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On Saturday, August 29, 2026, the Kunstverein für Mecklenburg und Vorpommern in Schwerin will present the performance Fish Stories by Nadja Abt at the Petermännchen ferry on the Pfaffenteich. Fish Stories, also known as sailor’s yarn (German: Seemannsgarn), is a metaphor for stories of actual and fictional experiences at sea. Abt takes this form of storytelling as her starting point and spins it further into a women’s sea yarn (German: Seefrauengarn). She engages with the cultural history of seafaring and explores, in particular, the history of women at sea—and thus also a history in which women have often remained on land in the narratives of seafaring: as those waiting on the shore while the sea appears as a male sphere of action. Fish Stories brings this history to the Pfaffenteich and the Petermännchen ferry in Schwerin, flagged and rewritten through an alphabet consisting of the artist’s paintings. The more than one-hundred-year-old ferry was built in 1924 and brought to Schwerin from the Spreewald at the beginning of the GDR. From the 1960s to the 1980s, two female ferry operators, Irmtraut Fritz and Waltraud Meyer, were at the helm. Carrying so many layers of history and stories on its steel frame, the ferry itself becomes a storyteller. In the form of an interview, Abt asks the ferry about its biography and its passengers. Stories passed down through generations, inscribed memories, and speculative fictions are woven together into a women’s sea yarn that connects the history of the ferry with the stories of its passengers.

The performance will be in German. The admission is free.

Petermännchen-Fähre
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