What Order Does This Space Rehearse?
Sarah J. M. Wenzinger is a Berlin-based conceptual artist, activist researcher and educator working at the intersection of artistic research, spatial practice and political education. After studying theatre directing at the Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts, she is currently completing an MA in Art in Context at Berlin University of the Arts (UdK). Her practice investigates how critical theory can be translated into collective, embodied and site-specific methods that examine power through institutions, public space, ecology and everyday infrastructures.
Wenzinger understands it as a collaborative spatial practice. She develops scores, assignments, walks, participatory installations, counter-archives, films and open-source methodologies that enable people to collectively test, challenge and reshape political, social and ecological systems. Her work draws on queer phenomenology, hydrofeminism, situated knowledge and institutional critique, translating these theories into experiences that can be walked, touched, tasted, questioned and transformed.
She has developed long-term artistic projects and public programmes with institutions including the Neue Nationalgalerie, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Bauhaus-Archiv, the Latvian Museum Association, NODE Forum for Digital Arts, Kulturagenten Berlin and numerous museums, schools and cultural organisations across Europe. Most recently, she has been designing participatory processes with citizens in Turin for the city's European Capital of Culture bid and developing programmes with Latvian museums on accessibility, mental health and just futures.
Her recent artistic research explores queering architecture through performative assignments, hydrofeminist walks and audio walks, while another strand of her practice investigates weeds, fermentation, collecting and archiving as political and ecological methods.
No space is neutral. Buildings, thresholds and signs organise who may enter, remain, speak, decide or be removed. As border regimes harden and public space is privatised, spatial practice must take a political position. We need to read spaces as systems that rehearse authoritarian, market-driven, binary or extractive ideas.
What Order Does This Space Rehearse? develops an open-source testing set for spatial practitioners. It gathers scores and assignments from my practice into a counter-survey: a tool for identifying which political ideas are built into space, which our practices reproduce, and how critical theory can become spatial action.
The project grows from my work in museums and public spaces, where I investigate a site’s structures, conflicts and narratives. Through walks, mappings and sensorial formats, I translate queer phenomenology, hydrofeminism, institutional critique and more-than-human thinking into instructions that can be walked, touched, tasted and altered.
Critical vocabulary alone does not transform practice. Participation may retain institutional control; ecological projects may treat plants, water and labour as resources; queer language may leave binary infrastructures intact. Theory must be tested through bodies, materials and relations to shape long-term practice.
Each iteration follows four movements: read the system, position the practitioner, test a theory and remap the practice. Participants examine borders, access, ownership, care, representation and ecology. Their questions become scores and temporary rules that interrupt movement, redistribute decisions or make invisible boundaries tangible.
I want to test and sharpen the set with artists and spatial practitioners across contexts. Each collaboration would add questions, failures and unresolved conflicts to an evolving open-source resource. It could become workshops, walks, self-inquiries for reading how political orders are built—and how they might be changed.