PERMEABLE BODIES

Art Laboratory Berlin welcomes you to our new series Permeable Bodies (May – November 2023) with artistic and feminist explorations of embodiment and identity in flux, as well as an investigation of our interconnection and interaction with the environment around us. With reading groups, talks, workshops and podcasts we propose a net of narratives of permeability to encompass a poetic (post)natural history of being woman throughout 2023. It is our great pleasure to welcome an art, design and science trio who have been collaborating in the art science research project DIY Hack the Panke.

Together the artist Sarah Hermanutz, the designer Fara Peluso and the biologist India Mansour continue their ongoing workshop collaborations along the Panke River, with an introduction to ecofeminism and hydrofeminism as both academic theories and as lived artistic and scientific practice. Guided by this framework, the workshop will take a special interest in the algal life of the Panke. This often invisible part of the ecosystem will be explored on the riverbanks with site-specific phenomenological, meditative sensory encounters and sample taking, followed by indoor ocular encounters using microscopy and DIY biology practices to observe living algal samples, grown in the laboratory from Panke river samples gathered in the previous year’s workshop. Practices of cultivating and studying these life forms as a form of care and environmental engagement will also be discussed.

Flowing together formats of reading groups, meditative sensory experience, DIY and traditional methods of scientific inquiry, and discussions both affirmative and critical, this workshop invites fluid practices of connection and care between and beyond humans, ‘staying with the trouble’ in laboratory practice with algae that defy categorisations of ‘living’ or ‘dead’, and embracing the unease of incomplete, in-progress ways of watery knowing and being.

Visual artist Sarah Hermanutz works 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.  She is a co-founding member of the Berlin-based art-science-technology community Lacuna Lab (since 2015), and the art-science research group DIY Hack the Panke (since 2018) with whom she creates workshops, performances, and installations engaged with Berlin’s Panke river.

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.

India Mansour, postdoctoral scholar and lecturer at the Free University Berlin (Institute of Biology, Plant Ecologies | Rillig Lab), researches how microbial communities shape and are shaped by their environment and their interactions. She completed her PhD in River Science in Germany and the UK, investigating soil and river microbial ecology. This, in part, involved conceptual development of the community coalescence concept: collisions of previously disparate microbial communities. Her current research focuses on communities within matter-closed, energy-open systems, known as microbial biospherics. India is a member of DIY Hack the Panke, an interdisciplinary artistic research group exploring the Panke River.