P A C K E T – S O U P

An exhibition by SAVVY Contemporary Richardstr. 43/44, 12055 Berlin-Neukölln

Opening of the exhibition: 5th May 2012, 7 pm

Exhibition opening hours: 6th May – 2nd June 2012, thuesday – sunday, 4 – 8 pm Performance by Nathalie Fari: 12th May, 6 pm Performance by Yingmei Duan and Cai Qing: 19th May, 7 pm

Finissage: 2nd June 2012, 7 pm

Curator Claudia Lamas Cornejo

Artists Jan Kuck (DE), Pamela Longobardi (US), Steve McPherson (UK) Nathalie Fari (BR),Yingmei Duan (CH), Cai Qing (CH) Susanne Richter (DE), Werner Boote (AT)

Art Director Dr. Bonaventure Soh Ndikung

INDEX

4 BONAVENTURE SOH NDIKUNG Parallax or the Luxury of a shift in perspectives 6 CLAUDIA LAMAS CORNEJO Cloaca Maxima 11 KATHARINA FINKE PACKET - SOUP – The Journalist Perspective 14 HILLA STEINERT A Dress for Eternity

ARTISTS

17 JAN KUCK The Plastic Dimension 23 PAMELA LONGOBARDI The Social Life of Pam Longobardi’s Drifters Project 27 The Ocean is communicating through the Materials of our own Making 30 STEVE MCPHERSON Saltwater Soup 34 The Archeology in Art 37 NATHALIE FARI Incarnating Bodies40 The Decelerated Performance

44 WERNER BOOTE The Plastic Planet 49 SUSANNE RICHTER wrapping (Wrapping) 54 YINGMEI DUAN AND CAI QING The Discovery of Slowness

55 BIOGRAPHIES 58 IMPRINT

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BONAVENTURE SOH NDIKUNG Parallax or the Luxury of a shift in perspectives

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PARALLAX OR THE LUXURY OF A SHIFT IN PERSPECTIVES

The art shown at SAVVY Contemporary can not afford to deal with vacuity, superficiality and shallowness.This of course doesn’t imply (re)presenting reality as it is, but using all available poetic, fiction, utopia to deal with the real and unreal. In all exhibitions we have shown in the last years, we seek to combine finest aesthetics within depth research, savvy content, decent approach to cur-rent socio-political issues, as well as social awareness and impact. Thus is exactly the case with the exhibition PACKET-SOUP, an exhibition on our responsibility to-wards our environment and questions of sustainability, whereby the „plastic“ issue serves as an allegory for all that has gone off track with regards to environmental, economic, and social responsibility.In the last years, a lot more lobbying has been going on, such that the issues of sustainability and a new found awareness have gripped our societies, especially in the Western world. But that is only the one side of the coin. Here comes the scientific term, parallax, into play, which seen in a philosophic/geometric sense will imply the apparent change in the direction of an ob-ject, caused by a change in observational position that provides a new line of sight. If we force ourselves to change our observational position, so as to get a new line of sight, what do we see? The other side of the coin is thus the less talked about consequences of the envi-ronmental awareness of the West towards the rest of the world. Great efforts are made in the West to get rid of wastes e.g. old TVs, comput-ers, mobile phones, refrigerators etc. that are harmful to the environment, because of the dangerous FCKW and other chemicals they do contain. But where does all this waste go to? In 2005 about 7,5 million tonnes of

waste especially plastic waste were officially exported from Europe to China. Unofficially, more than 70 million tonnes of waste are exported from the West to Africa yearly, a very lucrative business that is controlled by the so-called „waste-mafia“ in cooperation with Western and Non-Western governments. For example in Africa a kind of „recycling“ is done, ¼ of the waste gets into use and ¾ is disposed of, mostly by burning the waste. The well known example of “Probo Koala” case also comes to mind. In 2006, a British company, Trafigura, deposed hundreds of barrels of some poisonous waste in Abidjan, Ivory Coast. As a consequence, 15 people died after inhaling poisonous gases and 100.000 peo-ple fell sick. Those are the official scores! The unofficial scores are the millions of people who fall sick, after in-haling the gases from the burnt plastic waste.

Parallax! Sustainability? Awareness? If we shift from our observational position in the West we indeed might see that our great efforts to protect our environment in the West might be to the detriment of others in the Non-West

PACKET-SOUP is a starting point within which we look at this issues from various angles. We do not claim to have solutions from problems, but we claim to afford for the luxury of shifting perspectives. We invite all to join us in a discussion process, using the best weapons at our disposal: art.

Dr. Bonaventure Soh NdikungArt Director and Founder SAVVY Contemporary

CLAUDIA LAMAS CORNEJO Cloaca Maxima

“Civilization is waste. Cloaca Maxima.” Jacques Lacan

Immersion

Dealing with garbage, especially with plastic waste in the context of art is a return of the foundations of a cultural-philosophical discourse. Cultural philosophy as a discipline is inherently a creative profession. This disciplin imposes itself the aim of pointing the way and taking a leading role for societal issues by confronting itself again and again with new terms and definitions. The concept of garbage-art is a paradox. It does not take waste as worthless or as a particularly valuable rest, but as a material that, just because it seems wrong, failed or worn out can unleash unpredictable dynamics. The energetic substance of (plastic-) waste drives its collectors and causes both irritation as well as admira-tion. This is reminiscent of Adorno’s utopia of the crum-bling world´s need of a reconciliation of their opposites (Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialektik, 1966): Gar-bage-art is dominated by the interplay between art/life, aesthetics/ existence, poetry/ theory, waste/ concept, presence/ absence, grandeur/ disgust.

Drifting

The reception of this kind of art requires an approach outside of the habitual, across all genres and speciali-zations. The question if art from or with waste is art or non-art can be answered as unsatisfactory, just like the

question of beauty or uglyness, good or bad, true or false. It lies as art in its whole dimension, in the eye of the beholder. What counts for art from waste or with waste is the immediate and direct, the familiar of our everyday life and world, which is undergoing a trans-formation and becomes something new, different and even scary. The process of drifting between two opposite pooles (beeing waste and not jet beeing art) concludes in a perspective of art contemplation: “The moment we see something, select it and pick it up, the object leaves its status as a waste and becomes a piece of find. The re-pealed object falls into an intermediate zone. There, it is no more waste, yet not it is art.” (Helga- Kämpf Jansen, 2001 in Kunstforum Bd. 168 Januar-Februar 2004).It is in this intermediate zone where Duchamp put his objects to explore the boundary between art and non-art. The process of drifting leads in a second step to the metamorphosis of such an article, which leaves its original status and becomes artificial, art ... therefore, there is no clear decrement or waste in art – but there is the dragging and shifting of contexts and meanings.

Awareness

The garbage that we produce, especially the plastic gar-

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bage that lasts much longer than its human producers due to its longstanding decomposition (500 years), ap-pears, on closer analysis, as a tool of cultural archeology of our time. „These objects can be seen as a portrait of a global consumer society, mirroring our desires, wishes, hubris and ingenuity.” (Pamela Longobardi, The Drifters Project, 2009). Plastic waste becomes transformed – with unintended consequences – as it leaves the quo-tidian world and collides with nature to be transported and regurgitated out of the shifting oceans. It seems as if the oceans are communicating with us through the materials of our own making. The plastic elements initially seem attractive and innocuous, like toys, some with an eerie familiarity and some totally alien. In our eagerness for the new, we are remaking the world in plastic, creating our own toxic image.

