Ponds as Spaces of Art and Science
Exploring Berlin’s urban ponds through artistic and scientific perspectives
At first glance, ponds appear still. Unlike flowing rivers or tidal lagoons, these small bodies of water seem almost motionless. Yet beneath their surfaces, intricate relationships unfold between fish, invertebrates, bacteria, pollutants – and human communities.
In this ARL Lunch Talk, artist Margherita Pevere and environmental anthropologist Germán Joosten invite us to explore Berlin’s urban ponds through the perspectives of both art and science.
Over the past year, Margherita Pevere has been artist in residence at the Jeschke Lab for Ecological Novelty at Freie Universität Berlin as part of POUNDER – Pollution in Urban Ponds, Eco-evolutionary Dynamics, and Ecosystem Resilience, working closely with researchers from different disciplines.
This collaboration has resulted in Ode, a new artwork that imagines Berlin’s urban ponds as enigmatic spaceships. Combining metabarcoding and bioinformatics, custom AI, living samples, music, glass, garments and sound, the work explores ponds as complex ecological worlds.
But the exchange between art and science worked in both directions. The collaboration also opened up new questions for the scientific project: How do we experience and conceptualise freshwater environments? Whose stories – human and non-human – become part of our understanding of them? And what changes when ecological problems are approached through different forms of knowledge and inquiry?
Building on their experience within POUNDER, Margherita Pevere and Germán Joosten will discuss what artistic and scientific approaches can contribute to understanding urban pond ecologies – and what can emerge when different ways of knowing meet.
Registration
Please register here by 28 October. You'll receive the Webex Link to the Lunch Talk in the evening of 28 October or in the morning of 29 October.
