Jakob Kudsk Steensen: Berl-Berl Brings a Singing Swamp to MoMA
Jakob Kudsk Steensen opens Wetland at MoMA, where Berl-Berl turns the lost swamps beneath Berlin into a living digital landscape that sings with Arca's voice.
Jakob Kudsk Steensen opened Wetland at The Museum of Modern Art in New York on October 12. The show holds a single work, Berl-Berl, on the Hyundai Card Digital Wall in the Agnes Gund Garden Lobby, and it stays on view until March 7, 2027. MoMA asks visitors a simple question to begin: what once existed under the streets where we stand?
Berl-Berl takes its title from the Slavic word for swamp, the origin of Berlin's name. