Latent Accumulations: Walking Along Paraffin Pollution at Nida Coastline. Film still: Anna Luise Schubert 2025
Exhibition, Round Table and Workshop
Paraffin pollution is a recurring concern in coastal environments, yet one that is inherently difficult to detect and classify. The exhibition »Latent Accumulations« at Tieranatomisches Theater Berlin traces the elusive activity of this material. It gives insights into site-specific research processes that connect material investigations with local experiences and memories of shifting landscapes.
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Film Still taken from a film by Emilia Tikka and Oula A. Valkeapää. Image: Oula A. Valkeapää, 2021
Exhibition, Talk and Tours
The exhibition brings together two worlds: reindeer nomadism in the Arctic Sápmi region and the bioscience of epigenetics. Drawing on living relations within contemporary reindeer worlds and bioscientific research, the exhibition at Schering Stiftung materializes a world in which epigenetic memories are not only shared between humans but carried within ancestral migratory paths.
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Microverse, Pea, reflected light, 2023. Copyright: Kathrin Linkersdorff
Photographs Created by Kathrin Linkersdorff in Collaboration with Regine Hengge Exhibited at Haus am Kleistpark
Circularity and sustainability of material flows are hallmarks of intact ecosystems. This principle has now been stunningly visualized in ultrahigh resolution, large format photographs - the MICROVERSE series - created by Kathrin Linkersdorff in collaboration with Regine Hengge, Professor for Microbiology at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. The exhibition at Haus am Kleistpark (Berlin-Schöneberg) will be on view from March 21st to June 8th, 2025. We kindly invite you to the opening on March 20th, 2025 with an introduction by the Cluster's Senior Co-Director Horst Bredekamp.
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Artist Talk by Cluster Member Emilia Tikka at Conference »Memories of Tomorrow«
Emilia Tikka presents the research-driven collaborative art/science project called »Johtingeaidnu – The Path Within«, and its exploration of memory, drawing from bioscience research on transgenerational epigenetic memories and the understanding of memory as place-based in the reindeer worlds of the Arctic Sápmi. In the conference »Memories of Tomorrow« critical questions, such as how biotechnological advancements can allow us to alter the course of human memory and history or in what ways the Earth itself stores the memories of human interaction, and how we can repair the ecological damage we've caused, will be discussed. Registration for the online conference is now open.
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Cluster Member Rahel Kesselring Gives a Talk at the 3rd International Care Ethics Research Consortium Conference
Rahel Kesselring will give a talk at the 3rd International Care Ethics Research Consortium Conference in Utrecht. In her talk entitled »›If we do not seek to fix what has been broken, then what?‹: On Procedures of Care, Repair, and Breakdown in Contemporary Arts«, Rahel will give insights into her recent field research. The talk is part of the panel »Care Beyond Repair«. The conference brings together care ethicists and scholars, artists, designers, and makers, artistic researchers, performers and philosophers, educators, policymakers, and others to explore a fundamental question: What does it mean to care?
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Rahel Kesselring spricht im Rahmen der »Critical Ecologies« Vortragsreihe
»Critical Ecologies« ist eine für und mit Szenographiestudierenden organsierte Veranstaltungsreihe der ZHdK Zürich und der HfBK Dresden. Ihr Fokus liegt darauf, gemeinsam ein ökologisches und nachhaltiges Denken, Forschen und Handeln in den darstellenden Künsten (weiter) zu entwickeln. Am 27. November gibt MoA PhD Kandidatin Rahel Kesselring unter dem Titel »How to hold things: Reparatur, Regeneration und Rewilding als künstlerische Praktiken in versehrten Ökosystemen« Einblicke in ihre Forschung.
