CURATING
Exhibition WE ARE THE RIVER – What Connects Us With the River Weser, 21.03.-23.08.2026, Harbour Museum, Bremen
Curators:
Valentina Rojas Loa, Jessica Fritz , Felix Dreesen
Art Installation:
Felix Dreesen
Exhibition Design:
Rainer Weber
© Frank Scheffka
What is a river? And what would it say if it could speak — or rather, if we were able to listen? Through conversations with those who know the Weser most intimately, We Are the River brings to the surface some of the quieter, yet no less important, voices of the river. Among them are an inland boatwoman, a forester, a logistics director, a biologist, a lawyer, and a poet, as well as birds and oysters, including advocates for the rights of the river as a living subject and holder of rights. The exhibition presents these interviews alongside a series of objects floating in tanks filled with river water, where life slowly unfolds over the course of the exhibition. At its center stands Felix Dreesen’s monumental 20-ton stone installation, reproducing the river one-to-one as a “heavily modified water body.” Plastic fabric and industrial stones used in the transform the river into an anthropocenic landscape: a waterway designed to serve merely as a human resource. And yet the river is alive. And it revolts.
DeichTRIFT City Center – A Multifocus Research on the River Weser. Exhibition, Research, Performative Lunch, Open-Air Kino, Raumlabor UMZU, Bremen, 19.09.2024 (International River Day)
Curators: Felix Dreesen, Valentina Rojas Loa, Susanne von Essen
Artists: Beate C. Koehler; Felix Dreesen; Nikolai Wolff, Kay Michalak and Tristan Vankann
© Jasper Wessel
DeichTRIFT was a multi-perspective research project on the Weser River that bringed together diverse forms of knowledge to explore socially and ecologically responsive ways of relating to the river in times of climate crisis. The project investigated how the spatial potential of both city and river in Bremen can be reimagined and redefined. Moving between past, present, and possible futures, DeichTRIFT examined the historical and contemporary uses of the Weser while creating new connections between established institutions, emerging initiatives, researchers, artists, activists, and communities working with the river. DeichTRIFT understood the river not only as infrastructure or landscape, but as a living political and ecological space — one that challenges us to rethink urban life, coexistence, and responsibility in an era of climate crisis and environmental transformation.
Exhibition Bremen speaks – a Cartography of Bremen’s Multilingualism, Focke Museum, 05.03.-29.05.2022
Curators: Valentina Rojas Loa and Maria Mazolli
Linguistic Maps: Vittorio dell’ Aquila
© Nikolai Wolff
Through a series of groundbreaking sociolinguistic maps — developed for the first time in this form in Germany — this exhibition revealed the hidden linguistic landscape of the city. Where do the highest numbers of multilingual children grow up? Which neighborhoods hold the greatest linguistic diversity? How do languages inscribe themselves into the fabric of the city? Based on data provided by Bremen’s Senator for Education, the maps made visible a reality that often remains unseen. Bringing together speakers, activists, educators, policymakers, administrators, and social scientists, the exhibition was a multilingual conversation itself, creating a space where different perspectives collided, interacted, and reshaped one another. Together, these voices challenged dominant ideas about language, identity, and belonging, transforming Bremen’s linguistic diversity from an overlooked fact into a shared social and cultural resource.
Touring exhibition Citámbulos – Through the Looking Glass, German Centre for Arquitecture,
Berlin, 2008; National Museum of Anthropology, Mexico, 2009; Upper Austrian Architecture Forum, Linz, 2010; City Museum, Copenhagen, 2011.
