Birds, Fish, Nets, Skies

The exhibition project "Birds, Fish, Nets, Skies" began in the artistic residency Atelier Josepha at the Baltic Sea, where in dialogue with marine biologists, ornithologists, and the landscape the four artists - Simone Kessler, Isabella Martin, Bärbel Praun and Oksana Yushko - worked on their artistic research.

For 48 Stunden Neukölln, the artists re-imagine the project as a laboratory of maps - each work offers a different, incomplete but meaningful design of the world. Following Alfred Korzybski’s idea that the map is not the territory, the exhibition is grounded in questions of perception: which maps of the world do we trust, and whose experience do they contain or exclude?

In a world of warming seas and polluted coasts, the post-Anthropocene is no longer a distant scenario but a daily condition: humans now live inside the consequences of their relationship with nature. Inspired by thinkers such as Frans de Waal on animal intelligence, Robin Wall Kimmerer on reciprocity and Donna Haraway on “staying with the trouble”, the project asks what it would mean to draw maps that include more-than-human perspectives and responsibilities.

Scientific investigations become cartographies. Magnetic fields and experiments on Zugunruhe, recorded with Emlen funnels, point to perceptions of the world humans do not share. Shark hooks and new sea charts become maps of environmental stress. Ghost nets and marine litter trace the routes of our consumption, pointing to the violent, unintended maps of global fishing and plastic circulation.

By bringing together four practices grounded in scientific collaboration, ecological awareness and personal narratives, the project turns Neukölln into another shoreline and invites visitors to read these maps critically and sensitively, and to imagine new ways of care and drawing our place in a damaged, though shared world.

The exhibition is financially supported by Atelier Josepha in Ahrenshoop.