A new immersive installation opens in Nairobi this week, inviting audiences to sit with questions about water, power and memory rather than rushing toward easy answers. The Water Between Us, a multidisciplinary lecture performance, runs at the Goethe-Institut Nairobi on 23 and 24 September 2026.
Musyi Arts & Productions created the piece with artists Esther Kamba and Louisa Schiedek. Their research spans Hamburg and Nairobi, and the resulting work treats water as a site where colonial power, ancestral knowledge and gendered resistance collide.
A Work Built On Discomfort
The installation does not offer solutions. It asks audiences to stay in the tension between ecological crisis and historical injustice instead.
“We talked a lot about getting comfortable with not finding solution, and yet, of course, we were always searching for them,” said Schiedek. “Surely not for the last time.”
That refusal to resolve things quickly shapes the entire project. The work draws on indigenous ecological wisdom and pushes audiences to question the line between human life and the natural world, listening instead for what water itself remembers.
Reclaiming Erased Knowledge
Kamba traced the project back to a personal discovery that reshaped her thinking about Kenya’s rivers and dams.
“I was shocked to discover that many of our rivers have lost their names and become sewage channels, while the dams we celebrate are entangled in hydrocolonial histories of controlling water, land and people,” Kamba said. She added that the deeper shock came from realising how thoroughly African knowledge has been written out of climate conversations. “It is time to reclaim African ways of knowing, remembering and experiencing our weather, rivers, land and environment, and place them at the centre of the conversation.”
A German Kenyan Collaboration
The Internationaler Koproduktionsfonds, the International Co-production Fund run by the Goethe-Institut, backed the project alongside Musyi Arts. The partnership reflects a broader push to build artistic dialogue across East Africa through cross-cultural collaboration.
Cristina Nord, director of the Goethe-Institut Kenya, welcomed the partnership.
“We are very happy about this Kenyan-German coproduction,” she said. “A joint artistic endeavour like The Water Between Us brings people together; it creates new avenues, new networks and new perspectives. That is the aim of the International Co-production Fund: to promote innovation and cooperation on an equal footing, thus helping mutual understanding to grow.”
Attending The Event
The three-day programme is free, though organisers require registration in advance.
Dates: 23 to 24 September 2026
Venue: Goethe-Institut, Nairobi
Admission: Free, RSVP required
Daytime exhibition: 11:00am to 5:00pm
Evening performance: 7:00pm to 9:00pm
Registration: shorturl.at/xzu0Y
About The Artists And Institutions
Louisa Schiedek studied literature and gender studies at Humboldt University Berlin before training in theatre directing at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg. She has directed and worked as a dramaturg at HAU Berlin, the Schauspielhaus Hamburg and the Theater Bielefeld, with a practice that often examines structural critique, ecstasy and hybridity.
Musyi Arts, the Nairobi based organisation behind the production, works across theatre, performance art, lecture performance, installation and sound. Founder Esther Kamba leads research driven work that draws on archival material, oral histories and embodied knowledge to examine identity, power and place.
The Goethe-Institut, Germany’s cultural institute, operates worldwide and supports artists and cultural exchange in Nairobi through co-productions, school partnerships, language teaching and knowledge sharing programmes with local partners.
For more arts and culture coverage from Kenya, visit Khusoko.
