Berl-Berl Field Guide

Jakob Kudsk Steensen’s work centres on Berlin’s history as a wetland and the mythologies it holds. The artist shifts between the analogue and the digital, new technologies and scientific discourse, futuristic landscapes and complex soundscapes. He creates wholly captivatingexperiences that reorient our perception of time and space.

Triglav – a pagan deity – appears in Berl-Berl in the form of a great tree. Within the mythology, the deity is three-headed, representing three distinct dimensions of Slavic cosmology: Prav (Heaven), Yav (Earth) and Nav (Underworld). These three dimensions structure the journey through the work: from heaven across the earth into the underworld.

Berl-Berl places Berlin at its centre – its origins and its past as well as our 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.

Long before the swamps were drained, people in the region had their own ways of living with them. Songs were essential to ancient wetland culture, used to navigate the swamp and to share stories and swamp mythologies. Within Sorbian mythology especially, water-spirits, such as Vodyanoy, appear as frog-like entities, extensions or embodiments of the swamp, both guiding and deceiving their human cohabitors. Berl-Berl is reviving wetland sensibilities and perspectives more akin to ancient communities and their deep connection to the swamp.

‘I dreamed of a place where the songs came from the earth’

— Precious Okoyomon, Sky Song for Berl-Berl

At the same time, the work draws on Romanticism: Berl-Berl is at once beautiful and nostalgic – drawing from romantic or classical ideas of a lost Eden – but at the same time an illusion, a mystical fantasy of an ecosystem.

‘… the city’s iconic ‘Museum Island’ situated along the river Spree stands on structural wooden posts.’

Swamps were seen as antithetical to this order – dangerous, chaotic, uncivilised and therefore in need of control, destroyed under the banner of progress. And yet: Although wetlands account for only one per cent of the planet’s ecosystems, they account for ten per cent of its biodiversity and play an important role in reducing carbon and acting as a filter for freshwater.

Kudsk Steensen is particularly interested in amphibians, protagonists within Berl-Berl. In many societies the archetypal animals are symbols of wetlands and ecosystems. The artist’s interest in frogs extends from their ancient importance to a darker contemporary reality – thousands of amphibians are disappearing across the world, namely due to a fungus spread by humans. Here, the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin introduces ten species from Berlin’s wetlands, from the dipper to the ostrich fern. Many of them have already found a new virtual home in Berl-Berl.

The swamp has always served as a mental model. Simultaneously solid land and fluid water yet also neither. They resist the categories through which we order the world. Philosopher Bruno Latour argues that it is in the defining of such distinctions – such as between nature and culture – that the seeds of our climate emergency were sowed. Berl-Berl asks how nature, humanity and culture can be re-entwined.

‘We live and breathe in the space that decomposition leaves behind’

— Merlin Sheldrake, quoted by Emma Enderby

Kudsk Steensen has described this as ‘touching time’: seeing the swamp as a space that melds time through the knitting of life and decay.‘We don’t live on a linear timeline, something that happens in 50 years might be directly related to something that happened yesterday.