Collecting/ Determining

The habit of collecting is as old as mankind. By actions such as collecting, determining and gathering, humans used and use to structure their life, to arrange their property, to smaller ambiguity and to cope with an in-certitude and choas. What is at the first glance pre-sented as chaos is revealed after further consideration as a sprawling installtion. When we think of the rituals of choas, we are reminded of Andy Warhol’s legend-ary Time-Capsule, demonstrating the unbridled zeal of the artist’s collection. As a man of chaos Warhol how-ever, was a very well-organisated man, who collected and sorted in hundreds of paper boxes everything, that

seemed to him worth keeping. The Time-Capsules by Wahrhol are like islands of affluence in an ocean of uni-versal misery. Pollution is not limited to air, rivers and forests, but captures the humans as a whole. A society that is obsessed by the zeal to produce more and more, creats the willingness to take ideas, feelings, art, love, friendship and the people themselves as goods. Artists working with waste as material design psychograms of our consumer society, pointing out the ecstasy of the world. The double view towards art and trash shows the visible empty space between them. This artists are masters of a cold and precise, but at the same time very engaged observation.

Re-structuring

Art works of plastic material can be dismantled and re-configured, but nearly impossibly recycled. The act of removing thousands of pounds of material from the natural environment and re-situating it within the cul-tural context for examination seems like the work of a forensic scientist, examining and documenting the dep-osition as it lay, collecting and identifying the evidence of the crime. The artists of the project PACKET-SOUP are driven by the question of what can be said from the art world to the overflowing garbage problems, both inspiring and provoking. Their re-structured and reassorted find-ings do uncertainly confront visitors with their daily consumption of plastic - in a quite playful, ironic and sensual way. PACKET-SOUP invites the visitors to im-

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merse themselves in their plastic consumption literally, to question it, to touch it and to play with it in order to make a transformation themselves from observers to participants by reassortment of their own role within the framework of an art exhibition.

P A C K E T - S O U P

The visitor will immerse into the first room of SAVVY Contemporary artspace, dominated by the swimming pool installation from the Berlin-based artist and de-signer Jan Kuck, which gives its name to the whole pro-ject. But instead of water, it is filled with 6000 plastic bags mostly contributed by visitors themselves. Drifting further into the subject of environmental pollu-tion and our daily live consumer behavior one is sliding into the next room, where works of the Austrian film-maker and writer Werner Boote (Plastic Planet) and the documentary film producer Susanne Richter (e.g. ARTE ”Der Kampf ums schwarze Gold“) are approaching the issue with jet unpublished results of their researches.

The american artist Pamela Longobardi (exhibited i.a. in Venice Biennale 2009) is exhibiting in the same room parts of her highly acclaimed art-installation “Drift-ers Project”, which she created out of vast hoards of plastic the ocean regurgitates on remote beaches. Lon-gobardi is building a time bridge between the freshly collected plastic debris in the first room and the sci-entistic backround in the second room, opeing in the mean time a whole new dimension of plastic waste ar-

cheologie. Her gigantic sculpture´s tentacles are me-anding and crawling along the ceiling like an octopus at the mirrored water surface, reaching out towards Steve McPherson laboratory archive of marine plastic findings he has been collecting from beaches of the UK for over 15 years. As the founder of www.marine-plastic.org, an online participatory art/photography project which aims to be a depository for images of plastic pollution at beaches from around the world, Steve McPherson is locating and documenting the human and the object, the local and global.

Two outstanding performance works will be shown during the exhibition: The brasilian performance artist Nathalie Fari integrates location- and body-related art with postmodern theater and Minimal Art for her work about environmental responsibility. Yingmei Duan and her colleague Cai Qing will as well interprete the theme of the exhibition in a performative way, sharing with us their thoughts on sustainability, space and time.For their live-performances these artists will use the urban space of the artspace SAVVY Contemporary, as-sociating with PACKET–SOUP´s concept of interationand interdependence between cause and action, sensa-tion and perception, art and recipient.

Claudia Lamas CornejoCurator

P A C K E T – S O U P9

KATHARINA FINKE P A C K E T - S O U P - The Journalist Perspective

Nowadays we live in a world made out of plastic: We sit on furniture and work with electronic devices made out of it, use it to store, carry or eat our food, wear it as part of our clothes and sometimes even put it into our bodies after a surgery or as a chewing gum.Plastic is everywhere and it seems to be too useful to live without. But due to this daily-life consumption of plastic we produce such a huge amount of plastic waste. As easy and cheap it is to produce and use plas-tic, as hard is it to dispose of. Plastics are durable and degrade very slowly. Some of the plastic waste can be burned or recycled, some not. But even after billion of years some pieces of the recycled plastics will remain - most of them in the oceans - for our descendants. Therefore the environment is the biggest victim of our plastic world.

Working as a journalist I made the experience that the issue of plastic consumption and the waste it produces is extremely underrepresented in the public. It is no sur-prise then that even though almost all of us use plastic naturally all the time, we are often not aware of it. Nei-ther of their high consumption, nor - and probably even less – of the waste we produce with that. But to tell thewhole story: this also varies from country to country.

The biggest plastic consumers are the United States where one person annually consumes 130 kilogram of plastics, whereas in the Middle East for instance a per-son only uses 8 kg of plastics per year. In the US it is hard to escape the plastic consumption. Even if you only

want to buy a drink at a grocery store you have to fight not to get a plastic bag. And on top of that, they do not have a proper system for waste separation and recy-cling of plastic waste. In Germany and other Northern European countries it is different: they also consume a lot of plastics (92 kg per capita per year) and environmental issues are not everyone’s concern but there are some arrangements, e.g. taking a plastic bag at a supermarket will cost you something and plastic waste is separated from other waste.

These examples show that there are different levels of awareness around the globe but also that society, economy and politics everywhere inevitably have to tackle the issue.

Of course there is some motion already. Private people and organisations try to educate society about environ-mental issues, such as plastic, in order to influence their behaviour. But the impactis limited. How can a small group of people in the US for instance influence the mass plastic consumption there?

As a consequence other sectors, like economy and poli-tics, should also get involved. Sadly, economic players mostly only care about the environment if it helps their Corporate Social Responsibility, quasi their business. Some initiatives have been using this to combine eco-nomic with environmental objectives. Like “TerraCycle”, which is making consumer products out of pre- and

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post-consumer materials and thereby trying to reduce plastic waste. Unfortunately, the motivation for politics does not differ so much from the one in economics. En-vironmental issues have just recently appeared on most political agendas (of course green parties had them be-fore) because politicians are starting to realize that they can gain voters and power with them.So at the end of the day economy as well as politics care more about themselves than about the rising problem of plastic waste.

Consequently, the claim for everyone really has to be: Create awareness for the consequences ofplastic use! And I truly hope that P A C K E T - S O U P can contribute to that.

Katharina FinkeFreelance journalist

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HILLA STEINERT A Dress for Eternity

Sustainability is actually a very old word. However, the word was out of use for so long that it was not listed in the 1975 edition of Kluge's etymological dictionary. At the moment, Sustainability is undergoing a renaissance. Being sustainable is considered a desirable thing; if something is sustainable then it is considered to be good. Sustain-ability places importance on the conservation of resources and thus the environment. It expresses our wish that everything should exist for a long time. It is an appeal to use, as sparingly as possible, what is already available.

One of the most enduring phenomena of our time, which I know of, is plastic packaging. It is so persistent that we will not get rid of its waste in our life time.One meets plastic everywhere: new, used and recycled. It is carelessly discarded and left to occupy like grass hid-den corners.

Grass is also persistent. It is simply there, pushing up again and again, forcing itself to the surface. One can not forget to think about its part in Nature and therefore Life.

Where does Nature start and where does it end?

Years ago I harvested grass and used it to make a dress. An archaic model was developed in a slow process.

Now I reap plastic. It grows on the tree outside my house, it flies through the streets on windy days, it piles up in the rubbish bins of supermarkets and in every conceivable cranny on this planet.

The achievements of plastic have its own aesthetic in infinite forms.

A dress made from freshly harvested and prepared plastic waste: long live the perfect outfit to PACKET-SOUP!

