Berl-Berl (2021 - ongoing)
Live Simulation and virtual performance stage
Berl-Berl is a living simulation of a virtual pulsating swamp, created as a collaboration between artist Jakob Kudsk Steensen, The Natural History Museum in Berlin and the singer ARCA, curated by Emma Enderby and comissioned by LAS.
All major cities are built on or near wetlands, but it is a story of environmental history that we have forgotten. The exhibition and online world Berl-Berl starts with a swamp as its protagonist – its ecosystem, history and mythologies – and pays tribute to the wetlands, the origin of the majority of urban centres. The piece was created through months of fieldwork researching the remaining wetlands of Berlin-Brandenburg. The findings were recreated in a 3D plan to create an enveloping, absolute landscape using the video game platform Unreal Engine, a constant within Steensen’s practice. Partnering with the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, local specimens were also woven from their extensive archive into the visual and acoustic world of Berl-Berl. Kudsk Steensen collaborated with sound artist Matt McCorkle and singer Arca to create the world’s soundscape. Arca’s voice morphs with environmental sounds that include those made by local amphibians.
“While the exhibition focuses on the wetlands that surround Berlin, their destiny is unfortunately tied to the same fate as the majority of swamps in the Western world that were drained in the 1700s, heavily contributing to our ever-accelerating climate emergency. In combining his images and recordings from the wetlands with research on this complex ecosystem, the artist builds a bridge between us and the history beneath our feet. Halle am Berghain becomes a gateway in which relics of the Ice Age connect to present-day wetlands, with an eye towards how we might experience nature, mediated through technology, in the future. Drawing attention to our current environmental reality, Kudsk Steensen’s method of forming landscapes through macro photogrammetry reveals a perspective that would otherwise be impossible to see or experience. It is the artist’s hope that this perspective sparks a newfound appreciation for the swamp and perhaps even a way to reimagine our role within this ecosystem that sustains us.” - Emma Enderby, curator, Berl-Berl at Halle am Berghain
Berl-Berl reveals a perspective that would otherwise be impossible to see or experience, with the hope of sparking a newfound appreciation for the swamp and to reimagine our role within this ecosystem that sustains us. It builds a universal bridge between us and the history beneath our feet. Berl-Berl is an immersive installation, an organ, an instrument and a forever changing song; a place for the undefinable - morphing, liminal and mystical.
Berl-Berl is a continously evolving project about reviving lost mythologies and perspectives on wetlands. It has so far been exhibited as a solo exhibition by Jakob Kudsk Steensen at Halle am Berghain summer 2021 , and as a solo exhibion at ARoS Museum of Art, 2022, and included a live performance by artist Pan Daijing.
More information can be found at www.berlberl.world and on LAS website here.
Selected Press
Wallpaper*
“Ambitious in scale and astonishing in detail, the resulting artwork is a marvel of VR technology.”
Dazed
”Berl-Berl is more than an exhibition, it’s an immersive experience. A metamorphosis of senses.”
Tagesspiegel
“A tunnel that creates a connection between the natural and digital worlds … an optimized version of the future.”
Video: Arte TV - Techno Club Berghain Becomes a Swamp
Interview: Killscreen - Dreaming Up A Digital Swamp
Installation
Berl-Berl: The Singing Swamp
ARoS Museum of Art
June 4th - October 23rd, 2022
At ARoS, Jakob Kudsk Steensen has adapted the work to suit the museum’s distinctive architecture: Berl-Berl transforms the building into an instrument and creates an immersive environment.
Berl-Berl comprises three sections. The first section is a whispering staircase which uses narrative poetry to invite visitors into the virtual environment. The second section is an invisible river in the form of a soundscape - poems, vocalizations and natural sounds of water and amphibians gathered through months of fieldwork intertwine as visitors progress through the large open corridor. The third and final section is the heart of Berl-Berl, emitting its pulsating beat from the dark gallery space in the form of an immersive digital simulation that invites visitors to step into the work and surrender themselves to it. Via algorithms, all screens and speakers in the exhibition communicate with each other in real time, existing on a live digital network. - Ellen Drude Langvold, curator at ARoS
The Digital Sensorium, The Vegetal Metaverse - Aliya Say
This second formation of Berl-Berl is celebrated by a new text by editor and art writer Aliya Say. Say explores the experiences of plants, the senses they use to interpret and experience the world around them, and asks the extent to which human thought is determined by our own coding. The text seamlessly navigates through a web of techno-utopianism, the separation of the corporeal and the digital, and the ways in which collaboration can push artwork beyond its own limits. Say weaves together the foundational disciplines, studies and questions that came together at the core of Berl-Berl’s creation.
