PANKE INTERVENTIONS

Art Laboratory Berlin welcomes you to the series PANKE INTERVENTIONS on art, science and sound in Berlin Wedding during autumn 2022. The series is closely connected to our ongoing art science research group DIY Hack the Panke. The events have been supported by the Bezirkskulturfonds (Kulturamt Berlin Mitte) and the Berlin Senate (Department for Culture and Europe).

After two years of social distancing, Art Laboratory Berlin proposes a season of collaborative action, building together our ecological and technological future. We use the Panke River in Berlin-Wedding as an artery for a series of interdisciplinary participatory workshops and talks with artists and scientists. Creating future visions about a green(er) world, exploring possible taphonomies of trash, discussing paths and origins of food, sharing cultural investigations and storytelling – these eight interventions seek to build engagement through exploration and empathy. Contributions by: plan b (Sophia New & Daniel Belasco Rogers), Ariel Orah & Michelle Lai, Kat Austen, Sarah Hermanutz, Fara Peluso, Cammack Lyndsey, Ink Agop, Tad Ermitaño and India Mansour.

PROGRAM | Short Version

14 August 2022 | Workshop
Plan b (Dan Belasco Rogers & Sophia New) – Another Green World

23 September 2022 | Workshop & Lecture
Ariel Orah & Michelle Lai (Soydivision Kollektiv) – Kentanggung

1 October 2022 | Workshop
Kat Austen – Taphonomy of Trash

8 October 2022 | Workshop
Sarah Hermanutz, India Mansour, Fara Peluso – Wetland Ecologies. Life in Transitional Zones

30 October 2022| Performative Workshop
Cammack Lindsey – The Materiality of Ghosts

6 November 2022 | Artist Talk (online)
Tad Ermitaño – Notes on Somatodelia

12 November 2022 | Workshop  
Fara Peluso – Algature Workshop

26 – 27 November 2022 | Workshop
Ink Agop – Koji Cultivation

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Algature Workshop by Fara Peluso, 2019, photo: Anne Freitag

PROGRAM | Long version

Another Green World
Workshop with plan b (Sophia New & Daniel Belasco Rogers)
14 August 2022, 11 am – 5 pm

Using green space in the urban context of Wedding in Berlin, plan b invite participants to this outdoor workshop to collectively envision another kind of green, urban world, one that might sustain us in an uncertain future? Building on techniques of perception and imagining developed by the environmental activist Rob Hopkins, pioneer of the transition movement and author of From What Is to What If, we use the radical, transformative power of our imaginations to assess what we already have and taste what is nearly in our grasp. The workshop will take place at Art Laboratory Berlin, the surrounding area and the nearby Panke river. We will start by sharing knowledge about the plants that are useful for food. What food and medicine can we find in this urban landscape? Where could we build shelter? Source drinkable water? Once collective knowledge has been gathered, we start galvanising our collective imagination. What would it take to make this place even more useful? By the end of the workshop, we will have shared visions of an alternative near future.


Kentanggung
Workshop & Lecture with Ariel Orah & Michelle Lai (Soydivision Kollektiv)
23 September 2022, 3 – 6:30 pm – Workshop, 7 pm – Lecture, at ALB

In the Bahasa language kentang means potatoes, while tanggung can define a plethora of words: to hold responsibility, to bear, to assure, to be half-hearted, to be awkward and to guarantee. Tracing the historical, migratory pathways undertaken by the spud, we propose an ode to the potato, this  participatory research workshop explores the spectre of histories and imaginations that the potato, as a seed of desire and delight contains. In the first part of the workshop (“Planting”) we will gather to plant potatoes and reflect about the myths of potatoes, its stories, folklores and rhymes, as well as share anecdotes about the potato. In the second part (“Observing”) we will explore the potato from a microscopic point of view and also discuss toxicities and neutralising potatoes. And in the third part (“Showing”) the workshop invites the participants to enjoy a potato cooking session, which continues with a performance lecture and eating session later on.


Taphonomy of Trash
Workshop with Kat Austen
1 October 2022, 10 am – 2:30 pm, at ALB

What is the legacy of our waste? In this workshop, with artist Kat Austen, participants will explore the traces of human consumption, the act of throwing away and the process of decay. Inspired by the experimental practice of taphonomy, which examines decomposition over time, participants will search for discarded materials along the banks of the Panke River, cataloguing them while discussing their temporal nature, persistence, and degradation. Based on research developed for the Palaeoplasticene project’s Open Artistic Research Platform, participants will be introduced to the concept of incidental taphonomy, exploring the transience of organic existence and humanity’s relationship to long-lasting materials such as plastic.