Hilla SteinertPerformance Artist

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JAN KUCK The Plastic Dimension

Jan Kuck´s installion PACKET–SOUP gave the name to an entire exhibition project with international artistic participation on the subject of sustainability and envi-ronmental pollution caused by plastic debris. The pool filled with plastic bags is opeing an unknow dimension, consisting a concept that deals with different time and space levels while asking the question about our daily life consumtion and cultural behavior.

Immersion

Claudia Lamas Cornejo: How many objects made of plastic are surrounding you within one meter at this very moment?

Jan Kuck: Quite a few. One, two, three, four, five, six—the table is partly made of plastic—seven, eight, nine—and the clothes here are probably also partly made of plastic, my glasses—eleven.Everything really! A lot! Life is plasticized!

CLC: You are a conceptual artist who works with plastic but also many other materials. What is so exciting about plastic?

JK: Just this: that it has become such a routine sub-stance that we cannot escape it anymore. We are not even aware of how much plastic we are surrounded by; it is part of our reality. The desire to show this reality in an even more exaggerated and direct way led me to create PACKET-SOUP. Plastic is too often seen in conjunction

with waste, but it is not only waste. Plastic has a great capacity for changing its functions and appearances. It can take any shape or form and may possess different surface textures that can simulate a lot of things. For example, plastic can simulate silk, but an observer must lie under synthetic bedding to actually detect the differ-ence. But as far as superficial appearance, plastic can be almost any materiality whose essence is more apparent than real. What fascinates me is this interplay between disgust towards plastic and aesthetic, which may well be manifested in plastic. It is a material that offers a great deal of possibilities and which can be altered and revitalized.

CLC: You mentioned “aesthetic”. Art fits within a cer-tain aesthetic—or anti-aesthetic, such as in Joseph Beuys´sconcept of the aestehic experience or with so-called "trash-artists" who take the concept of garbage-art as a paradox. For them waste is neither worthless nor particularly valuable ...

JK: For me, art does not work with certain aesthetics. Art must be beautiful for me, but the question of beau-tiful is a very personal perception. Also, something very ugly at first glance, may be nice to deal with if you take a closer look at the concept. Aesthetics are important to me especially in this tension, I see the beauty of a work only when a conflict is in it, everything else is dull and boring for me. For me, contradictions and fractures make up real beauty, because they enable reflection. An image that is pleasant to look at can only be decorative

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at its best, but in my opinion this is not a criterion for art.

Drifting

CLC: When looking at your work, an observer drifts along the interplay between art / life, aesthetics / waste, presence / absence, grandeur / disgust. What does am-biguity mean to you?

JK: For me the connection between these pairs of op-posites is time. For instance, there is a certain time in which I deal with the issue of environmental pollution by plastic, for a limited time I analyze objects made of plastic, a material that survives time more than anything else; a plastic bag takes 500 years to decompose. This temporal ambiguity plays an important role for the con-cept of PACKET-SOUP, as the works to be shown oc-cupy different time stages; the first room with its fresh bags, the second room with bags and other plastic items that have been fished from the sea, and the third room with found plastic objects that are sorted and prepared in a very precise way.

Awareness

CLC: What kind of role can art play for environmental issues such as the pollution of the oceans?

JK: This is a dilemma for me, because I'm wondering if it is helpful to the art when it is associated with such a tangible benefit. Because, even after PACKET-SOUP

our lives will not be completely without plastic, this is totally unrealistic and probably not even good. At the same time I am questioning whether art can be only something useless? Art does not have to do anything at all—but maybe it can? I think that artists can sometimes provoke a change in awareness and different point of views. To look below the surface, deeper and eager to see more is at the end of the day the activity of each individual viewer. Ultimately, there is a pool that is not filled with water but with plastic and this alludes to the fact that the oceans now contain such a high concen-tration of plastic that one wonders whether this should still be called “water”. So it seemed only logical for me to replace the water in my pool completely with plas-tic. Art does not need to do anything, but it can serve a purpose.

Collecting

CLC: What does the action of collecting mean to you?JK: I mainly collect—due to the size of my current apart-ment—smaller semi-materials, movies, pictures, essays. If you collect too much it is loading you down too much. However, my colleagues of PACKET-SOUP and I show collectibles of a particular moment, period or habit, from which they originate. The works that accompany my in-stallation and complete the project were first, before anything else, commodities, property, the truth, the ob-jects in a very short daily human context. Only through the act of collecting and rearranging by fellow artists, have they become something else; they have become findings and have turned into objects of artistic debate

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about plastic. For me this collection expresses a work that is against our own volatility, a collective memory.

Restructuring

CLC: Decontextualization and transformation are strong elements of your work. What kind of role does context play for you in the sense of time, space and recipients?

JK: If the pool would stand by itself, then it would not have the charm that it gets when it is experienced by the visitor. When visitors are trying to move in it, to swim in the sea of bags, I do not even know what will happen concretely, what kind of interaction or emotion my work will evoke. But emotion for me is already the first step of an interaction. Anyone who goes into the pool enters the plant, is part of the work and changes it necessarily, that is what makes it so exciting for me and ultimately, beautiful. For the exhibition I hope that it encourages a social discourse and contributes to this, as well as trig-gering something in the visitors.

Claudia Lamas CornejoCurator

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PAMELA LONGOBARDI The Social Life of Pam Longobardi’s Drifters Project The Ocean is communicating through the Materials of our own Making

THE SOCIAL LIFE OF PAM LONGOBARDI’S DRIFTERS PROJECT

“…even though from a theoretical point of view human actors encode things with significance, from a methodologi-cal point of view it is the things-in-motion that illuminate their human and social context.” Arjun Appadurai, The social life of things

In his introduction to The social life of things, Arjun Appadurai explains that the commodity is not a kind of thing, but rather a phase in the career of certain things. As part of her field work, Pam Longobardi rescues ob-jects that have moved out of their commodity phase in order to counter their environmental harm: she removes plastic that has washed up from the ocean. In her Drift-ers project, she reintroduces these objects into the flow of cultural exchange: she exhibits photo-documen-tation and installs sculptural forms and environments made from the objects themselves.

The arrival of Longobardi’s work into spaces of cultural exchange is, of course, a new phase in the life of these often toxic objects as transformed commodities. The materials have already been produced and consumed within a system of economic and human value exchange, but the environment has reproduced them with differ-ent formal and signifying qualities, which the artist uses as a commentary on global capitalism for our visual and intellectual consumption. The project is recursive in the sense that this second phase of commodity exchange is meant to inform the future first phases of consumption, endowing the work with a strong activist tenor. But for the purposes of an exhibition document, the ques

tion becomes: how does this second commodity phase function as art?

Is it some kind of trash art? Should we look back to Kurt Schwitters and other Dada artists for early appropria-tions of non-art materials? Do we align Longobardi’s Drifters project with movements like arte povera or histories of anti-aestheticism? Or does the work sig-nal new formulations like artistic research? If so, what does the exhibitionary phase of these things-in-motion illuminate about our human and social context? This is a question about the potential for knowledge claims in the field of contemporary art production, and indeed Longobardi refers to herself variously as a field worker collecting evidence and a forensic scientist.

If we are going to make an epistemic claim, then what does the art know? Or, rather, what does the artist know having engaged in the process of art making? Perhaps there is a kind of non-discursive knowledge gathered through the objects about the ocean and also about our own inventiveness and desires, or about the ten-sions between the circulation of commodities through cultural and economic networks and through natural processes. But epistemic claims are the result of par-

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ticular sets of practices that produce them. In this case, the methods include excavations on the borderlands of water worlds and land and the examination of symbolic and material relationships. Through this second phase of exchange the commodities return with a deeply am-bivalent status, a familiar commentary on modernity at least since World War I.But, contemporary artistic and hybrid work might also create new kinds of knowledge that reflect our human-ity in both its toxic and rejuvenating forms.

