The memory of the world is held by the world itself and retold in human and non-human songs. In what ways is change expressed through and with the bodies of all beings: human, animal, plant and mineral? How are grief and pain, but also hopes, dreams and desires, experienced, processed and imagined on an individual and collective level?

Does the world end when a world ends? History would appear to suggest it does not: worlds end, worlds begin again, and culture encodes the signals of bygone times into the future: epic poems holding the memory of major environmental events, rituals holding long-standing learnings from agricultural practice... Yet the continuity of the world is necessarily told from the perspective of all those who endured beyond endings, conflicts or collapses—while other experiences have been systematically silenced or forgotten.

Reflecting on how ecological concerns are felt and dealt with through art, the exhibition focuses on the rhythms, repetitions and also endings that mark the ebbs and flows of our planet.

Cooking Sections examine the systems that organise the world through food. Using site-responsive installation, performance and video, they explore the overlapping boundaries between art, architecture, ecology and geopolitics. Established in London in 2013 by Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe, their practice uses food as a lens and a tool to observe landscapes in transformation.

In 2015, they initiated CLIMAVORE, a research-driven project that seeks to reimagine, through artistic interventions, the possibility to transform food systems, policy, infrastructure and culture. In a climate-disrupted, heavily industrialised landscape, CLIMAVORE offers an adaptive diet that looks at the upstream effects of food consumption as an opportunity to adapt to disrupted seasons, inserting regenerative and reparative interventions into the food chain. CLIMAVORE was initiated on the Isle of Skye, Scotland, where industrial salmon farming is causing devastating effects on the local ecosystems, from chemicals released into the water to how artificial salmon-colouring feed is turning all kinds of species salmon. Salmon: Feed Chains invites audiences to walk in circles to experience an audio piece that reproduces the infinite, circular movement of farmed salmon, whose life is trapped in a circular cage in polluted waters.

Cooking Sections
Salmon: Feed Chains (2022)
Performative installation, 20 min.

Working with soft and malleable materials, the practice of Barcelona- born and based artist Eva Fàbregas embraces tactile engagement, physical intimacy, sensorial relations and multiple forms of somatic experimentation with and through objects. She considers touch as a primary source of knowledge. Her work belongs to the realm of the somatic, the experiential, the guttural and the unnamable. It aims to fully inhabit the world of the senses, invoking a pre-linguistic stage to imagine other possible bodies, other ways of feeling, caring and being in the world.

Exudates, her new series, presents a new step in the artist’s on- going work with haptic visions and sensorial encounters. With darker, yet still bodily colours, her sculptures appear in purples, browns, rusts and copper tones. They are now wrinkled, with small and large folds that resemble the ways the skin and organs respond to tension and release. Arranged as various sets that are distributed around the space of the Nordwestbahnhof, the forms appear and reappear throughout the whole exhibition space. Exudates constitute a multitude of corporeal entities where the human, the nonhuman and the posthuman challenge their own boundaries, definitions and forms

Eva Fàbregas
Exudates (2024)
Air, latex, elastic fabric, inflatable balls, variable dimensions

Sofia Jernberg is an experimental singer and composer born in Ethiopia and living in Stockholm. Her work focuses on unconventional techniques and sounds such as non-verbal vocalisation, split tones, toneless singing and distortion. She has received several commissions for compositions and recently premiered Dreams of our Future for children’s choir, soprano, voice and chamber ensemble at the Ultima Festival Oslo 2022 and a new composition for the Ensemble Contrechamps at the Borealis Festival 2023 in Bergen.

Songs for the Changing Seasons, the new sound work commissioned for the exhibition, welcomes visitors through the hall leading to the Papageienhalle, where the exhibition takes place. The piece expresses how human presence enforces itself on the Earth, manifested through a sonic dialogue between human and animal sounds. It ends with an almost inhuman tone, with a penetrating high whistle pitch emitted in a cave close to the ocean, were water dripping from the roof of cave, the wind and ocean waves can be heard

Sofia Jernberg
Songs for the Changing Seasons (2024)
Sound installation, 20 min.

“I am a sculptor who explores the human-animal relationship. My perspective on this subject influences my artistic practice, which is fundamentally conceptual. My way of working in the studio is pre- dominantly affective and processual. From the beginning, I was influenced by conversations with animal liberation activists, by a study  of animal rights literature and current debates on the topic. [...] I discovered Styrofoam as a material for my artistic practice in college.  The fact that Styrofoam is a (hu)man-made petroleum-based plastic seemed to make sense because it says something about the present. Since I work figuratively, life-size was important so that the viewer is at eye level with an animal or human figure. The light weight of the material makes it possible to work on a larger scale. About half of the material I use, I get from construction sites or from leftovers. [...] There is an additional reason why I like working with Styrofoam. Most animals have fur, feathers, scales or an exoskeleton, and depicting that sculpturally is a challenge. Every living thing moves almost constantly, and motion blur and vividness go together. Likewise, there is a blurriness when working with Styrofoam because of the materiality. Styrofoam is, first of all, block material and on closer inspection it has a smallest visible unit, namely small spheres. The fact that the naked eye can see the smallest unit has a poetic quality. I like to imagine that they are atoms. I look for the productive interplay of these two blurs, the granularity of the material and the living things that emerge from it. And perhaps most crucially: I understand my works not as objects, but as subjects.”

—Lin May Saeed

Through a consistent formal language, a profound ethical stance, a broad knowledge of fables and history and with humour, the work of the late German artist Lin May Saeed narrates the subjugation and liberation of animals, creating a new iconography of interspecies solidarity.

Lin May Saeed 
Bee Relief/The Liberation of Animals from their Cages VII (2008)
Styrofoam, acrylic paint, steel, transparent paper, wood, 108×143.5×18.5 cm

Sea Dragon Relief (2021)
Styrofoam, steel, acrylic paint, wood, 173×268×51.5 cm
Courtesy of Collection Silvia Fiorucci, Monaco

Trained as a painter, Thao Nguyen Phan was born in Ho Chi Minh City, where she lives. She is a multimedia artist whose practice encom- passes video, painting and installation. Drawing from literature, phi- losophy and daily life, Phan observes ambiguous issues in social conventions, nature and history, which she conveys through drawing, storytelling and the creation and exhibition of found and created objects.

Becoming Alluvium is a moving image—as the artist calls all her filmic works—that narrates the naturecultural history of the Mekong River across recollections, legends and representations. In it, the artist brings together fact and fiction, documentation and portrait, ecology and mythology, materials and narratives that concern human and wild lives to address the context of her homeland in Vietnam while echoing wider systems and ecosystems. Articulated in three chapters, Becoming Alluvium narrates episodes of destruction, reincarnation and renewal that take place in and around the Mekong River and the life it fosters. Accompanying it, Ode to the Margins is a specifically commissioned, handmade work that responds to the social, political and natureculture of the Vietnam Central Highlands. The bamboo wreath was originally produced as a Christmas decoration in the Saint  Mary’s Cathedral in Kon Tum province, central highland of Vietnam. The cathedral was constructed entirely in wood in a mixture of gothic and vernacular style and was completed in 1918. Since its inauguration, the church has been the main worship site for the Bana Indigenous community and various ethnic groups in the area. In the gallery, the bamboo thread is hung as a wall piece, suggesting how local material such as bamboo and Indigenous craftsmanship, initially used for pagan rituals and traditional ceremonies had been adopted and translated into a new language in support of the new faith.

Thao Nguyen Phan 
Becoming Alluvium (2019)
Video HD, 16:40 min.
Produced by the Han Nefkens Foundation

Ode to the Margins (2024)
Bamboo wreath, bells, variable dimensions