Installation
Berl-Berl
Halle am Berghain
Jul 10, 2021 — Sep 26, 2021
Commissioned by Light Art Space (LAS)
Berl-Berl was originally commissioned for display in Halle am Berghain by Light Art Space, curated by Emma Enderby.
The location, Halle am Berghain, also played an instrumental part in forming Berl-Berl. An iconic space, so important to the fabric of Berlin, became a perfect counterpoint to the ecosystem Kudsk Steensen built within it. There is a kinship between the location and the artist’s environment, which is tied together by history, community and creation. Song and music play an essential role in Berl-Berl, which for the artist connects both to the exhibition’s location and to the ancient Slavic traditions of using songs and narratives to navigate the swamps at night.
The exhibition takes Berlin as a protagonist, its history as a wetland and the mythologies it holds, as well as its future. Merging times and shifting perspectives, Berl-Berl is a hybrid ode to this city founded on a swamp and the memory of this lost world.
Berl-Berl on Light Art Space website:
https://lightartspace.org/programme/jakob-kudsk-steensen
Videos: The Creation of Berl-Berl
Berl-Berl as a Site for Performance
The first live performance inside of Berl-Berl was directed by Daijing, performing her existing work Half a Name (act lll) in dialogue with Steensen’s installation, expanding on the existing sound set-up of the artwork, that uses the building as an instrument, further activating the cathedral-like space of Halle am Berghain.
What unites Daijing and Steensen’s practices is a shared understanding of singing as a form of navigating landscape as well as their interest in weaving mythologies into their work, blurring the lines between fictitious and lived realities. The collaboration marks the beginning of a new direction for Steensen's practice that focuses on performative approaches and collaborative projects. This performance was the first live event inside of the world of the artwork.
Pan Daijing, Half a Name (act III)
© Pan Daijing
Performance within the Light Art Space (LAS) commission Berl-Berl by Jakob Kudsk Steensen
Image featuring soprano Anna Davidson
Halle am Berghain, Berlin, 27 September 2021
Videography / Photography by Dzhovani
© 2021 Jakob Kudsk Steensen and Pan Daijing
Berl-Berl Book
The Berl-Berl book explores how lost mythologies, digital collaborations between science and art, swamp thinking and poetry can connect as means of collaborating and generating new worlds.
The book includes contributions from curator Emma Enderby, art historian Barbara London, scholar Alenda Chang, artist and researcher Dane Sutherland, poetry in response to the world of Berl-Berl by Precious Okoyonomon and Johannes Helden, as well as a conversation between director of the Berlin Natural History Museum Johannes Vogel, and artist Jakob Kudsk Steensen. The book is available through Buchhandlung Walter Konig internationally.
BERLBERL.WORLD
Berlberl.World
Berlberl.world is a growing platform for poetry, songs and collaborations extending from the virtual swamp. An interactive website, where five cameras journey inside the live-stream footage of the digital simulation. The guide of Triglav, a Slavic god, allows you to change perspectives while navigating landscapes between our world, the underworld and heavens. This is the first online version of the virtual world of Berl-Berl, providing access to the live-generated sonic worlds of the work and to live-physical performances and talks at different venues.
Credits
Jakob Kudsk Steensen: Berl-Berl, 2021
Live simulation.
Sound composition and music by Matt McCorkle
Featuring music by Arca
© 2021 Jakob Kudsk Steensen
Commissioned by Light Art Space (LAS)
Curated by Emma Enderby
Assistant Curator: Liz Stumpf
Creation Credits
Creator and Artist: Jakob Kudsk Steensen
Co-Producer: Elizabeth Kircher
Sound Composer: Matt McCorkle
Vocalization by Arca
3D Development and Technology Design: Erratic Animist Studio
Technical Manager: Wouter Weynants
Tech Consultant: Todd Bryant
Installation Producer: Andrea Familari
Spatial Sound Design: Lugh O’Neill
For press inquiries or exhibition bookings:
info@erraticanimist.com