This is finally captured by the uncanny objects them-selves whose deep unfamiliarity and dark strangeness turn out to be nothing less than the archaeological rem-nants of our own presence on the earth.

Joey OrrArts & Sciences FellowGraduate Institute of the Liberal ArtsEmory University

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THE OCEAN IS COMMUNICATING THROUGH THE MATERIALS OF OUR OWN MAKING

In 2006, after discovering the mountainous piles of plastic debris the ocean was depositing on the remote shores of Hawaii, Pamela Longobardi began collecting and utilizing plastic as her primary material. For the ex-hibition PACKET – SOUP Pamela Longobardi presents her approaches t in a gigantic sculpture, having removed thousands of pounds of material from the natural envi-ronment and re-situating it within the cultural context for examination.

Immersion

Claudia Lamas Cornejo: How many objects made of plastic are surounding you in this very moment within one meter?

Pamela Longobardi: The amount is hard to calculate. Plastic is often invisible, and sneaky, hiding in many things camoflaged. I try to surround myself with natu-ral materials as much as possible, but the entire sofa I am sitting on is not wool or cotton, so I assume it must be synthetic, in other words, plastic. The carpet un-der my feet is the same. And the laptop I am writing on! I no longer drink out of plastic water bottles, but so much food comes packaged in plastic, though I avoid it at every possible juncture. Its even hiding in the lining of cardboard boxes and aluminum cans. Its ubiquitous and dangerous in so many ways. ‘Packet-soup’ is fake

food swathed in plastic.

CLC: The concept of garbage-art is a paradox as it takes waste whether as worthless nor as a particiculary valu-able rest, but as a material that can unleash unpredict-able dynamics. Would you call yourself a representativ of this kind of art?

PL: No, I am a conceptual artist with a strong affinity to materials and process. I was trained as a painter and printmaker, but have always worked in varying mediums from photography to painting and collage to installa-tion, allowing the ideas to dictate the materials I work with. Some ideas are better as paintings, others as in-stallations. In 2006, after discovering the mountainous piles of plastic debris the ocean was depositing on the remote shores of Hawaii, I began collecting and utilizing this plastic as the primary material in my project called Drifters, now having worked on sites all over the world. I am interested in the collision between nature and cul-ture. I do agree that this ocean plastic is a material that can unleash unpredictable dynamics. I am interested in it in particular, as opposed to all garbage in general, be-cause of what it reveals about us as a global culture and what it reveals about the ocean as a type of social space, as well as a giant dynamic engine of life and change. As a product of culture that exhibits visibly the attempts of nature to reabsorb and regurgitate this invader, ocean

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plastic has profound stories to tell.

Drifting

CLC: Drifting between being an artistic scientist and re-searcher and being a scientific artist, where do you see yourself and the work you are doing? Are you willing to take any position at all?

PL: I am interested in the idea of authority and voice. When art deals with aspects of the real, as opposed to aspects of the imaginary, it intersects with other realms. Science and art are often seen in opposition, but I view them as synergistic partners. Artists and cultural work-ers often have very different goals than scientists but not always. I think both are about seeking. The position of overlap is one less explored, and its one I am inter-ested in.

CLC: Looking at your work, one is reminded of the in-terplay between art/life, aesthetics/ existence, poetry/ theory, waste/ concept, presence/ absence, grandeur/ disgust. What thas ambiguity mean to you? How do you cope with it in your work?

PL: This series of binaries, taken as pairs of oppositions, creates polarities; however, when taken together as two parts of a whole, describes a more complete picture of reality where things exist because of their opposite. One cannot exist without the other. The presence of the mulitude of endless products that humans have deemed

necessary to create has caused absence of other things: resources and space for other lifeforms. Matter can-not be gained or lost. The granduer of human capability and creation is swallowed in the disgust of waste. We are remaking the world in plastic, in our own image, as a toxic legacy, a surrogate, an imposter. The impossible beauty of these plastic objects that are transformed by nature are a kind of cultural marker of a pivotal moment of ‘civilization’, as nature tries to reabsorb the material-ity we have force fed it.

Awareness

CLC: What kind of role can art play for the subject of environmetal issues such as pollution of the oceans? What role can the artist take? Is there any role to take?PL: Art can align the intellect with the emotive and this is a potent combination.

Collecting

CLC: The notion of collecting is very old in human his-tory, by actions such as collecting, determining, humans used to structure their life, to arrange their property. What does the action of collecting mean to you?

PL: Collecting is an essential human obsession that has created somewhat disastrous consequences when it in-volves collecting of specimens of the natural world. As much as I am fascinated by the study of specimens in museums, (I used to work as a scientific illustrator in

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museums and with research scientists) it also sickens me to think about the drawers upon drawers of crea-tures, even endangered ones, that are still subject to ac-tive collection. We are creating a mausoleum of nature in which we ‘own’ everything, can name it, can know it, and therefore own it, but in some cases there is no vi-able population left alive. Now, I am deeply involved in collecting the relics of the near end of the era of mas-sive global consumption. I think someday these objects will be viewed as evidence of a time of great folly. In this case, the act of collecting ocean plastic actually has a positive effect, it helps to divert further harm. Each object I collect is one less that will be in an albatross, or a sea turtle, or a microorganism.

Re-structuring

CLC: De-contextualisating and transformation are strong elements of PACKET – SOUP. In your opinion, when does an object start becoming a finding, becomes art?

PL: Plastic objects are the cultural archeology of our time. These objects I see as a portrait of global late-capitalist consumer society, mirroring our desires, wishes, hubris and ingenuity. These are objects with unintended consequences that become transformed as they leave the quotidian world and collide with nature to be transformed, transported and regurgitated out of the shifting oceans. The ocean is communicating with us through the materials of our own making. It is not

the act of finding alone, it is the thing that is found. An object with invisible histories becomes, at the end of its journey, transported into the cultural context of art in a way that shines the most intensely focused light on it. These objects become a mirror for examining ourselves. The use value of a functional object becomes exchanged for a negative value of being a surrogate imposter of food as it fools creatures into eating it. I am hopeful I can create a new use value for it, as a signal, a historical marker, a warning.

Claudia Lamas CornejoCurator

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STEVE MCPHERSON Saltwater Soup The Archeology in Art

SALTWATER SOUP

Steve McPherson has been gathering discarded, washed up plastic from the UK shoreline for more than 15 years, scouring the beach to cleanse his local en-vironment and to re-use items that others may simply ignore or never even notice at all. His practice involves a significant amount of detailed, obsessive collecting, and although McPherson’s creative outputs range from painting, photography, installation and book works, there is one common thread that weaves all of these together and that is of narrative. Everything in his col-lection has a story to tell, and it is McPherson that gives it the voice in his artworks.

His plastic finds are recorded firstly in his online re-pository of photographic evidence of beached objects (www.marineplastic.org). The collection has record-ings made by McPherson and by others of found, bat-tered plastic remnants. There are no stories to tell here other than the ones conjured up by close range photo-graphic imaging and the interpretation of the viewer; we have our own voices to describe or invent their origin and destiny. Saltwater erosion of the plastic detritus washed up onto shores from far afield adds to the mys-terious past of the finds photographed in situ. A photo-documentary roll call for a civilisation’s discarded plas-tic objects of unidentifiable, immeasurable history sees a section of sea worn plastic ruler acquire the air of a Neolithic device from the dawn of technology; single parts of toys flail amongst pebbles like broken-

up alien spaceships forever languishing in this strange otherworldly terrain, and so on.It is when these objects are gathered, studied, and sort-ed with the care and attention that McPherson brings as an artist and as a collector, that he starts to weave his own particular narrative, especially in the boxed assem-blage works displayed here. That single, smooth-edged piece of ruler is now joined by others, and as they are gathered they begin to tell a new tale; 28 Objects That Measured The World (28 rulers and plastic measur-ing devices found on the shore lines of the North Kent coast in Thanet, between 1995 and 2010), and that single fragment of ruler is now gaining stature. We start to ask: Whose world did these things measure? The as-semblage of timeworn pieces of plastic now resembles the remains of a vast Roman mosaic - unearthed plastic evolves visually into marble, ceramic, glaze, and history.

