On the Sound and Value of Water—Voices and Perspectives

Before the exceptional Greek singer Savina Yannatou takes the stage with her new album, “Watersong,” we invite you to join us for a conversation that explores the multifaceted nature of water from two very different perspectives: science and art.

Prof. Dr. Andrea Schäfer focuses on water—specifically in places where it is needed most urgently. She is a professor of water process engineering and founded the Institute for Advanced Membrane Technology (IAMT) at KIT, which she also directs. Her research focuses on membrane processes that can be used to purify, desalinate, and reuse water. Her work ranges from basic research to practical projects in remote regions of the world.

Her career took her from Australia to Scotland to Tanzania and finally to Karlsruhe. She sums up what drives her in a single sentence: “I have a dream: clean water for all children.”

Girisha Fernando approaches water through sound. For years, he has been conceiving, organizing, and serving as artistic director of the Water & Sound Festival in Augsburg, an annual festival of global music through which he brings together artists from around the world to help people experience rivers, oceans, and waterways as cultural and spiritual lifelines—most recently under the theme “Waterways.”

As a curator of global music, Fernando blends world music, spiritual music, jazz, and contemporary pop, and deliberately organizes his festival in an interdisciplinary manner: he brings music together with ecological and social issues. For him, the festival is a way to make the multidimensional nature of water visible and tangible, beyond mere facts and figures.

In this conversation, technical knowledge and artistic vision come together: What does water mean as a resource, and what does it mean as sound, as history, as a connection between cultures? An encounter that sets the stage for an evening in which Savina Yannatou and her ensemble, Primavera en Salonico, explore precisely these questions through music: water as the source of life, as ritual, as a threat, and as the force that connects people across continents.