Echoes from Waterlands

In connection with their winter studio residencies at Art Laboratory Berlin, artist designer Fara Peluso and artist Sarah Hermanutz invite the public to learn more about their current artistic practices on 27 until 29 January 2023. There will be an artist talk on 29 January 2023 with both artists.

Fara Peluso asks through her work: How can living machines influence the way we see the world? How can art, science and new technologies help to build a collective memory about landscape changes? She will share an in-progress prototype for her latest project Tecuitlatl, a collaboration with sound artist Hüma Utku. Tecuitlatl is a hybrid algae sound installation which focuses on how living machines can tell stories of the destruction caused by the current pace of industrialisation around water ecosystems, like the algae bloom that causes aquatic life forms to suffer. The aim is to create an alternative narrative dictated by algae organisms about anthropocentric activities destroying nature.

Sarah Hermanutz shares this interest in the narrative potentials emerging from living installations. In her performances and installation environments, she is interested in the messy intermingling of human performers, old and new technologies, living creatures, and materials such as mud and water. She will share notes, sketches, writings, and material fragments of her artistic practice, as well as documentations of past experimentations with water as potent source of movement, life, awe, and deep unease.

Peluso and Hermanutz have collaborated as members of DIY Hack the Panke to present workshops such as Wetland Ecologies: Life in Transitional Zones with scientist India Mansour. On January 29 2023 they will be in conversation about the intersections and differences in their artistic approaches engaged with watery landscapes, ecological collapse and practices of maintenance and restoration.


Artist designer Fara Peluso‘s long-term research focuses on potential uses for algae as an environmental regulator, source for sustainable materials and aesthetic catalyser of biophilia. Her research and practice combine working with biotechnologists and DIY scientists with speculative and critical design to produce a myriad of innovative design and artistic solutions.

Sarah Hermanutz is a Berlin-based visual artist working at the intersections of performance, technology and ecology. Her sculptures, installations and performance experiments are preoccupation with water, mud, wetlands and amphibious life, while concerned with issues of neurodiversity, social cognition, awkward embodiments and human/nonhuman ecologies. 

In cooperation with the Vorspiel program of CTM and transmediale.