In 11 Signs and Simulacra (2010), tiny plastic frag-ments are pinned and detailed in the manner a Victo-rian butterfly collector would have secured their natu-ral spoils, but instead of a label identifying the species and date, we peer closely and read below a toy plastic barrier: “The barrier they knocked over, right past the outwitted enemy guards”, or, below a ‘no left turn’ sign: “The sign that was used but useless due to a lack of understanding of left and right”. These tiny plastic toys are transformed into the relics of some Lilliputian so-ciety and we start to wonder - Who were the enemy

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guards? The escapees? Some of the texts refer directly to the origins of these particular finds; the crablet, the sand, the beach, yet interspersed within these narra-tives another little universe begins to unfold, darting its way between the barriers and signs, assigning miniature histories to each.

Unlabelled (eleven marine plastic objects found on the shore lines of beaches on the North Kent coast in Thanet, between 1995 and 2009) is different again, starker. This time the labels themselves become the object, an ominous plastic poem of abandonment and marine disaster.

What happened to the ‘System Control’ and ‘Local Con-trol’ and all the ‘Water’ if only the plastic labels remain? And what was the Control that they were meant to be controlling? If you needed a warning about plastic waste polluting the natural environment then the signs really are there for all to see. And we should also be concerned about what Steve McPherson will be gather-ing from the shoreline as unlabelled in the future if we continue to go on as we are.

Sarah BodmanResearch Fellow for Artists BooksFaculty of Arts, Creative Industries and EducationUniversity of the West of England, Bristol

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THE ARCHEOLOGY IN ART

Steve McPherson questions what we perceive, what we can know and what exists in actuality, and therefore, if these notions exist at all outside of a theoretical con-text. In practice this is executed with a search for un-derstanding via maps, mapping, collecting, collating and documenting in order to value banality and challeng the objects´ meanings.

Immersion

Claudia Lamas Cornejo: How many objects made of plastic are surrounding you in this very moment within one meter?

Steve McPherson: Unfortunately there are too many to count, if the objects are not plastic themselves then most are coated in it - varnish on wood, paint on the walls coatings on paper and card. It is absolutely eve-rywhere.

CLC:The concept of garbage-art is a paradox as it takes waste neither as worthless nor as a particularly valuable rest, but as a material that can unleash unpredictable dynamics. Would you call yourself a representative of this kind of art?

SMP: I would not define myself as a Trash Artist.. In fact I would go further to say that I personally try not to define myself as any type of particular artist, I find that

unhelpful most of the time. I could be defined as a book artist due to my work with that format, or a sculptor, an installation artist, a sound artist, an eco or environmen-tal artist, and so on. Ultimately the idea the concept dic-tates and shapes the materials I use and how the work will be presented.In a lot of my work I utilise where possible, recycled, second hand, used objects; one man’s trash is another man’s gold, and I enjoy that the materials are alchemical in that sense. Recycled items always hold a history an untold story which excites and intrigues me, this adds to this alchemical sense and enriches it with further mystery and potential. This constant paradox of worth and worthless is something I love to use as its value is relative to the perception of the person examining it. If we break the object down, paper is just flattened tree pulp and chalk, paint is coloured liquid plastic glue, or crushed earth mixed with tree resin. It only 'becomes' in the eyes of the artist and then hopefully in the eyes of the viewer.

Drifting

CLC:Drifting between being an artistic scientist and re-searcher and being a scientific artist, where do you see yourself and the work you are doing?

SMP: The work with plastic for me is more about ar-chaeology and sociology than the science of ecology,

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although there are obvious conceptual and theoretically and sometime aesthetical connections. The work high-lights the problem of the amount of debris in the sea and brings into question the effect this may be having on the environment and animal life, and subsequently human life. But the main question that surfaces not only in myself but in the viewer is why, why is it there at all? And we start to retrace the steps of the objects exist-ence on the beach through our own experience, through the human experience. If we do this the line goes back beyond its consumption, it’s design, its manufacture to the sourcing of its raw material, back to the earth back to the environment, through the hands of thousands. This small plastic unexplained object that has drifted through the waters and has landed on a beach on the north coast of Kent, England then lets me drift through the series of the unknown events that brought it here. It takes me through their hands, across continents and time and brings me full circle back to my own hand, my own, use in a series of links that establish a constant reminder that we live in a time where local is global.

Awareness

CLC:What kind of role can art play for the subject of environmental issues such as pollution of the oceans? What role can the artist take? Is there any role to take?

SMP: Artists have always been political - there is poli-tics in everything, everywhere and in every subject. But I feel that it is not the job of the artist to solely inform of

their personal political concern, it is the job of the artist to make art - to make good art, art that communicates, art that inspires, provokes though or questions, and that activates and moves the viewer, that is primary. I hope that in my own work I do that first - that an audience are intrigued, that they spend time, look and question. That they are maybe amused, and find a beauty in the arrangement, the presentation, the situation of the ob-jects. If they spend more time and inquire further then the reality of the environmental aspect or, if you like, the political aspect comes next. The Arts can inform of the environmental crisis of our oceans, and I regard it as a means to spread awareness and communicate those issues that are not easily ac-cepted or communicated by other means. What impact it has is unknowable. Collecting

CLC:The notion of collecting is very old in human his-tory, by actions such as collecting, determining, humans used to structure their life, to arrange their property. What does the action of collecting mean to you?

SMP: Since I was a child I have collected, erasers, badg-es, key rings, postcards, fossils etc. It has always been a part of my life. In fact, ironically or not I collect less now than I ever have, and am active in not consuming through collecting. I suppose it is not surprising that is the case, as the need now manifests itself through my art. The activity of collecting beached marine plastic for my

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practice combines many of my loves and passions; the beach itself is the place where I feel most relax and yet connected with everything, while beach combing for me is pure treasure hunting, what could be better than just wandering by the sea, and finding your own materials. This stuff which is a pollutant, worthless and ugly to others, and finding value and beauty in it - because of the alchemical nature of 'stuff'.The works in themselves, the combination of pieces and collections, are for me like museum or specimen boxes, small Wunderkammers of the mysterious, the unusual, the forgotten and lost. These plastic objects symbolise the history of the world up to this point, they are con-temporary and future archaeology, and they both ex-plain and are unexplained at the same time. These are the objects of our lives; this is the material of the tech-nologically advanced.In some ways I am a very traditional collector, I obsess and eagerly await the next item, there is excitement in the collecting and admiration for the collection in the finished presentation. The really special finds are rarely used in the works I have made, they are deemed too precious to use, and affected too much instant attach-ment to pass on. I collect because I have to, and I ar-range and present to transform those ugly treasures that I have found.

Re-structuring

CLC:De-contextualisation and transformation are strong elements of your work…

SMP: Yes I use a plastic that is a pollution problem that has been discarded, and may have been someone’s trash. But there are many reasons for the arrival of these ob-jects onto beaches, and I could not agree that most of them are due to active and purposeful discarding. May-be it’s a romantic and hopeful view that I have, but I look upon most of the plastic items I collect as arriving on the shore due to accidental loss or mishap. So my definition of re-structuring is a very romantic one, detached from a strategic form of reconstructing.

Claudia Lamas CornejoCurator

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NATHALIE FARI Incarnating Bodies The Decelerated Performance

INCARNATING BODIES

Nathalie Fari is not a performer. Brazilian in Germany and German in Brazil, she is a Space Voyager, who invites people to explore with her the distance between INside and OUTside. The first time I discovered her work was on stage. At first, considering the group of other actors, one could have thought that she was in the wrong play. Different rhythm, different costume, and different energy: Fari appeared like a vi-sion in the background - slow and silent. However, she was exactly the opposite of being in her own world.

