Singing leads the enfolding Berl-Berl visions, travelling across the digital layers and generated in real-time dimensions of alive environment, meshed bioparticles, pulsating bodies, metamorphosis of vegetation or consumption of petrified insects. For Steensen, the singing swamp is a semi-mystical space of indefinable metamorphosis. Self-identifying as a transgender mutant, Arca is celebrated for her creaturely ability to shape-shift, which can manifest intense kinship to the dynamism of the swamp, as in Steensen’s view, she “negates stagnation and embodies transformation and fluidity”. Poetics of her singing follow Steensen’s intention to “overcome loss and embrace new worlds emerging from things that disappear and decay”. Influenced earlier in the singer’s career by nostalgic carols of her native Venezuelan farmers, Arca involves similar melodic techniques to expresses vocally the ghostly swamp-dwelling of uncanny Pagan Slavs of Brandenburg. Possibilities of virtual world-building and storytelling within Berl-Berl, inspired by cosmologies of ancient Slavic paganism and environmental storytelling of nonlinear videogames, find their momentum in the analogue medium of Arca’s singing. Media technologies have become in Steensen’s art installation a material form of these trans-human and co-species involvements. With this approach, the only way to get to know anything about nonhumans is to initiate mutualistic actions of humans with nonhumans. Perhaps nonhuman life forms can be understood by humans only through their attempts to perform together with nonhumans.

Berl-Berl, Jakob Kudsk Steensen, Halle am Berghain (2021) © Timo Ohler Thus, understanding vegetation through a song, macro photogrammetric 3D simulation of Spreewald’s fauna and flora, achieved with hundreds of photographs of each piece of mud or fungus provided by Berlin’s Museum fur Naturkunde, is narrated by the haunting voice of Arca, merged with spatial sound design by Matt McCorkle and local amphibians.īerl-Berl (2021). Intriguingly, Steensen also brings to life the extinct human cultures through features of their oral traditions of swamp songs, which are said (according to the research by Sabina Asmus, who interviewed some of the very few descendants of Sorbian Slavic tribes) to help to navigate the natural landscape through storytelling. Unearthing the story of Berlin’s origin from Slavic swamp dwellings, Steensen attempts not only to re-animate the swamp as hypercomplex ecology of nonhuman life and expose its crucial importance for providing ancient, diverse habitats as well as clean water within central European environments – importance comparable to rainforests or coral reefs in tropical areas. It reconstructs unique cultural imagination erased in the process of historical extermination of Slavic Pagans by Germanic Christians between rivers Elbe (Laba) and Odra (Oder), a founding event of what is now the capital city of Germany. This trans-cultural etymology was researched extensively by the specialist on swamp and technology, Dr Dane Sutherland (operating via excellent mixed reality IG: Most Dismal Swamp), who supported the concept of Berl-Berl with his background report ‘View from the Swamp’. It references the early mediaeval Slavic settlements in the wetlands by river Spree (particularly Pankow and Kopenick), which during the late Middle Ages were transformed into Germanic town Berlin. In the exhibition title Berl-Berl, Berl is an old Slavic word for ‘swamp’. According to Steensen’s approach, technology allows ecological insight and flourishing rather than domination over nature.

Instead, perceiving simulations as extensions of ecosystems, he engages with advanced technology as a sophisticated process of re-connection to base materialities of life. Employing state of art simulation tools from video games industry, such as Unreal game engine and AI algorithms that assist the evolution of vegetative biomorphs or animation of light, Steensen is not interested in the spectacle of high-tech in itself. Infamous for its techno/fetish club nights, Berghain has been transformed by Jakob Kudsk Steensen on the 10th of June into a multi-channel projection space of digital 3D swamp, which reflects its glistening image on the synthetic floor surfaces and interlaces with rough concrete textures of the interior. Berl-Berl, Jakob Kudsk Steensen, Halle am Berghain (2021) © Timo OhlerĪn obsolete soviet power plant in East Berlin has become a multimedia vehicle to the city’s origin this summer.

Unique swamp song