Inspired by Mikhail Karikis, Songs for the Storm to Come currently on show at The Showroom, and led by curator Bergit Arends, the reading circle offers affective engagements with the realities of changing climates and water levels.

During the sessions, we will read short texts together, delving into nature and culture, empathy and agency as expressed from different perspectives to explore not only human-to-human interdependence but also with the natural world.

Let me show you the tide
that comes for us faster
than we’d like to admit.

‘Rise: From One Island to Another’ by Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner and Aka Niviâna (Excerpt)

Reading circle #1 | Thursday 31 July 2025, 6.30 – 8.00 PM

• Ēlisée Reclus, Chapter 10. ‘The Water Cycle’ (1869), [from History of a Stream, original title ‘Chapitre XX. Le Cycle des Eaux’, Histoire d’un Ruisseau; translated from French by Annette David.]
  This exploration of nature reflects on the lifecycle of a small stream, delving into its origins, transformations, and the relationship it shares with the natural surroundings and humanity. The writing describes the connection between water and life itself.

• Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner and Aka Niviâna, Rise: From One Island to Another, 2018
  This poetic expedition undertaken by two islanders, one from the Marshall Islands in the central Pacific Ocean, and the other from Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland), connects their realities of melting glaciers and rising sea levels. Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner and Aka Niviâna use their poetry to showcase the linkages between their homelands in the face of climate change.

• Katrina Wilberg,” It is literally bubbling up through the storm drains”. Q&A with Billy Fleming, landscape architect, planner, activist and Wilks Family Director of the Ian L. McHarg Centre in Philadelphia, in Critical Coast (The Danish Architectural Press, 2023), 138–43.
  In this brief interview excerpt, landscape architect Billy Fleming discusses community adaptations to flooding in coastal areas and just futures.

Reading circle #2 | Thursday 7 August 2025, 6.30 – 8.00 PM

We will read the personal reflections by author Noreen Masud on the environment of the Cambridgeshire Fens. In her descriptions, Masud shifts between her childhood memories of the flat fields of Lahore, glimpsed from the backseat of her father’s car, and her affecting accounts of the land and water beneath her feet as an adult.
Noreen Masud, A Flat Place (Penguin, 2023), 57-67.

About Bergit Arends

Bergit Arends is a curator of contemporary art and academic with research interests in the intersections of material culture, art history, and environmental history within European and global contexts. Bergit’s monograph Photography, Ecology and Historical Change in the Anthropocene: Activating Archives (2024) is part of the Routledge series Photography, Place, Environment. She is currently curatorial research fellow in the UK Research and Innovation Network Plus ‘Shifting Global Polarities: Russia, China and Eurasia in transition’.