She was integrating the Space into her Body.

Nathalie Fari’s Body absorbs the energy like a sponge. The slightest vibration has an impact on the evolution of her act, emphasized by her extremely precise move-ments. Requiring rigorous physical training as well as a perfectly detailed body technique, her “performances” develop a new language, concentrated on the organic experience of Space.

With minimalist aesthetic, the artist exposes the fluc-tuations of her Body to the Public Space, decompos-ing and analyzing its limits. Twists, stretches, squeezes resonate with the audience. We don’t see a woman: we see a Body, the Body, and our Body. The contemplation becomes hypnotic, like a meditation.A Body on the grass, a Body in the woods, a Body under

the rock, under a piece of cardboard! Exposed, protect-ed, invasive or peacefully at rest, the Body permanently questions the Space, harmonizes or contrasts with it. Fari’s interventions can be disturbing, funny or absurd and create images for feelings or experiences we can’t always clearly define. The artist acts like a mirror; the smallest piece of flesh is plainly involved, engaging the audience in an exclusive and rather unusual intimate di-alogue.

We can hear the breathing and feel the intensity of each restricted movement. We examine: What is inside, what is outside? What is private, what is public? Like animals on the lookout, our senses wake up and we search for a new kind of connection with our own body.

Maud PiquionArt manager and curator

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THE DECELERATED PERFORMANCE

Nathalie Fari came up with the idea of her performance Vestilling (Flemish: style stand) in May 2011, as due to the volcanic eruption in Iceland almost the entire air traffic in Europe came to a cessation. She questioned herself, what would happen if people would have to give up flying because the environment no longer allowed it. Out of this question Nathalie Fari developed the concept of time and deceleration for her performance art, which she defined as a non-movement. The link to PACkET-SOUP is the question of an alternative use of resources and the search for what we still need today for living.Nathalie Fari is accompanied in her performance by mu-sician Bernard Reiss, whose sound supports the perfor-mance and is supporting the imagination, “that nothing is happening at all" says the artist.

Immersion

Claudia Lamas Cornejo: What does sustainability mean to you?Nathalie Fari: For me as an artist this means returning to the local network—connected internationally to pro-mote the development of art—but to make sure to do something for an immediate local community. To deal with sustainable resources and materials in the artis-tic sphere means, for example, that the international art scene ends collecting stamps in passports and to seeing jet setting as an ultra chic must-have! In other move-ments, such as the environmental movement, this critic

is already there. Even in the music scene, I noticed that some DJ's have decided to no longer fly and just to take the bus or train. Also questions about music production show signs of change. Ultimately, it comes to the ques-tion: how much do I consume, and do I have to consume so much?

Drifting

CLC: Does sustainability limit you in your artistic work?

NF: No, I do not see it as a limit. I question myself for each performance project about what to use, consider materials that I need, if any, and determine how to deal with these materials. I take a very minimalist artistic ap-proach and orientate myself to the land art movement, which was in the 60's and 70’s and was essentially the first wave of the sustainability movement in art. I do not limit art to the landscape, but I take the notion of land-scape and bring it to town; a kind of reversal. In practical terms I use the strategy of slowing down to gain sus-tainability. This strategy serves me and brings me and others to a different state. That means that for my art that I take away familiar stimuli with which we are often overwhelmed and attempt to slowly display actions with few resources. I create room for interpretation and in-dependent reflection. Promoting deceleration with per-formance art seems uneasy at first.

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Awareness

CLC: What will happen at the performance Verstilling?

NF: An unusual sense of time. I'll pass on my tempo-ral space to the viewer. Vestilling will have a traditional time frame, like a piece that is performed on a stage. But by slowing down it feels different. Longer actually, but viewers are surprised that everything is already over, because one is accustomed very quickly and very well to slow pace of time.

CLC: What role does the spectator play in your perfor-mance?

NF: A very important role because the spectator is in-volved indirectly in the work. The spectator is part of the work in the sense that it is with me in the space that is created by slowing down and by the specific at-mosphere, and thus the performance is reflected in its altered sense of time. This creates a strong bond. The deceleration must be endured not only by me, but also by the spectators. But as I said, the reactions tend to be those that one is surprised that it's over already.

Collecting

CLC: What does the action of collecting mean to you? Do you use it in your work?

NF: As a child I was a passionate collector, but due to

my regional exchange I discovered how much we all carry along with us that we do not actually need. In my work, collecting means documentation, because that's the only thing I have as a performance artist.

Restructuring

CLC: What kind of role does the context play for you in the sense of time, space and recipients?

NF: For me space is a container, like a square, in which everything happens. The time is a circle and the body is a triangle. I work with these three geometric symbols and my body works with time and space and creates the context. The view goes first to the space. Facilities are selected or created, and then I see what the body does with this room. The time is then the factor that has to do solely with the form of presentation. The combina-tion body-space is therefore very important for me and at the same time it creates images. Images and aesthet-ics are important to me as I do work at the boundary of performance and visual arts.

CLC: Can Aesthetics ever be sustainable?

NF: It depends on the material. I think the works of my colleagues at PACKET-SOUP are highly aesthetic, but you could also just say that everything there is made of garbage. This brings us to my performance Vestilling because Vestilling analyzes the garbage that we have in our minds sometimes—mental junk we accumulate un-

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consciously and are burdened with.So I want to create idea spaces, intellectual freedom for the audiences within the perception of the space and the period of performance. This is a very subtle work. It's about to embark on something else, only then can re-flection and awareness of one's own environment arise and questions about how we deal with it. If I reach one single person, I'm happy.

CLC: What does the notion of re-constructing mean for your work?

NF: I think this notion refers to the square itself, which I have chosen: the Richardplatz. There is no such ele-ment like my performance in the daily life of this square. At the same time Vestilling is a multi-part project that takes place at different places. Each new episode is an-other realignment and consolidation of issues and con-tents that are important to me. This is sustainable be-cause I no longer produce single performances, but am increasingly project-based to work longer on one pro-ject. Every time I approach a project again, it is different and eventually comes to an end at some point, but this is a point an artist has to reach. Vestilling suggests a kind of cessation, but it is very difficult to present a cessa-tion of images and movements and, moreover, with few resources. This is driving me on and on.

Claudia Lamas CornejoCurator

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WERNER BOOTE The Plastic Planet

THE PLASTIC PLANET

The film Plastic Planet by Werner Boote has provoked far-reaching consequences, such as the ban of plastic bags in Italy and the ban of the chemical bonding sub-stance bisphenol A in the whole EU as well as plastic bottles for babies, because of the tests taken during the film. Many villages in the south of Vienna took part in the campaign "plastic-free villages". The film also en-couraged the Minister for Environment and Water in Abu Dhabi to prohibit plastic bags, because every third camel dies from plastic bags in the desert. From 2013, plastic bags will be banned in the United Arab Emirates.

Immersion

Claudia Lamas Cornejo: How many plastic objects are around you within one meter?

Werner Boote : The plastic mobile phone, the plastic computer, the plastic in my blood. And when you make movies, it does not work without plastic, because oth-erwise I could not unpack one single camera. So, plastic is everywhere.

Drifting

CLC: How did you come to the issue of environmental pollution by plastic? Any trigger?

WB: I read a small newspaper article in which it was

clear that fish can no longer reproduce because of a substance that leaks from the plastic in the oceans. I thought, for God's sake, it cannot be like that! This small newspaper article did not leave my mind. In the follow-ing weeks and months, I researched information care-fully and repeatedly found small items that can be seen in the summary as a global threat. I wanted to make a film that examines this question in order to feed my cu-riosity. During my research I noticed suddenly that my own grandfather was in the plastics industry. He was managing director of Deutsche Interplastikwerke, but already dead by the time, 1999. I called my mother and asked what did Grandpa do anyway? And she said, well, you can talk to me, too, my diploma thesis was about plastics, and you can also talk with your aunt, who also holds a PhD in plastics or your uncle! And then I real-ized: Oh my God, this is an issue that affects my whole family! In my family plastic was always kind of a sacred word and therefore I could not let go of this newspaper article, perhaps someone else would not have paid that much attention.