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Edward Burtinsky, Iberia Quarries #2, Marmorose EFA Co., Bencatel, Portugal, 2006
Workshop Organized by Cluster Member Kaja Ninnis Together with Ursula Ströbele
What happens before matter becomes art – what happens before the object? This workshop at Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig, November 21st-23rd, 2024, is dedicated to exploring not artworks but the »stuff« artworks are made of and the ecological implications of their procurement, processing, and transport, aiming at uncovering what Laura Turner Igoe has called »the ecological unconscious of art matter.« The workshop is organized by Kaja Ninnis (HU Berlin / Matters of Activity) and Ursula Ströbele (HBK Braunschweig).
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»Kiki Prototype«. Design: Rasa Weber, rasaweber.com. PhD Project: «SymbiOcean». Location: STARESO - Calvi (FR). Diver: Noémie Chabrier. Installation team, assistance and monitoring: Arnaud Boulenger, Sandra Bracun, Noemi Chabrier, Mélodie Chapat, Sylvain Coudray, Stéphane Jamme, Leonie John, Teal Jordan, Michael Karle, Mathieu Kelhetter (design intern), Michaela Roger, Bram van der Schoot, Kelly Stiver, Anja Wegner, Lena Wesenberg, Aubin Woehrel. Date: June 2023. SNF research project: «Interfacing the Ocean». Hosting University: Zurich University of the Arts & University of Art and Design Linz. Photo: Stéphane Jamme @stepp_aquanaute.
Exhibition by Rasa Weber Opens at Berlin Science Week
We're delighted that MoA associated member Rasa Weber will be part of the Blue Talk: »Science and Design for Marine Ecosystem Restoration« at this year's Berlin Science Week. The event is part of the preparation for the Third United Nations Ocean Conference jointly organized by France and Costa Rica (June 2025 - Nice, France) and takes place at the French Embassy in Berlin. The panel discussion will be followed by the official opening of the exhibition »The Whispering World: Words by a Silent Sea«, showcasing Rasa's work in developing a prototype of an artificial reef that provides a substrate and structure for pioneer organisms to form a habitat.
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Copyright: ICI Berlin
Conference Organized by Claudia Mareis – Conference Contributions Now Online as an Audio Series
The conference »Planetary Design: Reclaiming Futures« brought together critical thinking and doing around the role of design in making, unmaking and remaking worlds. Starting from the intersection of design, infrastructure, and the planetary environment, it offered a generative platform open to artists, academics, and activists for rethinking design’s role in producing the present and for developing alternative planetary futures. The conference gathered artists, academics, and activists to rethink design's role in producing our present and developing alternative planetary futures. The conference contributions are now online as a podcast!
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Ever Given, 2021. Copyright: Suez Canal Authority
Exploratory Workshop about Cultural Techniques and Material Cultures at Sea
The workshop aims to foster research into the historical interplay between mobility, cultural techniques, and material culture within maritime and coastal contexts. By examining how cultures, cultural techniques, and nature have historically shaped life, work, and travel at sea, we seek to develop new research questions that can lead to future grant applications. Through interdisciplinary collaboration, participants will explore themes such as maritime technologies, littoral knowledge production, and the material manifestations of aquatic and coastal communities.
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Vorketzin, 2019. Photo: Jonas Stuck
Don't Forget to Sign up for Bike Tour Through Berlin’s Hinterland!
Alwin Cubasch, Christian Kassung and Heike Weber from the Filtering project cordially invite you to a bicycle tour of contaminated sites in the Berlin area, organized and conducted by Jonas Stuck from the Rachel Carson Center in Munich and based on his research results. This bike tour on 22 September 204 explores three significant landfills used to dispose of Western waste in East Germany during the period of Germany’s division. We dive into the beginnings of the trade of waste between West and East Germany and its geo- and socio-political, environmental, and economic implications. We discuss different types of waste disposed of and their impact on the surrounding ecologies. Examples of historical records and waste management strategies will be shown alongside the contemporary efforts of managing these legacies.
