MOTHS
Current Residency group
Period: 30.09.2024 - 13.12.2024
Yujia Bian, Niel de Vries, Xiaolu Yan and Hanwen Zhang
About
The newly formed collective MOTHS sets out to trace underrepresented histories, landscapes, ecologies and materialities through storytelling. The group consists of landscape architect Yujia Bian, installation artist Niel de Vries, design researcher Xiaolu Yan and filmmaker Hanwen Zhang. Together they create material and virtual environments, spaces for encounters in the more-than-human world, images and spatial production scrutinizing digital capitalism and critical perspectives on post-socialist nostalgia.
Research approach
MOTHS seeks to commit this residency to connecting the unconnectable: to present lost or misplaced knowledge through a diversified production and engagement toolkit such as a series of archive-based artistic actions – a collection of transformed stories that forges alternative narratives. How to use the open-endedness of archives to produce an alternative kind of eco-urbanism? By way of the ghost, goes MOTHS’ speculative answer: considering ghosts as ambigious guiding threads while exploring the past and present conditions of Spreepark. How does the park live in the people’s memories, what nonhuman ghosts inhabit the park right now, and what possible futures might all this entail?
Imperfect Futures
PAST RESIDENCY GROUP
Period: 01.07.2024 - 20.09.2024
Naadira Patel, Sarah de Villiers, Manijeh Verghese and Zen Marie
About
The artist collective Imperfect Futures works at the intersections of social and artistic practice, design, architecture and film. Naadira Patel, Sarah de Villiers, Manijeh Verghese and Zen Marie are concerned with interrogating notions of power in architecture and design, in language, and in the image-world, through speculative and experimental approaches to making.
Research approach
For this residency Imperfect Futures seeks to ask questions around the links between colonialism and climate through addressing the dispossession of land, loss of biodiversity, and the containment and control of nature. Imperfect Futures, in collaboration with two external guests, Alice Clancy and Madeleine Amsler, will explore what can be learnt from this park – its past, and its present, its successes and failures – in order to speculate on possible futures, alternate-realities, dualities, provisions of escapism and phantom cities delineated from the ‘real’ world by fence and forest.
Animal Architecture Collective
Past residency groups
Period: 08.04.2024 - 21.06.2024
Cardoso Studio, Feral Partnerships & Jennifer Turpin
About
The Animal Architecture Collective is a multidisciplinary team consisting of Cardoso Studio, Jennifer Turpin and Feral Partnerships. Together they have over thirty years of experience making large scale art works and researching complex environmental issues by way of creative practice. With a passion for natural history and biodiversity, the group explores how human and animal built form can connect contemporary urban life to the undervalued and wondrous skill of animal architects.
Research approach
The Animal Architecture Collective aims to use the residency to focus on architecture made by animals. Their project asks how can multi-species architecture be observed, incorporated and appreciated in the everyday operations of this urban park? Inspired by the buildings of animals such as ants, bees, birds, fish and small mammals, the group’s ambition is to reconnect the lives of humans to the incredible artistry / making skills / creativity of other animal architects, animal artists and animal designers.
