with Nenad Popov, India Mansour and James Whitehead
22 September 2019, 3-6 PM
For the last day of summer, sound and new media artist Nenad Popov and biologists India Mansour and James Whitehead (FU Plant Ecology) led a walk along the Panke and gave a series of short talks interwoven with participatory actions and interactions between visible and invisible ecological layers surrounding the Panke river. They explored themes including the human modification of urban landscapes through time, 'natural' cycles of decomposition in soils and rivers vs. the decay of man-made materials and the feedbacks between the synthetic waste and ecosystems in the city.
The research group DIY Hack the Panke, founded in January 2018, consists of a group of artists, scientists and curators promoting Citizen Science projects along the Panke River in north and central Berlin. Through interdisciplinary practice, the group aims to explore the Panke River for living organisms and critically examine its complex history of human use.
India Mansour researches microbial community structure and function in rivers and soils as a postdoc at the Free University Berlin, department Plant Ecology. She is currently focused on the emerging theoretical framework of community coalescence, which investigates the dynamics that occur when previously distinct microbial communities collide.
James Whitehead is a PhD student at the Institute of Biology, Free University Berlin. He investigates the impacts of urbanisation on microbial soil ecology.
Nenad Popov is a media anarchist whose interests lie in, or better, between art and research. The output of these processes are live cinema pieces, sound installations, film installations, weird sound making contraptions, impossible collaborations and occasional parasitism on public cultural funds.
http://www.artlaboratory-berlin.org/html/eng-DIY-Hack-the-Panke.htm