PRESENTATION: Jakob Kudsk Steensen-Berl Berl

Jakob Kudsk Steensen is concerned with how imagination, technology and ecology intertwine. His works range from immersive VR ecosystems to mixed reality installations bridging physical and digital worlds, which invite audiences to enter new ecological realities. Kudsk Steensen collaborates with NGO’s, residencies, scientists and artists from different fields and ventures on excursions where he collects organic material, which is digitised and converted into digital worlds with 3D scanners, photogrammetry, satellite data and computer game software.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: ARoS Aarhus Art Museum Archive

Inspired by ecology-oriented science fiction and conversations with biologists and ethnographers, his projects are ultimately virtual simulations populated by mythical beings existing in radical ecological scenarios. His work “Berl-Berl” is a song for the udefinable – morphing, liminal and mystical. Berl-Berl mourns what is lost and embraces what is new. The exhibition is located at ARoS’ level 1 where Jakob Kudsk Steensen makes use of the entire gallery space, the open space in front of the gallery, and the staircase leading down to it to create a total experience. The architecture has been entirely given over to the virtual and sensory universe of the work where large-scale LED screens divide up the space. The virtual swamp revives ancient European mythologies and perspectives, inviting people to appreciate the complexities and beauties of swamps around them. The work was formed during a year immersed in swamps around Berlin, collaborating with the singer ARCA, the Natural History Museum of Berlin, artist and researcher Dane Sutherland and Linguist Dr. Sabine Asmus. What emerged are the mythologies, songs and lost languages of the area and their relation to time, transformation, and landscape. To form the piece via the method of macro photogrammetry, hundreds of images are collected of a single object, such as a leaf or a patch of mud. A dialogue is then created between the physical and the virtual, building a 3D generative immersive landscape using the video game platform Unreal Engine. Berl-Berl creates a system of words with mythologies and songs to govern how the virtual wetland mutates, from scientific and pseudo-documentary perspectives to hypnotic constellations. Jakob Kudsk Steensen spent months researching the remaining wetlands of Berlin-Brandenburg, creating an archive of images using a method of macro photogrammetry in which he takes hundreds of images of a single object such as a leaf or patch of mud. Kudsk Steensen renders his findings in a 3D plan to create an immersive, absolute landscape using the video game platform Unreal Engine, a constant within his practice. Partnering with the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, he also wove local specimens from their extensive archive into the visual and acoustic world of Berl-Berl. As songs were essential to ancient wetland culture and used to navigate the swamp and to share its mythologies, Kudsk Steensen collaborated with sound artist Matt McCorkle and singer Arca to create the world’s soundscape. Arca’s voice morphs with environmental sounds that include those made by local amphibians. “Berl-Berl” is not only an image of the wetlands — it holds the memories of its past mythologies. Before it was drained, this saturated landscape proved ideal for the settlement of Slavic communities. This history, notably Sorbian folklore, permeates the work’s narrative wherein a Triglav, a deity, appears as a great tree. The artist connects the mythology of this three-headed deity representing three dimensions of Slavic cosmology—Prav (Heaven), Yav (Earth) and Nav (Underworld) — to his understanding of the swamp. In “Berl-Berl” the ecology is also a Triglav, it moves from undergrowth and fungi to water, leaves, and trees and sky—an entire, holistic landscape. In combining his images and recordings from the wetlands with research on ecosystems, the artist builds a bridge between us and the history beneath our feet. Halle am Berghain becomes a gateway in which relics of the Ice Age connect to present-day wetlands, drawing attention to our current environmental reality. Kudsk Steensen reveals a perspective that would otherwise be impossible to see or experience with the hope of sparking a newfound appreciation for the swamp and to reimagine our role within this ecosystem that sustains us.

Photo: Jakob Kudsk Steensen, Berl-Berl , 2021, Live simulation still, Commissioned by Light Art Space (LAS), © Jakob Kudsk Steensen, Courtesy the artist

Info: ARoS Aarhus Art Museum, Aros Allé 2, Aarhus, Denmark, Duration: 4/6-23/10/2022, Days & Hoours: Tue-Fri 10:00-21:00, Sat-Sun 10:00-17:00, www.aros.dk