ECHOES IN TRANSITION
About the Artist
Khandoker Upama Kabir is a Bangladeshi architect, heritage researcher, and interdisciplinary artist based in Germany. Her work explores the relationship between architecture, memory, material culture, and participation, using making as a way to connect people with place. Through installations, workshops, and collaborative processes, she investigates how traditional knowledge can be reinterpreted within contemporary cultural contexts.
Working across architecture, heritage, and public art, her projects combine research, drawing, material studies, and participatory construction. Rather than treating heritage as something static, she explores how it can be reinterpreted through contemporary practice and collective engagement, creating spaces where making becomes a shared experience and cultural memory continues to evolve.
Why I made this Project
Echoes in Transition began as a question: How can architecture become something people build together rather than simply observe?
Lusatia has already been profoundly reshaped by coal mining, which displaced communities and erased villages, homes, and landscapes. Now, as the region moves towards the end of coal-fired power generation by 2038, it faces another major transformation. This history of repeated change shaped my interest in memory, disappearance, and what remains.
Rather than reconstructing an Umgebindehaus, I designed the installation as an incomplete shell—some walls remain while others are missing, making absence itself visible. Through earth, timber, and collective making, the work creates space not only to remember what has been lost, but also to form new memories together.
Acknowledgments
Special thanks to:
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Arvid Ruddigkeit for his extensive technical guidance, production support, material sourcing and transport coordination throughout the development of the project
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Lehmbau e.V.
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OpenArt Lausitz Biennale
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Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus–Senftenberg
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Strombad Cottbus
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BASEhabitat Summer School 2025
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everyone who participated in the workshops and shared their time, stories, and skills
Project Information
Title
Echoes in Transition: Memory Walls of Lusatia
Year
2026
Location
Strombad Cottbus
Medium
Earth, straw, timber, natural fibres, found objects, community participation
Duration
OpenArt Lausitz Biennale 2026 (5. - 20 September 2026)
Languages
English & German
Credits
Concept & Artistic Direction
Khandoker Upama Kabir
Research
Khandoker Upama Kabir
TECHNICAL DEVELOPMENT & PRODUCTION COORDINATION
Arvid Ruddigkeit, Lehmbau e.V.
TECHNICAL & WORKSHOP PARTNER
Lehmbau e.V.
PRESENTED AS PART OF
OpenArt Lausitz Biennale
Academic Support
Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus–Senftenberg
VENUE PARTNER
Strombad Cottbus
Documentation