PRESS RELEASE | Kulturprojekte Berlin Creates Anniversary Programme for “25 Years of Twinned Cities Windhoek – Berlin”

Today, together with Berlin’s Governing Mayor Kai Wegner, Kulturprojekte Berlin presents the anniversary programme for “25 Years of Twinned Cities Windhoek – Berlin” and with it celebrates a partnership that represents an active culture of remembrance and future-orientated collaboration. From the 14th to the 19th of October 2025, an anniversary week will take place in Windhoek, accompanied by an official delegation visit by the Governing Mayor. This will be followed by an anniversary week in Berlin from the 17th to the 23rd of November 2025, which will invite the city’s wider public to attend a diverse programme of contemporary art and culture.   

The programme celebrating the anniversary of the twinned cities is based on the many relationships that have developed during the 25 years of partnership between Windhoek and Berlin and at the same time provides significant new impetus. The anniversary programme will be accompanied by official delegation trips to each city, starting with a visit to Windhoek by the Governing Mayor of Berlin, Kai Wegner. “For 25 years, Berlin and Windhoek have had a very vibrant relationship as twinned cities, which we want to strengthen and deepen. Both cities are linked through a large number of different cooperative projects in the areas of culture, education, business, research, sport and promoting democracy – but also through our historical responsibility to commemorate the German colonial period. We want to expand this work together and nurture the good relationships between Berlin and Windhoek, especially between young people on both continents,” says Kai Wegner, Governing Mayor of Berlin.

To celebrate the anniversary, a large number of cultural and civil society projects will be presented – they illustrate what partnership in practice looks like today. “‘25 Years of Twinned Cities Windhoek – Berlin’ shows how vibrant and relevant municipal cooperation can be. City partnerships like these strengthen dialogue in civil society and have an impact well beyond the city limits. The anniversary provides a valuable opportunity to give visibility to the historical and political significance of this partnership and to present forward-looking projects to a wider public. The close collaboration in creating this programme involving partners from both cities is especially important to us – it solidifies existing networks and generates new ideas,” says Simone Leimbach, Head of the Exhibitions and Events Department at Kulturprojekte Berlin.

The main focus of both anniversary weeks are two joint projects: the music theatre production “People of Song”, which is based on a long-term German-Namibian partnership and brings together artists from both countries, will celebrate its world premiere on the 17th of October 2025 at the National Theatre of Namibia and will also be performed from the 21st to the 23rd of November 2025 at the Humboldt Forum in Berlin. As well as that, the multidisciplinary artist Vitjitua Ndjiharine will present her work in both Windhoek and Berlin with a video installation – an intervention in urban space that brings an artistic exploration of the city partnership to the cities’ wider communities.

The celebrations kick off with the anniversary week in Windhoek from the 14th to the 19th of October. This is being realised in cooperation with the Namibia Institute for Democracy (NID) and the Creative Industry Institute Africa (CIIA). The programme focuses on participatory projects that engage in dialogue about future potential against the backdrop of an active culture of remembrance. In this way, possibilities for working together productively as twinned cities will be explored. A full-day workshop, in particular with representatives of civil society, will be dedicated to colonial history and seek concrete ways of shaping an equal partnership. A guided “Memory Walk” will chart Windhoek’s history and its connections to Berlin. Other events in the programme focus on civil society dialogue and networking between different organisations and partners, and are primarily aimed at a younger audience of school and university students. Finally, Independence Avenue in the centre of Windhoek will be turned into an open-air stage for the “Street Threads” fashion show, which brings together Namibian and German designers, and will celebrate the creative exchange between the two twinned cities with many other activities.

For the anniversary week in Berlin from the 17th to the 23rd of November, curators Anne Schumann and Noah Anderson have developed a programme that includes various collaborations and community perspectives in different locations: “With this programme, we want to create spaces where dialogue, culture and civic participation can really engage with each other, in addition to the symbolic gestures. Collaborating with people involved in civil society and activism in both cities is central to this. Our aim is to create something collectively, in which voices from Berlin and Windhoek speak together and new alliances and projects are formed.” The programme features, for example, daily city tours by Berlin Postkolonial and deSta – Decolonial City Tours that invite you to explore Berlin and its history with a critical eye. The theme of “Archives” will be addressed from different perspectives and applied in different ways at the Gropius Bau in works by Forensic Architecture, Contemporary And (C&), TheMuseumsLab and urban dialogues. At the Berlin Global Village, Decolonize Berlin will focus on the theme of “Moving Forward Together”, bringing together civil society actors from Namibia and Germany to discuss what is required for decolonial relations. The film festival “AFRIKAMERA – Current Cinema from Africa” will present contemporary Namibian films as well as the VR-production “The Soil of the Namib: VR” by Christian Zipfel at SINEMA TRANSTOPIA, while at the Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz there will be a special Namibia edition of the “Decolonized Glamour Talks”, initiated by Lara-Sophie Milagro. SODI e.V., an organisation that is active in future-orientated education work, are creating a mobile presentation on the history of the twinned cities’ partnership. There will also be exhibitions, panel discussions, films, music and participatory projects, as well as a podcast for children and a community singing event in the Genezarethkirche accompanied by Namibian singers from the “People of Song” project.

The Berlin anniversary programme celebrating “25 Years of Twin Cities Windhoek – Berlin” is being curated and organised by Kulturprojekte Berlin, on the initiative of and in collaboration with the Governing Mayor of Berlin – Senate Chancellery, as well as a large number of partners. The programme in Windhoek is taking place in cooperation with the City of Windhoek, the Namibia Institute for Democracy and the Creative Industry Institute Africa. Made possible by funds from the Lotto Foundation Berlin.

More information on the anniversary programme at www.windhoek-berlin.com.