Curators: Valentina Rojas Loa, Ana Álvarez, Christian von Wissel, Fionn Petch, Vlady Diaz
Museum Design: Luis Rodríguez
© Citámbulos, Budde
A touring exhibition on the contemporary life of Mexico City, first conceived for Berlin, transformed itself through dialogue with the urban fabric and inhabitants of each host city — Berlin, Mexico City, Linz, and Copenhagen — evolving into a provocative reflection on “citiness” as a global contemporary phenomenon. In Mexico City, it attracted 277,000 visitors and became the first exhibition at the National Museum of Anthropology — one of the world’s leading anthropology museums — dedicated to contemporary urban life. Developed with more than 120 collaborators, including artists, scientists, urban specialists and inhabitants, the exhibition combined photography, sculpture, games, everyday objects, video, and sound installations, extending beyond the museum walls into public space. Alongside the exhibition, the Urban Age project of the Alfred Herrhausen Society and the London School of Economics, co-produced with Citámbulos and the Deutsche Bank Americas Foundation, organized the Mexico City Symposium, bringing together international experts to debate the future of the Mexican megalopolis.
In 2025, we were thrilled to discover that the Mexican composer Erick Tapia found inspiration in the work of Citámbulos to create a mambo dedicated to Mexico City. If Mexico City sounds like anything, it certainly sounds like this mambo!
Exhibition Archive Curating the City – Unpacking Citámbulos,
Wagenhalle, Stuttgart, 2012
Curators: Valentina Rojas Loa, Ana Álvarez, Christian von Wissel (Citámbulos)
© Citámbulos
Built from the evolving archives of the touring exhibition Citámbulos – Through the Looking Glass, which travelled over four years between Mexico City, Berlin, Linz, and Copenhagen, Curating the City – Unpacking Citámbulos turned the exhibition-making process itself into its central subject. Rather than presenting a fixed narrative, this exhibition about an exhibition operated as an open and living archive: a space where research, translation, negotiation, and collective knowledge production remained visible. Drawing from methodologies in sociology, anthropology, urban research, and participatory practices, the project challenged the idea of the exhibition as a finished object, presenting it instead as an evolving social process deeply entangled with the different urban realities in which it unfolded.
Five dérives, a contribution to the exhibition Instant Urbanism, Swiss Architecture Museum.Basel, 2007; Danish Architecture Centre, Copenhagen, 2008; Espai d´Art Contemporani, Valencia, 2008; and Vitruvianum, Heerlen, 2008.
Curators: Valentina Rojas Loa, Ana Álvarez, Christian von Wissel, Daniela Wolf
© Citámbulos
Conceived in dialogue with the parallel exhibition on the history of the Situationist International at the Museum Tinguely, Instant Urbanism revisited the radical legacy of Situationist thought in architecture and urbanism, tracing its theoretical echoes in contemporary spatial practices. Citámbulos contributed to the exhibition through two graphic interventions and five dérives: five audiovisual urban drifts created by five groups of artists inspired by the book Citámbulos: the Incidende of the Remarkable. Guide to the Marvels of Mexico City (2007). The project also included a dérive through the streets of Basel, drawing directly from Guy Debord’s concept of the dérive — an open-ended exploration of the city guided by atmosphere, chance, and psychological encounter between two urban imaginaries — Basel and Mexico City — rather than destination.
Exhibition The Turn of the Bicycle, Franz Mayer Museum, Mexico City, 2016; Museo del Amate, Cuernavaca 2016; Museo Nacional de los Ferrocarriles Mexicanos, Puebla,2017
Curators: Ana Álvarez, Valentina Rojas Loa
Museum Design: Luis Rodríguez and Nils Dallmann
© Moritz Bernoully
Celebrating one of the most revolutionary inventions in modern history, the exhibition presented the bicycle as a key tool for more sustainable, accessible, and collective forms of mobility. Through 13 thematic sections, it traced the close relationship between the evolution of bicycle design and broader social and cultural transformations in Mexico and around the world, inviting audiences to rethink the bicycle not simply as a means of transport, but as a social, ecological, and cultural force capable of reshaping urban life.
The exhibition featured 52 bicycles from 18 private collectors and 13 manufacturing brands, alongside graphic and audiovisual material from private collections and national archives. It also included an interactive installation that allowed visitors to virtually cycle through the streets of Mexico City, as well as sound, graphic, and audiovisual pieces narrating stories and historical moments connected to cycling culture. Bridging history and future imaginaries, the exhibition also showcased recent technological innovations in bicycle and accessory design. The exhibition received 75,000 visitors.