Collective Experiments in Social Fermenting
Irene Agrivina | Interspecifics | Pei-Ying Lin | Cammack Lindsey | Constanza Piña Pardo | Rice Brewing Sisters Club

Following two years of social distancing and isolation Art Laboratory Berlin devotes 2022 to exploring what social possibilities can be thawed and revived. The project Hacking, Making, Thinking proposes that Doing it With Others (DIWO) can be a way of rebuilding and re-energizing damaged social relations. We are interested in an open culture based on reciprocity, cooperation and exchange on a global level. Combining Berlin-based artists and venues with artists from Latin America and Southeast Asia, this project proposes art-making as a tool for social empowerment, knowledge acquisition, collaboration, and working together. The group exhibition, an interdisciplinary conference, artist workshops and performances offer ways of ‘social fermenting’.

The project Entangled Beauty. A Perfect Marriage by Indonesian artist Irene Agrivina combines traditional farming practices, art and biology. With this installation, which is a power source, a biobattery, the artist also discusses the phenomenon of symbiosis by combining water plants with cyanobacteria. The installation Codex Virtualis by the Mexican collective Interspecifics is an aesthetic journey through an ecosystem of neural networks and algorithms. The work is an AI-art-science research framework oriented towards the image synthesis and evolution of an open-ended taxonomic collection of new-to-nature speculative life forms. Taiwanese artist and designer Pei-Ying Lin is interested in viruses, especially in those that are beneficial or crucial for human survival. Her project Virophilia has evolved both as an artist book and installation, and also exists as a “Cookbook for the 22nd Century” using foods whose genome has been altered by viruses.

The science-fiction musical installation Holobiont: Relics from the Revolution by artist Cammack Lindsey is an imaginary set inside a factory, extracting toxins from cyanobacteria for transformation into profitable products. The performance of the same name discusses the symbiosis between an intersectional working class and toxic cyanobacteria. In her installation, Khipu Chilean artist Constanza Piña Pardo recreates an Inca khipu, a prehispanic knotting method for recording information, made of cotton or camelid fiber strings that store data. Copper wires connected to 180 wool strings create an electronic circuit that amplifies and sonifies the electromagnetic changes present at the installation site. TERRESTRIAL-CELESTIAL is a new work by the South-Korean artist collective Rice Brewing Sisters Club (RBSC) realized during their 2022 Berlin residency. Basing their artistic research on social fermentation, they collaborate with local urban gardeners, explore human-nonhuman companionships, intercultural resonance in collective conversations and actions, decolonial histories, geographical and geological observations, and belief systems.

CONFERENCE
27 / 28 May 2022
Hybrid: UdK Berlin & ALB / online livestream
In cooperation with
Prof. Michelle Christensen, Prof. Florian Conradi
(UdK Berlin/ Weizenbaum Institute, TU Berlin / Einstein Center Digital Future)
More information coming soon!

WORKSHOPS
Interspecifics | Almost Nonhuman (Berlin)
7-8 May 2022

Constanza Piña Pardo | Khipu Dialogs
22 May 2022

Irene Agrivina | Soya C(o)u(l)ture/ Ecoprints on BioLeather
28 May 2022

Rice Brewing Sisters Club | Terrestrial-Celestial
4 June 2022

PERFORMANCES
Pei-Ying Lin, Soy Division | Virophilia
11 June 2022

Cammack Lindsey | Holobiont: Relics from the Revolution
9 July 2022