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 artist and researcher Margherita Pevere for an artist talk.

What does it mean to be vulnerable — and what may leaks tell us about bodies and environments in posthuman terms? Dr Margherita Pevere has addressed these questions through bioart and performance. Ash, slugs, cellulose-producing bacteria, bioreagents, drawing, writing: diverse materials constellate her artistic research and come together in celebration of leaky matters and relations. Alongside discussing the artworks Wombs and Lament, the artist will guide us through a nuanced discussion in feminist and queer terms about materiality, vulnerability, and the entanglements of life and death. What emerges are two concepts — ‘arts of vulnerability’ and ‘poetics of uncontainability’ — which, while coming from the arts, may have something to say about these very unstable times.

Margherita Pevere: Symbiont Map, Drawing

Margherita Pevere: Wombs_W02, photo Maja Bacic

Dr Margherita Pevere is an internationally acknowledged artist and researcher working across biological arts and performance with a distinctive visceral signature. Her inquiry hybridises biotechnology, ecology, queer and death studies to create arresting installations and performances that trail today’s ecological complexity. Her body of work is a blooming garden crawling with genetically edited bacteria, cells, sex hormones, microbial biofilm, blood, slugs, burned soil and decomposing remains. With Marco Donnarumma and Andrea Familari, she co-founded the artists’ group Fronte Vacuo. She is member of the Finnish Bioart Society, of The Queer Death Studies Network and of The Posthumanities Hub. www.margheritapevere.com, https://frontevacuo.com