Join us to celebrate our annual Sommerfest. Look forward to a fantastic programme in our garden with performances by Hannah Rettl, Sophie Becker, and Seán Being, a reading by Marius Goldhorn, a family workshop with Luise Bichler, and many more surprises.

Free admission. Donations welcome
Exhibition 9 / 6 euros

1 pm
Start of the Sommerfest in the garden
The exhibitions and the café are open from 11 am

From 1 pm
Haus am Waldsee Friends
Tombola

2 – 4 pm
Paper flowers
Family workshop 

From 2.30 pm
Hannah Rettl
I’m not telling anything actually I get told 
Performance

3 pm, 5 pm
Sophie Becker
Ronnie’s World
Performance (in English)

4 pm
Marius Goldhorn
Reading from Die Prozesse (in German)

7 pm
Seán Being
Car Musick
Music performance

2 – 4 pm
Luise Bichler
Paper flowers
Family workshop

For our Sommerfest, we invite families to create beautiful flowers from wire and handmade paper. Join us in bringing blossoms and leaves to life using colourful paper pulp, wire, and dried petals. Together, we’ll craft delicate botanical forms and transform flower beds and vases into a vibrant sea of blooms. At the end of the workshop, you can take your handmade flowers home as a special keepsake.

From 2.30 pm
Hannah Rettl
I’m not telling anything actually I get told
Performance

As part of Hannah Rettl’s performance I’m not telling anything actually I get told, visitors can exchange a secret for blue ice cream. Instead of paying with money, they whisper the secret into the performer’s ear and receive a scoop of ice cream in return. The performer does not disclose the secret. As the ice cream stains visitors’ tongues blue, they become marked as bearers of secrets.

In Rettl’s performance, the messiness of transactional relations intertwines with associations of leisure and childhood: sticky hands, stained tongues, and sun on one’s skin. The summery soundscape of the lush garden at Haus am Waldsee is overlaid by a surreal-utopian sound work developed by Ellie Lizbeth Brown. From the apparent impersonality of abstract exchange, layers of intimacy and vulnerability emerge, intersecting with questions of trust, power, and of how performers relate to the role they inhabit. 

Hannah Rettl is an artist based in Berlin. Her work has been presented in two solo exhibitions at Studio Hannibal, as well as in group exhibitions at Pinky Projects, Neu Workshop, Fat Cat, Associazione Awai, and Biblioteca Tolentini.

3 pm, 5 pm
Sophie Becker
Ronnie’s World
Performance (in English)

Sophie Becker performs alongside her ventriloquist dummy Ronnie Woods, presenting excerpts from her stage work, Ronnie’s World.

Ronnie is impulsive, ambitious, and the perfect foil to Sophie’s collected demeanor. A beauty influencer, aspiring interior designer, and self-proclaimed “dummy activist,” she is relentlessly building her career while, together with Sophie, navigating the pitfalls of modern relationships, codependency, and self-invention. But when Ronnie begins to question her status as a dummy and starts pursuing ambitions of her own, the balance between the two begins to unravel.

With Ronnie’s World, Becker plays with the tropes of ventriloquism — the showmanship of the 1950s, comedy, and the dummy as an embodiment of the id — while also drawing on older histories of voice throwing, spiritualism, and the deep connections humans form with inanimate objects. Blending theater, performance, and experimental comedy, the work explores desire and recognition, as well as the increasingly unstable boundary between who is really speaking for whom.

Sophie Becker is a performer and actor based in New York. Her work has been presented at New Theater Hollywood, SculptureCenter, De Studio, C-mine, Art Omi, and NADA Miami, among other venues. She is currently included in the exhibition Greater New York 2026 at MoMA PS1.

4 pm
Marius Goldhorn
Reading from Die Prozesse (In German)

Marius Goldhorn’s novel Die Prozesse traces the disintegration of a late-capitalist Western world order. In 2030, an uprising begins in Brussels on the day of a fictional independence celebration of the once brutally colonized Congo. The novel follows an unnamed protagonist, T., and his partner Ezra through the turmoil of revolution, through arid landscapes marked by climate change, into the depths of counter-revolutionary blog discourses, and into the camps of the insurgent commune in the EU financial center, which attempts to write a new history.

With a hyperrealist and crystal-clear language, Goldhorn engages with questions of memory and archiving, illness, love, and forgetting. In doing so, he creates a dense archaeology of the deformations of an old world.

Marius Goldhorn is a writer based in Berlin. Prior to his novel Die Prozesse (2025), published by Kiepenheuer & Witsch, he released his debut novel Park (2020) with Suhrkamp and the poetry collection Yin (2020) with Korbinian Verlag.

7 pm
Seán Being
Car Musick
Music performance

Car Musick is a sound performance for cars and drivers, developed by Irish performer and musician Seán Being. Pre-arranged MIDI horns are tuned to the pitch of the horns of three cars and played back through their sound systems as a multichannel track. On Being’s cue, the drivers join the composition with their horns, enriching it into dense, immersive sonic textures.

Being removes the sound of the car horn from its functional context as a potentially aggressive warning signal. Alongside disruptive, dissonant, and frictional moments that cut through the artificial idyll of the English landscape garden, the performance also contains harmonic, poetic, and meditative elements, drawing in part on Being’s background in Gregorian chant.

The car – as the very symbol of an imagined individualist freedom that obscures its dependence on planetary entanglements – is transformed here into a porous, open sonic body. The drivers, otherwise seated alone in their metal enclosures, are connected to one another through the collectively produced sound.

Being lives in London and released the solo album FAUX WINDOW (2022) and the collaboration Princ€ss (2024) on the label wherethetimegoes. They have performed at venues including Café Oto, Somerset House, Spanners, Douglas Hyde Gallery, St Paul’s Chapel at Columbia University, Fluent, and Galeria Zé dos Bois.

A medical team will be present on site during the Sommerfest.

Families:

Baby changing facilities can be found in the ladies’ and men’s toilets in the basement.

For wheelchair users:

You can reach our park on the right through the garden hall, where our café is also located. There is another entrance to the park on the left-hand side of the building (with a slope).

You can reach the exhibition via a lift to the left of the building. Please press the bell on the lift so that our ticket office team can activate the lift. As the lift leads directly into the exhibition, for safety reasons you must ring the bell before using the lift. Access to both exhibition floors is possible via the lift. Please note the restricted turning circle in front of the lift on the ground floor and the restricted turning circle on the first floor.

Access to the wheelchair-accessible WC in the basement is also possible via the lift. The lift door remains open automatically as long as you are in the toilet. Your privacy is guaranteed in this way – the lift remains closed to others.

Dogs:

Unfortunately, it is not possible to take dogs into the exhibition rooms. This does not apply to assistance dogs, i.e. dogs belonging to people with visual impairments or other disabilities. These dogs may be taken into any exhibition.

Dogs are welcome in our sculpture park, provided they are kept on a lead.

Review of the 2025 Sommerfest programme