Awareness

CLC: How did your research affect you?

WB: The first study I read said that the more often you refill plastic bottles the more toxic products can emerge. I always had a plastic bottle next to the computer. After

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reading the study I got rid of this bottle and I switched to a glass bottle.CLC: One can not live entirely without plastic, or…?!

WB: The question is do we want it? Thanks to plastic, we flew to the moon. Without plastic, we still would not know about the moon at all. In essence, the question that is worrying me is that there are chemicals linked to cancer, infertility and other diseases, which need to be banned. Especially when it comes to sensitive products, e.g. baby bottles. I cannot accept that I go to the su-permarket and there are life-threatening chemicals that mess with my hormones and that cause allergies. I think that's outrageous!

CLC: In your opinion, what can an art exhibition such as PACKET-SOUP accomplish?

WB: There is indeed no coincidence that such a dispute has its origin in the arts. It is an intellectual discourse about an obvious problem. Art encourages finding so-lutions. That's what pleases me with respect to Plas-tic Planet: many people—such as Sandra Krautwaschel or the Ballet of Saarland State Theatre, which is based on the film Plastic Planet—come up with new ideas on how to buy plastic-free products. Art projects such as PACKET-SOUP have a nose for what must be con-sidered new and provide impetus. That is the only way change can happen, because it will be a lobbyist of the plastic industry, who will suddenly say, “everything is different now, I'm converted.”

Collecting

CLC: How important is the action of collection for your work?

WB: I have collected 700 studies on plastic and all sorts of information that can give me a picture on the topic.

CLC: Do you collect to find answers, or to feed the cu-riosity?

WB: I do not know. I just collect. You ask questions… I am looking for an answer, of course, but at the begin-ning of each new film I do not know what my question really is. I am only at the very early stages of the project if I have gained enough information that I believe, and then I can better understand aspects of the topic. Only then peels out the real basic question.

Restructuring

CLC: Decontextualization and transformation are strong elements of PACKET-SOUP. What kind of role does context play for you?

WB: This is a tricky question for the medium of film, as there is no movie that is objective. The context in which I show a film plays an immensely important role. At what point a finding will be art—I have no idea. My voice is the movie and I collect things to fill my movie with content. The selection of this content is always subjective. Solely

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through the medium of the camera and through focus on an object, it becomes part of the film work. Absurdly, I made a film about plastic and my camera is plastic as well as the film tape. We have asked ourselves again and again, are we supposed to film that at all? After all, film-ing is associated with spending or wasting plastic mate-rial. But we hoped in the end that the effect of the film, which is also made of plastic, is a more far-reaching one than the actual consumption of material.

Claudia Lamas CornejoCurator

SUSANNE RICHTER wrapping (WRAPPING)

wrapping (WRAPPING)

Plastic has become an indispensable material in our modern world. Its lifecycle begins in huge refineries. Crude Oil is still the major raw material used to manufacture plastics - approximately 4 % of the worlds oil production is requiered solely by the plastics industry.

Within the refinery, the crude oil is distilled into raw gasoline, called naptha, which is the raw material for the pro-duction of plastics. Through a process of thermal “cracking”, the hydrocarbon compounds are broken down into propylene, ethylene and butylene. Next, the hydrocarbon monomers are chemically processed to be converted to long chain polymers through polymerization reactions. In further steps, thousands of small plastic pellets are cre-ated. These pellets, enhanced by various additives, are the material from which most of our plastic products and packaging is produced.

The film „wrapping (Wrapping)“ shows the industrial packaging of polypropylene plastic pellets. Once they leave the refinery, a wide variety of plastic products are made out of them, most notably packaging products for the food industry. Packaging is omnipresent in our modern world, yet it is strangely invisible to our everyday perception. Once we open our products, the packaging disappears and ends up on our ever growing landfills. By focussing specifically on the process of wrapping the material that is later on to become the wrapping of our products, the film takes a look at the beginning of the very same lifecycle.

Susanne Richter Documentary filmmaker and producer

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YINGMEI DUAN and CAI QING The Discovery of Slowness

THE DISCOVERY OF SLOWNESS

Yingmei Duan is a curious observer who asks investi-gates different facets of life in order to constantly learn and develop. Much of Yingmei’s performance art ex-plores human instincts such as fear and desires. A vari-ety of themes inspire Yingmei Duan and are reflected in her work including the examination of society and ques-tioning its conventions and human behavior. For the art project PACKET-SOUP at SAVVY Contem-porary, Yingmei Duan and her colleague Cai Qing are drafting two performances on sustainability. Duan, who has a special interest in collaborative projects, focuses on interaction in her performance pieces. She engages not only with other artists, but also with the audience, the public and with objects. Her artistic pieces are works in progress and are often stretched over a long period of time, both in development and presentation.Yingmei Duan, who was born in the north of China, in-corporates elements of slowing down and deceleration into her artwork. Part of the Chinese avant-garde, she first worked as a painter at the legendary East Village Art District in Beijing. In 1995 she took part in the col-lective performance “To add one meter to an anonymous mountain”, which is considered one of the classics of modern Chinese art. After immigrating to Germany in 1998, Duan studied among other renowned artists such as Marina Abramović and Christopf Schlingensief at the Braunschweig University and participated in numerous national and international exhibitions, art collabora-tions, festivals and workshops.

Cai Qing works as a independent artist in Europe, New York and Singapore. He uses performances, installation, photography and video elements to express himself ar-tistically. The focus of his work explores the observer and an observed object at the simultaneously. Cai Qing focuses on people from different cultures and with a di-verse range of experiences. He enjoys interaction with other people in his works and his art is often inspired from people’s everyday experiences and personal life stories.

The performances by Yingmei Duan and Cai Qing will take place on 19th May 2012 at 7 pm at SAVVY Contemporary in Berlin-Neukölln. After the show, visitors will have the oppor-tunity to talk with Yingmei Duan and Cai Qing.

Claudia Lamas CornejoCurator

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B I O G R A P H I E S(in alphabetic order of the surname)

SARAH BODMAN Research Fellow at the University of the West of Eng-land, Bristol, (*1967 in Bath, UK)Sarah Bodman works at the Centre for Fine Print Re-search (CFPR), UK, where she runs research projects investigating and promoting contemporary book arts. She is also Programme Leader for the MA Multi-dis-ciplinary Printmaking course. As the author of Creating Artists’ Books and editor of the Artist's Book Yearbook, and The Blue Notebook, she writes a regular column on artists’ books for the ARLIS News-Sheet and the jour-nal Printmaking Today. Her recent artists’ books include Cherry Blossom Island Tree with Tom Sowden (2009), Dinner and A Rose with the artist/poet Nancy Camp-bell (2010), An Exercise for Kurt Johannessen (2010), No Dutch Details with Tom Sowden (video: 2011) and TOAST: A Night on Weevil Lake (collaborative book and video 2011).

WERNER BOOTE Director and author (* June 2, 1965 in Vienna, Austria)Werner Boote is an austrian filmmaker of eclectic mo-tion pictures and tv-movies (e.g. Plastic Planet 2009) and winner of numerous awards (e.g. Kurier ROMY, Silver Screen Award).

YINGMEI DUAN Performance artist – (October 27th, 1969 in Daqing,

China)Yingmei Duan is part of the Chinese avant-garde, where she worked as a painter in the legendary art dis-trict of Beijing’s East Village. In 1995 she participated in the performance “To add one meter to an anonymous mountain”, which is considered to be one of the classics of Chinese modern art. She became a pure performance artist under the influence of Marina Abramović at the HBK Braunschweig in Germany from 2000 to 2004. There, she also worked with the filmmaker and action artist Christoph Schlingensief.

