Tom Albrecht
Transformation (2022)
Object, wood, waste cardboard, solar panel from advertising, paint, glue, plastic

An extinguished wood fire, an oil drum and a solar panel are arranged rising on a staircase. The work presents the phases of man’s energy extraction from nature. Gone are the pre-industrial days with the open wood fire on the left. We are in the fossil phase in the middle and need to enter renewable energy production on the right because of the acute climate crisis. Through our use of fossil fuels, we have caused a climate crisis that threatens humanity. The transformation consists of replacing fossil energy production with renewable energy.

STREETWARE saved item
MHLD – Multifunctional Hybrid Laundro Drive (2021)
clothes horse | stroller (found objects)

STREET-SHOPPPING: through the streets of the city to your own style! Berlin’s most sustainable fashion label STREETWARE saved item offers the most diverse selection of fashion brands! Online shopping at Zalando was yesterday. Discover plus-size, lace-up blouses and tank tops, baby’s first dress or baggy jeans, where the city is at its most urban – on the banks of gutters, the seams between public and private space. Maneuver a mobile clotheshorse with us at the intersections of consumption and sustainability, along life on the road. Ask about the people whose shells lie on the ground and investigate the traces of identity in the urban. Get inspired by stripped textile covers and pant legs. Roll around the houses with us. Enjoy the flow of circular living! STREETWARE saved item makes fashion sustainable and accessible! For everyone! For all!

Jana Charl
Electric Poweress (2021)
Mixed media (found object: metal and wood electric box, gesso, spray and acrylic paint, string and screws).

The disruption of routine creates an opening for new ideas that lead to transformation. I see routine as symmetry in patterns and asymmetry as a means to disrupt that order. By reinventing a discarded electrical box that was destined for a landfill, I am trying to raise awareness and rethink energy sources.

María X. Fernández
LEX (2021)
Book intervenes with plaster

A book belonging to a legal encyclopedia, with all its complex connotations, transformed into a piece reminiscent of the grooved drum module of a Roman column. This recalls the Greek architectural creation, which in turn recalls in stone the shaft of the most primitive wooden column. Evolution. The allusion to the fragment of a petrified tree closes the circle, the paper that makes up the book again seems to take the form of a trunk.

Mariel Gottwick
The extinction of the automotive species (2022)
Installation with photographs and text printouts

Documented through photographs, it is shown how the “decomposing” force of nature affects the extinction of the “automotive species” – a transformation takes place in which the car transforms into the landscape. The text panels show the IUCN World Conservation Union’s definition for classifying an automobile species as “extinct.” With a few changes made by Mariel Gottwick (marked by italics) to the original text, the automobile is elevated to an endangered species. For some people, the thought that individual transport could “die out” may pose a greater threat than the idea that biodiversity on our planet could continue to be reduced to extreme levels. However, the prospect of a traffic turnaround that would take care of itself would be a welcome future prospect for others.

Stephan Groß
Small Is Beautiful (2022)
Collage, print media

The collage combines an image of a festive university event with a photo of a traffic accident. The driver of a van overlooked a height restriction when entering the tunnel. Through the cut, onlookers leaning over the parapet join the celebratory speakers. The title “Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered” refers to a collection of essays of the same name published in 1973 by British economist E F Schumacher calling for small, appropriate technologies and policies as a superior alternative to the mainstream “bigger is better” ethos. The blind belief in growth must be transformed, a sensitivity for moderate and adapted solutions must be developed, otherwise we could end up like the driver who is denied passage through the tunnel.

Alexa Helbig
One thousand mushrooms (2022)
unfired clay

Over millions of years, deprived of oxygen, cut off from the decomposing power of fungi, dead life became toxic petroleum. What is not decomposed becomes poison: physically as well as psychologically. In the ancient books, the number 1,000 stands for the uncountable. Let us countless human beings together, with long breath and diligence, work through our collective trauma of destruction, and, like mushrooms, transform ourselves back into a fruitful existence on this planet.

Mary Corporal
Change (2022)
Experimental video, animated charcoal drawing and digital animation

I stand with my bicycle on our planet, which seems an endless asphalt road. At my feet is Erich Fried’s motto: “Whoever wants the world to remain as it is, does not want it to remain”. When I start cycling, the earth starts moving and a transformation is set in motion. Animated images are created that suggest alternative energies and evolve into breathing life forms. The world is revived and the asphalt planet begins to bloom! The term CHANGE can be interpreted here in two meanings: the change in our environment and the change we must make to overcome the climate crisis. With this work I try to make clear that we have to set ourselves in motion if we want to change the situation. If we do this by bicycle instead of by car, we are already on the right track.

Lilia Limiyan and Katherina Sadovsky
A0000000001000AA011 (2021)
Video, 3D, CGI, sound

The project consists of six videos with CGI graphics and 3D technologies. Different characters are depicted who are no longer ordinary people, but people of the future (posthumans). They are equipped with special implants and an additional organ system. This allows them to survive in the modern world, where many environmental disasters have led to excessive CO2 emissions and global warming. Viruses have destroyed the usual biological organism and forced it to adapt to modern conditions. 3D organs move and pulse in time with a person and respond to their emotional and physical state. Technological advances have enabled posthumans to survive in the most difficult conditions, reanimate a dead organism, and grow food using 3D printing technologies.

Petra Lehnardt-Olm
Net time // Berlin # 03 2020 (2020 )
Photography as pigment print on paper, edition 3

In the limited close-up, the founding industry visually combines with an e-car. It is connected to the mains. Nature is symbolically “locked out” by the old hall roof. A big empty space that needs to be filled.

Graham Livingston and Marina Resende
tendergarden.io (2022)
Installation (server, garden beds, electricity meters)

The garden beds in the gallery bind the CO2 emissions produced by the running server. However, ejection and binding occur in radically different temporalities. The only website hosted on the server, tendergarden.io, calculates and logs in real time the carbon footprint between the garden and the server. The CO2 economy that has emerged in recent decades seeks to invent a methodology to link economic production with its biochemical impact on the environment. The work stages such conversions between data, energy, carbon, and biochemical work, thereby raising questions about current CO2 calculation models. The ecological footprint of the digital economy materializes in the work. More broadly, tendergarden.io questions the effectiveness of the logic of financial products in relation to CO2 policy.

Jila Svicevic
Green Hearts (2019-2022)
Clay and earth seed bomb

The main focus of the Green Hearts project is to bring more attention to our environment, positively impact ecosystems, promote sustainability, and support collective well-being. Given our alienated urban lifestyle, it’s easy to lose our healthy connections to it. Seed bombs are useful tools for improving wildlife habitat and conserving seed effectively. Maintaining genetic diversity of seeds is essential for adaptation to climate change and serves the survival of various species, including ourselves. The seed bombs are being developed to restore the human-plant relationship and bring back valuable knowledge to catalyze faster systemic change toward understanding and respecting our biosphere.

Tom Albrecht + Stephan Groß
Get Ass Up (2022)
Performance

Speech performance with guitar,bird whistles, baking tray, singing bowl and deer antlers Tom Albrecht: text, voice, sounds and Stephan Groß: guitar. The audience is impressively motivated as a contribution to the transformation of society with proposals and brisk speech to become active against the climate crisis.