Wetland Ecologies: Life in Transitional Zones
Workshop with Sarah Hermanutz, India Mansour, Fara Peluso –
8 October 2022, 12 – 5 pm

In the workshop the artist, the designer and the biologist will introduce the participants to the river Panke and changing perceptions of wetlands and essential ecosystems playing a vital role in biodiversity preservation and climate change mitigation. Through river-side lectures and storytelling, participants will be encouraged to share and reflect on their own personal relationships (or lack thereof) with wetlands, while physically and sensorially encountering a small, fragmented patch of wetland along the Panke. We will weave together landscape-scale and microbiological perspectives and hack art, design and DIY biology: through a participatory format the audience is called to have an immersive experience with algae and Panke water ecology. Together we will develop an algae culture collection and prototype a DIY photo-bioreactor for indoor cultivation. The transdisciplinary practice will raise questions such as how closeness to living organisms can give us economic, political and artistic contributions. Our goal is for everyone to foster a deeper relationship with the river through situating, storytelling, contextualizing, experiencing, sampling, examining, collaborating, and dreaming.


The Materiality of Ghosts
Performative Workshop with Cammack Lindsey
30 October 2022, 1 – 6 pm

Ghosts are material and they are acting in our physical realities, speaking to us from within pockets of past, future, and present time. How do material conditions determined by a capitalist system affect our mental state, and possibly induce visions of ghosts? As reflections of nature, our memories and environment, ghosts appear through language, noise, smell, color and shapes of lights and hues. How can mysticism and magic through our encounters with ghosts be used to question our mechanicalized bodies and commodified labor-power? How can science be a tool in transforming our ghosts into collective material bodies that can act, protest and rebel as weapons against our precarity. In this workshop we will explore these themes in relation to historical and environmental relics with intimate discussions, readings, and written poetry. We will experiment with our voices and harmonies, while learning about breathing and our body resonance to amplify our stories together in a final composition of our poems through a performance. The conditions of the final outcome will also be discussed and decided within the group so that everyone is comfortable.


Notes on Somatodelia
Artist Talk with Tad Ermitaño
6 November 2022, 12 pm noon CET (online)

As a self-described “refugee from the sciences” artist Tad Ermitaño creates in his films and artworks an uneasy field in which a facility with technology collides with a kind of postcolonial guilt slamming its head against the limits of empiricism. Radyo Somatodelia: Experiments in Sonic Animism (Tagalog of “radio”) recasts the act of looking and listening as ways of reconstructing an animist orientation towards the world. In this artist talk with curator Tengal Drilon, Ermitaño will discuss the methodologies behind his recent works, shown at Art Laboratory Berlin earlier this year.


Algature Workshop
Workshop with Fara Peluso
12 November 2022, 1 – 6 pm

Can daily spaces be designed to house living machines, as an action to merge and connect different ecosystems by reducing the distance between the human and nonhuman spheres? The workshop supports this action connecting practices of DIY biology with art and design, encouraging participants to learn about science and discovering how powerful the transdisciplinary approach can be. Through a participatory format, the audience from different backgrounds are involved in an immersive experience with algae’s ecology, a DIY photo-bioreactor prototyping and a discussion on speculative practice focused on raising more awarenesse about daily habits. By considering a new way of approaching living organisms Algature will question how closeness to them can give economic, political and artistic contributions. The introduction to the speculative design combined with the DIY methodology will be an occasion to study some objects and, by stimulating critical issues, it will help to define a new possible generation of tools.


Koji Cultivation
Workshop with Ink Agop
26 – 27 November 2022, 1 – 6 pm daily

The Koji workshop by ink Agop introduces the symbiotic relationship between microorganisms and human cultural activities by demonstrating the connection between Koji mould and food culture in Japan. Participants make rice koji using koji mould. We will examine the process of cultivating Koji on rice and learn about how time, temperature and humidity control its growth. In the process of fermentation, they will learn how the enzymes produced by Koji decompose carbohydrates into sugar. We will experience the multiple parallel fermentation processes using koji, yeast and lactic acid bacteria.