Stretching Practices

Group Aspect: Main responsibility in exhibition realisation of »Stretching Materialities. Hidden Activities in Objects and Spaces«

Interweaving exhibiting and researching as forms of practice in the exhibition uncovered a sensual potential of knowledge and publicity in situ. Here, practices are explored at the levels of the sensory, temporal, spatial and virtual/symbolic, such as the location of stones in the virtual, woven spatial structures in arid climates, telepresence in damp clouds on our VR elevator, opening up new sensory modes.

These practices, including experiencing, mapping, fabricating and fabulating, can be summarised as atmospheric participation.

Here, current challenges, such as a so-called Slow Violence, expand the exhibition by continuously measuring agencies of the surrounding through machinic processes that strive for a new awareness of formless fumes and residues.

In the experience of leading our research group within a collective curatorial process, it was challenging to keep the focus and trust in many unpredictable layers for us throughout the thirteen months of preparing until the finissage and dismantling. However, what we faced on a daily base seeing our professional expertise challenged, turned out fruitful in perspective. For me, thinking with air, breath, breathing with all internal and external companions – more questions, what this means and requires, what practices such as repair, healing, and care can take and cannot. What kind of mediums and substances one can feel as attunements, feelings, affinities or substances – letting us imagine kinship, solidarity, conspiracy, collectivity – matters, how practices in the future look like and what might count as practices in precarious future times.

The outlook within our exhibition-as-research time of collectivity transferred the individual experiencing, fabricating and collecting into dimensions of the overall conceptions in time, space, the virtual, and the senses. We entered a performative dance with found non-human actors and material activities guiding our decision-making as a collective. The gathered practices on atmospheric levels were constituted by conservational techniques of activation and passivation concerning the temporal dynamics of living and non-living material collections in certain environmental conditions to make knowledge accessible. With this, practices meander between intentional and non-intentional actions to immobilize or re-enact the specimen's activity. Furthermore, techniques of collective weaving ran through spatial structures embodying questions on tissues in multiple scales, from microbial levels of fungi to spatial architectures to climb into - i.e. in the spatial. On the virtual level, practices offer a lot to question the analog once again – to renegotiate material properties. A collective material witnessing is enhanced with new intimacies and proximities by new semantic operations, such as giving the moisture from a wet tissue the haptics of a magmatic stone or reading tangibly cloudy archives.

Stretching Practices to access »exhibiting as research method«

Stretching the focus on design practices as environing techniques during the exhibition period of »Stretching Materialities. Hidden Activities in Objects and Spaces« opens an integrative connection between all the individual stations. With the focus on atmospheric participation, visitors and objects become active as breathers in their breathing conditions. Through participatory modes of making and speculating, dust and residues within the exhibition space become alive over time, can be experienced anew, traced and mapped and co-speculated upon. So, how can new modes of atmospheric participation be set in motion and raise awareness of how we change our environment unintentionally? And how is the air as medium aiming for discourses and forms of socio-ecological and economic institutions through an analytical approach?

At the historical Veterinary Anatomical Theatre (TA T) Berlin, airborne deposits as ephemeral media-materialities have been mapped in a so-called »Metabolic Archive« as a first station. To understand atmospheric tactilities beyond the conservation space, we set dust collections, metagenomic data, carbon capturing materialities, residues and humidity levels from things and the exhibition space into new relation to the behavior of visitors.

We could figure out throughout the process some investigated airborne particles have made transcontinental journeys or indicated anthropogenic interventions, even in the COVID-19 Lockdown.

Further, in the installation »Enveloping Incomputable Atmospheres« at the center of the exhibition space, the Rotunda of the TA T, weak circular air curtains set up a damp atmosphere entangled with various bodies of the exhibition space.

After questions like what is this cloud doing here, a 3-5m diameter warm, moist, visible, dusty air layer can be understood as being intimately tight to the presence, body heat or movements of visitors and technical operations of the building itself. The forming cloud is set as a re-enactment of all collected data, residues, filtrated water of the nearby river and provided energy for the building.

Another neighbouring installation growing over the months of the exhibition process is »Imagining Suspended Care-riers« questioning existing narratives of the ongoing detective work in the microchemistry of the atmospheric environment and its influences on our anthropocentric view. Here, semiotic materials, emotions and voices as ephemeral media could be understood as “healing” devices set up for debate about reshaping human. The study of data and experiences in the indoor clouds as useful media also poses new challenges and opportunities for research and pedagogy. Co-designing practices around fabulating through language, materials, recipes, event scores and short cli-fi essay movies shaped new perspectives on education and the transfer of knowledge.

These three exemplary participatory stations for knowledge production allowed different audiences - children, students, educators, researchers, curators, caregivers and politicians - to dance, think, debate, re-enact and shape the dusty archive as an experimental learning space. Last but not least, as the Anatomical Theatre itself is based on the combination of theatrical and non-theatrical practices of the historical Anatomical Theatre, which houses a lecture theatre and a medical research area directly below.

Our virtual museum - following the life of the air

The VR level empathizes with the apparent situated void spaces between visitors and exhibits, including between the inside and the outside of the TA T all the way up to the stratosphere. Central to the staging of the virtual space was sympathy with alternative world models in which, for example, microbes travel in clouds.

By extension, the trend in VR is to explore new human experiences as another species, such as in the air, under, in and above the clouds. Inspired by the virtual experiences, participants in the exhibition create event logs, log sheets and notes for other visitors to recreate certain conditions in the exhibition space. Questions in virtual remain, such as how bacteria would curate and design this exhibition, and in the physical postdigital sense, how exhibition spaces deal with the energy-material infrastructures colonizing other territories (reference might be here the AHRC granted research project https://www.museumsforclimateaction.org, where museums can be probed as metabolism, as atmosphere, laboratory, theatre, factory and more)

Outlook - Tracing the Ephemeral

In resulting research findings, new intimacies are formed in dealing with material codes, new forms of critical analysis of scientific measurements and the formation of new material metaphors as material literacies and semiotics. In a participatory, fabulating way, the question remains how the produced knowledge in text, space and temporality can be further developed by co-speculating actors in the medium of Design that seems increasingly critical to us in the Anthropocene.

New experimental teaching and research formats in the exhibition space will be further analyzed, e.g. protocols, recipes, event results, classified metagenomic data during the COVID-19 lockdown. Among other things, rituals will emerge from scientific data collections in the exhibition process, representing new bio-logical and climato-logical understandings of circularities. Just as reverie shapes clouds, clouds are not made to be reliably shaped. Therefore, a performative need for constant re-adjustment will remain necessary in knowledge archives of our daily research practice.

With the help to analyze our results from research-based exhibiting, we would like to change research in the entire Matters of Activity group in such a way that future knowledge productions are increasingly diversified and made hybridly accessible - not concluding representatively as an exhibition, but rather becoming an integrative epistemic part of experiential knowledge in the process itself.

Special thanks for realizing the atmospheric participation part in Stretching Practices goes to Curator Felix Sattler (TA T), Geo-Microbiologist and Aerobiologist Anna Gorbushina (BAM Berlin), Climate Scientist Cornelia Auer (PIK Potsdam), Thomas Auer (TU Munich), Benjamin Maus (allesblinkt.com), Helen Galliker (https://www.helengalliker.ch), Skander Hathroubi and Regine Hengge (Microbiology, HU Berlin), Michaela Eder (MPIKG), Astvaldur Thorrison and Felix Lenz (Research Fellows)

Clemens Winkler