NATHALIE FARI Performance artist (* 1975 in Sao Paulo, Brasil)As a performance artist Nathalie Fari integrates loca-tion and body related art as well as postmodern theater and minimal art into her work.

KATHARINA FINKEFreelance journalist (*May 16, 1985 in Frankfurt/Main, Germany)Katharina Finke is reporting from different spots around the world - for print (taz, Freitag, Zeit, Merian, Enorm, Fräulein, Greenpeace Magazin) and online me-dia (spiegel.de, zeit.de, stern.de) as well as for German-speaking television (ARD, ORF, SF).

JAN KUCKArtist and Designer, initiator PACKET-SOUP (* March 7, 1978 in Hannover, Germany)Since 2004, Jan Kuck’s main place of work and resi-

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dence has been Berlin. His artworks are primarily within the scope of performance installations and action art, combining multiple media and communication forms. In his work, he primarily plays with the viewer’s percep-tion, by implementing his objects in unexpected con-tents. In addition to his artworks, he designs innovative furniture and accessories with a group of Berlin based designers.

CLAUDIA LAMAS CORNEJOCurator and Culture-Manager (* October 16, 1983 in Munich, Germany)Since the foundation of SAVVY Contemporary Clau-dia Lamas Cornejo is responsible for management and Public Relations as well as for fundraising exhibition and performance projects at this non-profit space in Berlin-Neukölln. She participated as a media- and press-manager in numerous national and international exhibitions and publications. She has completed a B.A. in Intercultural Communication and a Master of Culture and Media Management at the Freie Universität Berlin.

PAMELA LONGOBARDIArtist and art professor at the University of Georgia (* October 1, 1958 in Glen Ridge NJ, USA)Pam Longobardi’s work encompasses multiple mediums from painting, to photography and installation to ad-dress the psychological relationship between humans and the natural world. Her artwork was and is shown at numerous solo and group exhibitions all over the world (e.g. Venice Biennale 2009). In 2006, upon discover-

ing the vast hoards of plastic the ocean regurgitates on remote beaches, she founded the Drifters Project, creating environmental interventions in Hawaii, Alaska, Costa Rica, China, Italy and Greece.

STEVE MCPHERSON Artist and lecturer (* 0ctober 12, 1972 in Margate, Kent, UK)McPherson - whose practice includes installation, sculpture, objects, book works, collections, assemblage, collage, experimental drawing, photography, video and sound - asks us to question what we perceive, what we can know and what exists in actuality, and therefore, if these notions exist at all outside of a theoretical con-text. In practice this is executed with a search for un-derstanding via maps, mapping, collecting collating and documenting.

BONAVENTURE SOH NDIKUNG Independet curator (*March 20, 1977 in Yaounde, Cameroon)Founder and art director of the art space SAVVY Con-temporary Berlin aimed at fostering the dialogue be-tween “western art” and “non-western art”. Project initiator and editor-in-chief of the bilingual art journal, SAVVY|art.contemporary.african. intended to be a plat-form for critical positions on contemporary African art with a focus on germanophone countries. He has been the curator of several international exhibitions and has published corresponding catalogues. He studied and earned a PhD in food biotechnology, medical biotech-

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nology and Biophysics in Berlin, York und Montpellier.

JOEY ORRArts & Sciences Fellow at the Emory University (Janu-ary 8, 1969, in Winter Park, Florida, USA)A former instructor in Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Joey Orr's work at Emory centres on performance-as-research and public practice. His curatorial work has focused almost exclusively on installation and public intervention, from alternative, grassroots venues to museum, commer-cial and municipal exhibition spaces. Past projects have been reviewed by Art Papers, Art in America, ARTnews, Contemporary (UK), Public Art Review and Sculpture magazine, among others. He currently serves as an associate editor for the Journal for Artistic Research (Bern, Switzerland).

CAI QING SONNENBERG Performance artists - (*April 8,1961 in Hu Lin, China)Cai Qing has been living and working as an independent artist in Europe and New York since 1989, in Septem-ber 2007 he relocated to Singapore. He uses perfor-mance, installation, video and photography to express himself. His art concept is the one of an “observer” and an “observed”, focusing on people of various back-grounds in different societies, inculding interaction with other individuals. Cai Qing has curated several impor-tant art shows, such as “Trace of Existence” in 1998 which was China’s first contemporary art exhibition in a private space. In 2008 he curated “Construction before

Destruction”, the last performance show in Sifo Art Vil-lage, Henan province, before its modernization by local officials.

SUSANNE RICHTERFilmmaker, producer and psychologist (* September 27, 1980 in Berlin, Germany)Susanne Richter is an independent documentary film-maker based in Berlin. She holds a degree in Psychology and Media Research and currently works as director and film producer for Anthro Media, a scientific documen-tary production company in Berlin. Her films (e.g. ARTE “Der Kampf ums schwarze Gold”) have been aired on German and French PBS and received several awards at international film festivals. She is lecturer at the FU Berlin for the Module “Children and Media” as well as at the University Trier for “Visual Research”. She is also co- founder of the gallery “tempoRärity – Atelier 42 Neukölln”, a showcase for contemporary art (film, paintings, photograpy and performance) in Berlin.

HILLA STEINERTPerformance artist (*June 9, 1960 in Preuntsfelden, Germany)Coming from dance she creates performance over more than 20 years. Space, time, material and the input of her own body are the basis for her artistic work. She develops her performances on the fundament of expe-rience, exploration and invention. Her main concern is to retrieve and visualize connections on all levels. Her works are characterized through her ability to establish contact.

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IMPRINT

ExhibitionPACKET – SOUP

CuratorClaudia Lamas Cornejo

ArtistsJan Kuck (DE), Pamela Longobardi (US), Steve McPherson (UK), Nathalie Fari (BR), Yingmei Duan (CH), Cai Qing (CH)Susanne Richter (DE), Werner Boote (AT)

PublisherClaudia Lamas CornejoBonaventure Soh Ndikung SAVVY Contemporary e.V.

EDITINGAndrea BomearClaudia Lamas CornejoJaime SchwartzBonaventure Soh Ndikung

GRAFIC EDITGiusy Sanna

Printed in Germany

ACKNOWLEDGMENTSNora Beilke, Pia Bogolowski, Désirée Düdder, Nadine Sophie Eckert, Beatrice Fabry, Vera Fricke, Cilgia Gadola, Carmen Gerner, Johannes Gillert, Mikołaj Golubiewski, Andrea Heis-ter, Diego Campo Hübner, Yvonne Hüttig, Anja Kalb, Martin Karge, Sebastian Karge, Damir Krajdl, Isabel Kraft, Sebas-tian Kretz, Raisa Kröger, Barbara Kuck, Theresia Kuck, Daniel Lamas Cornejo, Guillermo and Renate Lamas Cornejo, Koen Lenssen, Ionana Montenescu, Marcio Carvahlo, Mareike Nan-nen, Johanna Ndikung, Carlo Nordloh, Marcus Pauli, Kiruba Roberts, Ariane Rutz, Tobias Schwind, Sabrina Yvonne Veit, Désirée Wenzel

© 2012 SAVVY Contemporary© 2012 of texts: the authors© 2012 of reproduced images: the artists

SUPPORTED BY Stiftung Naturschutz BerlinPool Power Shop, Mosafil Fliesen, Ökologisch sinnvolle Wer-beartikel Antonia Kreiter, Karges Land film photography ani-mation, intertrex, Farbfilm Verleih GmbH

Contact:PACKET – SOUPdive@packet-soup.comwww.packet-soup.com

SAVVY ContemporaryRichardstr.43/4412055 Berlinwww.savvy-contemporary.com