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Watery digits at the Venetian sestiere of Dorsoduro. Copyrigth: Gina Caison
Léa Perraudin Holds Evening Lecture at »Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe« in Hamburg as Part of the Exhibition »Water Pressure. Designing for the Future«
What allows one to float? In the evening lecture »Surface Tension. Tracing Socio-Material Relations Through Urban Waters« that concludes the workshop »Built with Water – Anthropocene Interdependencies«, Léa Perraudin will engage the physical phenomenon of surface tension to delve into socio-material relations that emerge in the Venetian lagoon. As a city that thinks every aspect of itself through the water, the liquid grounds of Venice hold potential for frictional and careful encounters alike.
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Tracing paraffin accumulations. Fieldwork on the coastline of the Curonian Spit in the Neringa Nature Reserve, Léa Perraudin and Iva Rešetar. 2024. Copyright: Iva Rešetar
Fieldwork of Léa Perraudin and Iva Rešetar on the Coastline of the Curonian Spit in the Neringa Nature Reserve
In their ongoing fieldwork in Nida, Lithuania, Iva Rešetar and Léa Perraudin are concerned with the scales and phases of paraffin (re-)distribution in this seemingly pristine natural environment. Latent Accumulations focuses on the ecopolitics of paraffin pollution, engaging the material as unsettled in its movement and energy exchange. They argue that it is precisely the process of phase transition that gives rise to this uncertain ontological status – between solid and liquid, slow and sudden, and between events of pollution, their materialization and maintenance.
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Workshop »Critical Times. Part II: Ecologies of Relation«, April 11-13, 2024, workshop with Lara Almarcegui at ALBETON concrete plant, Rotterdam. Photo: Rahel Kesselring
Workshop 11 to 13 April 2024
The workshop »Critical Times. Part II: Ecologies of Relation« brought together Post-Doc’s, PhD’s and advanced MA students from the humanities, social science, as well as arts and design to engage in a discussion about critical times and materialities, postcolonial and posthuman critique, non-European perspectives, and notions of »deep time« of materialities. »Critical Times. Part II: Ecologies of Relation« unfolded a critical conversation, contesting linear conceptions of time, reductionist notions of materiality, and teleological solutionism, by focusing on ecologies and relations. Either term, ecology and relation, has received much attention over the last decade, especially in the arts, design, and humanities. Both emphasize the intersection of different domains of knowledge, media and practice to understand and navigate the challenges of an increasingly complex present. With the workshop, we aimed to critically address and resituate the multi-faceted dimensions of both through in-depth and creative formats.
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Syntopia 0 – Anthropos I Human. Copyright: Roland Halbe
Karola Dierichs' Project Contributes to Exhibition and Symposium »Being Plastic/Becoming Plastic« at the University of Virginia
In March 2024, Karola Dierichs exhibited the project »Syntopia 0—Anthropos I Human« as part of the exhibition and symposium »Being Plastic/ Becoming Plastic« at the University of Virginia, US, under the direction of Ehsan Baharlou. Initially conducted under the title »ICD Aggregate Pavilion 2018«, the project explores the construction of spatial enclosures made from designed granular materials. Yet one might now call this project »Syntopia 0—Anthropos I Human« in the present discourse on human-made plastic residue. This considers the research not only as an example of materials design and construction robotics but also as a monument of anthropogenic mass superseding living biomass around 2020, given it was made of injection-molding plastic waste from the local Stuttgart car industry.
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Intro, Excursion Filtering Oranienburg, 2023. Foto: Sybille Neumeyer.
Online Documentation of Interdisciplinary Cluster Workshop Available Now
In March 2023, an interdisciplinary team from design, computer science, art, and cultural studies examined various concepts of dealing with radioactive waste and the historical environmental impact of the industrial site of Oranienburg. While exploring the history of radioactive legacies in Oranienburg, we were confronted with different types of information: traces of the former industrial sites and bombings, symbols, maps, or signs of cleaning and securing as well as memorials as part of today's culture of remembrance. Oranienburg, with its multi-layered historical legacies, but also the land activations that have taken place, thus offered a concrete environment for the workshop questions as a field of research and experimentation. The group now published detailed documentation of the workshop.
