WORKSHOP SERIES BY YI-TING WANG
WHEN
WHERE
Kulturgut Ost,
An d. Römerbrücke 5,
66121 Saarbrücken
LANGUAGE
DEUTSCH & ENGLISCH
PROGRAMME
This event is part of the public festival and civic forum The Saar as a Worker | La Sarre ouvrière.
River Walk is a series of on-site explorations along the Saar in June and July 2026, each led by a regional expert. Historian Birgit Metzger walks visitors through living polluted archives at the Rossel–Saar confluence near Völklinger Hütte. Environmental organisation Cleanup Saarland uses citizen-science methods to interpret debris carried downstream as material records of consumption. Historian Susanne Nimmesgern brings to light the forgotten histories of boatwomen, female brewers, and female ironworks directors along the riverbank. Geographer Jochen Kubiniok reads the river’s hundred-million-year geological transformation through canals, meanders, and oxbow lakes. Hydrologist Isabelle Charpentier explores alternative scenarios of flooding, military legacy, renaturation, and aquatic well-being. Together, River Walk offers a situated way of navigating the postindustrial riverscape, and opens a space to reimagine the Saar’s future.
SATURDAY, 4 JULY 2026, 1:00 PM – 3:00 PM
Simulation und Spiel an der Saar | Simulation and Gaming for the Saar
Workshop with Dr. Isabelle Charpentier (hydrologist, CNRS, Université de Strasbourg)
This interactive workshop invites visitors to explore the Saar watershed virtually through three research-driven games and tools. ReFlood lets visitors pause, rewind, and replay the May 2024 Nied flood, testing alternative scenarios by raising dykes or adding bridges. Chronic allows visitors to move through an interactive timeline of the Aquatic Maginot Line, tracing its transformation from 1930s military defence through recreational use to present-day renaturation. Miroirs is a quest-driven video game that invites players to rediscover familiar aquatic environments through a virtual walk upstream, from urban channels to rural rivers and marshes, ending at a hidden mountain lake, while recording players’ perceptions and emotions on site.
FURTHER WORKSHOPS IN THE RIVER WALK SERIES:
SATURDAY, 13 JUNE 2026, 3:00 PM – 5:00 PM
Industrie-Natur | The Nature of De-Industrialisation
Dr. Birgit Metzger
SATURDAY, 27 JUNE, 10:00 AM – 12:00 PM
Was die Saar mit sich trägt | The Saar’s Carried Objects
Cleanup Saarland e.V.
SUNDAY, 28 JUNE 2026, 10:00 AM – 12:00 PM
Frauen und die Saar | Women and the Saar
Dr. Susanne Nimmesgern
Participation in the workshops is free. You can register for the workshops here.
Conceived and organised by Yi-Ting Wang, River Walk is part of her fellowship at CURE. Her current research project REPAIR (Reparative Environmental Practices: Art and rreparable Riverscapes) investigates how artistic and situated practices engage with post-industrial riverscapes, fostering environmental knowledge from the river, rather than merely about it.
This event is part of the Rivers Beyond Borders project.
Participation in the workshops is free. You can register for the workshops here.