino’. Besides, she works as a lead-storyteller of LIOS Labs and Oslo Project.
Jagna Nawrocka (PL, born 1996) is a choreographer, performer, and visual artist engaged in activism for LGBTQIA+ communities in Poland and interested in the perseverance of life in dying ecosystems as well as in continuity beyond life-time, skin border and other frames. Jagna Nawrocka organises participatory performances and movements that dissolve the boundaries between play and critical analysis. They craft choreographies of coexistence to re-member relations with weirdness and wildness. Their artistic research explores choreographic scores as archives of the unseen. Working with the physicality of body and voice, a camera, somatic poetry, and textile art, they chase gestures and symbols that hold a healing power.
Laraja (UK, born 1994) is the artist name of Lara Ansell. Laraja is a multidisciplinary artist and bodyworker alchemising ritual performance and shadow capturing techniques through earthy-rooted technologies. This research explores ruptured realms through somatic experiencing to (re)activate beyond human transmissions and forces. Fluid embodiment and radical imaginaries function as mystical tools of storytelling and rupture.
Ama Luma (FR & CG, born 1993) is a multidisciplinary artist and the founder and designer of Amaluma Studio, a Berlin-based sustainable brand focused on upcycling through fashion, accessories, and creative workshops. Her work combines craftsmanship, sustainability, and storytelling, drawing inspiration from her French-Congolese heritage and a commitment to creating meaningful, one-of-a-kind pieces from reclaimed materi
Hiroo Tanaka (JP, born 1983) is a Tokio.born, Berlin-based filmmaker and artist whose work explores the intersections of sound, memory, and perspective. Having lived in Europe for over a decade, his practice is shaped by a sensitivity to parallel viewpoints – a recognition that communication often begins in the space between differences.
Trained in visual communication and installation, Hiroo Tanaka began making music videos through self-teaching, eventually cultivating a distinctive visual language rooted in rhythm, gesture, and poetic observation. His career has been deeply embedded in experimental music culture, serving as filming director for Berlin Atonal festival for seven years and as a videographer for Boiler Room for four. His films reflect a commitment to visual storytelling as a form of sonic translation, where the moving image becomes a way to map the emotional and cultural resonances of sound. Transcriptions extend this inquiry, engaging with music as an intergenerational language and a living archive of shared experience.
Hiroo Tanaka’s work has been selected for several international film and video awards, highlighting its growing impact across disciplines.