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Exhibition view »Closer to Nature. Building with Mushroom, Tree, Clay«, Berlinische Galerie. Copyright: Photo: Harry Schnitger
Experimental Building by SciArt Collective MY-CO-X on Show at Berlinische Galerie
Architecture and nature inevitably compete for space. That poses a dilemma when resources are finite and the demand for space keeps growing. Besides, we know that the construction sector generates huge waste and emissions. All this has raised issues about the role of architecture: Does it need a shift in perspective? Could we build with nature instead of against it? The exhibition »Closer to Nature« at the Berlinische Galerie showcases three Berlin-based projects, that utilize the potential of mushrooms, living trees, and clay. This gives them an ecological quality, but also a completely new character: the buildings breathe, grow, and thus become alive themselves. One of the showcased projects is the experimental building MY-CO SPACE, which was developed, designed, and built by the interdisciplinary Berlin SciArt collective MY-CO-X, an initiative of the Department of Applied and Molecular Microbiology at TU Berlin under the direction of MoA member Vera Meyer with contributions by Dimitra Almpani-Lekka.
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Workshop participants discussing T.J. Demos recent book »Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today« with the author. »Critical Times« at »Matters of Activity«, 17 & 18 November 2023
Workshop with Contributions by T. J. Demos, Sandra Jasper, Kiran Pereira & David Weber-Krebs
Time has become an increasingly critical factor and concept in the wake of Anthropocene debates. With the workshop »Critical Times. Part I: Multiple Matter«, which took place at »Matters of Activity« on November 17 and 18, the organizers asked, what times and temporalities shape the pressing crises of the present but also what temporalities allow for a critical response to a homogenizing crisis of such a present. The focus of the workshop resided in the conjunctions between speculative practices and narratives, other-than-scientific modes of sense-making as well as enchanting, violent, or haunting counter-/temporalities unfolding through eco-artistic practices. Around twenty-five multidisciplinary workshop participants engaged in discussions together with our invited guests — T.J. Demos, Sandra Jasper, Kiran Pereira and David Weber-Krebs.
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Copyright: Jann Mausen
Public Lecture by T. J. Demos as Part of »Critical Times. Part 1: Multiple Matter«
How might we rescue the future from the grips of planetary negativity, capitalist longtermism, and generalized catastrophism? It will take nothing less than cultivating an emancipated chronopolitics emerging from the traditions of the oppressed in relation to an undetermined not-yet. T. J. Demos presentation addresses recent creative modelings of radical Indigenous and Afrofuturist worlds-to-come and their radical temporal reconfigurations, founded upon social justice and environmental flourishing.
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Leben machen. Die Zoëpolitik der synthetischen Biologie. Copyright: DeGruyter
Publikation von Clustermitglied Martin Müller Open Access veröffentlicht
Die synthetische Biologie versucht sich gegenwärtig am Re-Design ganzer Gattungen, arbeitet an der ›resurrectio‹ längst ausgestorbener Arten zur Stabilisierung kollabierender Ökosysteme und greift mittels der Genomeditierungstechnologie CRISPR gezielt in die menschliche Keimbahn ein.
