MOTHS

Yujia Bian, Niel de Vries, Xiaolu Yan und Hanwen Zhang

WINTER 30.09.2024 - 13.12.2024

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?