Colour Topographies

Site-specific colours combine colour and location, as a type of topographical perception through local colour. What colour producing plants and minerals can be found in this place, and how can they be perceived and understood through colour? Plant knowledge is knowledge of place. The project explores topics of plant blindness, urban ecology, mapping, bio-invasiveness, and migration as well as Zero Waste, Queer Ecologies, and Interspecies Cooperation.

This project has resulted in site-specific colour charts that record, map, and characterise a place; including the fact that, depending on the soil conditions – this also includes pollution and man-made soil compositions – different colours and tones are produced. The same applies to the water composition, acidity, and mineral content.

Photo: Käthe Wenzel

Photo: Käthe Wenzel

Photo: Käthe Wenzel

During production, processes such as fermentation, oxidation and modification by iron or copper oxide, and shifting the pH value bring out colours, and intensify and stabilise them. For the exhibition a series of charts has been created for 12 locations in (initially) Berlin, over the course of a year and through all phases of plant cycles.

The workshop Hidden Colours. Inkmaking with Plants in Urban Space by Käthe Wenzel took place in July 2024 and some of the results will also be displayed in the exhibition.

Käthe Wenzel is an artist and researcher working with hybrid bodies, queer ecologies, and the structures of urban consumption. She provides machines and survival kits for the navigation of hegemonic culture and explores the knowledge of plants. Wenzel is a professor of aesthetic practice at the European University Flensburg, and she was a Fulbright Exchange Scholar in New York and a Senior Fellow at IFK/Vienna.

She has received numerous grants and scholarships, including the Stiftung Kulturfonds, Böll Foundation, NRW Stipendium Kunst-Wissenschaft-Wirtschaft, Karin-Abt-Straubinger-Stiftung, Künstlerdorf Schöppingen and others. Her works are represented in numerous public collections, including the Deutsches Technikmuseum Berlin, Museum Weserburg Bremen, LWL Museum für Kunst und Kultur – Westfälisches Landesmuseum, Roemer-Pelizaeus-Museum Hildesheim, Museum Oldenburg, Mittelrheinmuseum, the Künstlerbuch collection at Telavi State University, Georgia, and others.
www.kaethewenzel.de
www.globalupfitters.com