Für eine Kritik dieser prometheischen Biologie verbindet Martin Müller Ansätze aus Medien- und Kulturwissenschaft mit Designtheorie, Wissenschaftsphilosophie und Wissensgeschichte. Seine ›Genealogie der Zoëpolitik‹ ist gleichsam eine neue Macht- und Lebenstheorie. Sie beschreibt einen ›Willen zum Lebenmachen‹, der um 1800 entstand. Dieser intensivierte sich und eskalierte im 20. Jahrhundert in der ›molekularen Revolution‹ und heute im Auftauchen der synthetischen Biologie, welche die planetarische Natur und das biologische Leben in Gänze als ein Interventionsfeld ingenieurtechnischer Kalküle begreift. more
Für eine Kritik dieser prometheischen Biologie verbindet Martin Müller Ansätze aus Medien- und Kulturwissenschaft mit Designtheorie, Wissenschaftsphilosophie und Wissensgeschichte. Seine ›Genealogie der Zoëpolitik‹ ist gleichsam eine neue Macht- und Lebenstheorie. Sie beschreibt einen ›Willen zum Lebenmachen‹, der um 1800 entstand. Dieser intensivierte sich und eskalierte im 20. Jahrhundert in der ›molekularen Revolution‹ und heute im Auftauchen der synthetischen Biologie, welche die planetarische Natur und das biologische Leben in Gänze als ein Interventionsfeld ingenieurtechnischer Kalküle begreift. more
Hambacher Forst, Germany, March 2024. Copyright: Rahel Kesselring
This research project will contribute to their research by developing an interdisciplinary and humanities-based perspective on wood, forests, and bark. It will draw on new materialism, STS, history of knowledge; decolonial thought and posthuman approaches to map tree-related knowledges, technologies, and futures by drawing on scientific works, material cultures, and cultural production.
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Enveloping atmospheres - experiment with structural textiles (knitted willow column). Copyright: Matters of Activity, Clemens Winkler, Natalija Miodragović. Photo Credit: Michelle Mantel
Clemens Winkler
The main interest of our research group lies in an integrative approach for the Cluster »Matters of Activity. Image Space Material« in forming walkable ways of knowing »exhibiting as a research method«. Therefore, this interest follows new forms of witnessing material activities and enacting tacit material knowledge to further co-create and co-speculate on them. Under intensive leadership within our curatorial collective including supervision of responsibilities for the exhibition process over thirteen months, our design research further set the focus on the materiality of atmospheric processes as highly immersive environing mixed media. Through the lens of this media materiality, situated practices are intended to transform our research across our curatorial collective and guide the Cluster's future exhibition projects.
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A refugee`s hut in the so called Jungle at Calais, France, October 2016. Copyright: Thomas Müller
Emergent Structure and Structure of Emergence
Armchair, flamed birch wood with ivory and mother-of-pearl inlays, designed as part of a bedroom ensemble by Mackay Hughes Bailly Scott, made by the Dresdener Werkstätte für Handwerkskunst in 1903, Bröhan-Museum, Berlin.
PhD Project Kaja Ninnis
The PhD project »(Hi)Stories of Transformation: Tracing Materials in the British Arts and Crafts Movement« by Kaja Ninnis investigates the environmental implications of the sourcing and transformation of ›raw‹ materials in the context of the British Arts and Crafts Movement.
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Tour through the abandoned city of Manheim with artist Silke Schatz and her art project »Manheim calling.« The town has been evacuated and demolished to make way for lignite mining close to »Hambacher Forst« in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. Schatz’ ongoing art project is part of the investigation of Rahel’s PhD project »One Big Green Thought.« Image: Rahel Kesselring, March 2024.
PhD Project Rahel Kesselring
In her doctoral project, Rahel investigates artistic practices, which are set in damaged environments and have plants, trees, and forests as their object of investigation. By analyzing selected case studies from the field of contemporary art and recent art history, the project aims to discuss arboreal politics, their medial modes of representation, and the epistemologies brought together in them
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Infra-red images, Lieberoser Heide, August 2023. Copyright: Konstantin Mitrokhov
The artistic-scientific research project »Blasted Landscapes« deals with the complicated history and controversial use of former military training areas in Brandenburg. Based on the different interests in relation to these sites we want to investigate how different landscape concepts are created and what assumptions about nature and culture underlie them.
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Microverse I-6, 2023. Copyright: Kathrin Linkersdorff
Blurring the Boundaries between Science and Art in a Living Theatrum naturae et artis
Circularity of growth and decay as well as sustainability of the flow of living matter is a hallmark of intact ecosystems. This principle is stunningly visualized in ultrahigh resolution, large format photographs - the MICROVERSE series - created by freelance artist Kathrin Linkersdorff in collaboration with microbiologist Regine Hengge.
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