26.09.2026—OPEN WA~TER No1

We welcome Damini Gairola and Emir Garcia, sharing their current works as part of the first OPEN WA~TER. Sina Saberi will host the Micro Labs and facilitate a follow-up discussion between the artists and the interested audience.

Both sketches revolve around personal memories and emotional states. In “Up Side Down”, Damini Gairola seeks to resist forgetting and erasure of her personal, historical imprints. Coincidentally, Emir Garcia is experimenting with a suspended body in “Please Do Not Lift Alone” and turns herself upside down for as long as she can take it.

About the works

Upside Down—Damini Gairola

Up-Side Down explores the body as a living archive of memory and a site of future possibilities. Moving between remembering and forgetting, lightness and heaviness, the work asks how past experiences remain present in the body — and whether movement can lead us towards forms of knowledge that the mind cannot access.

Through shifting physical states, the performance traces a body caught between different timelines, searching for coherence while resisting erasure.

Please Do Not Lift Alone—Emir Garcia

Please Do Not Lift Alone brings a private state of self-abandonment into public view: a mess, a body, a longing to be seen and supported without asking for it. The audience encounters this vulnerability, sharing the uncertainty of what happens next.

Rooted in experiences of depression, limiting thoughts and emotional and physical paralysis, the work inhabits the unstable space between helplessness and support, limitation and dependence, individual agency and collective response.

The SHD/ Studio Hammer Deich and OPEN WA~TER is funded by the Hamburg Ministry of Culture and Media.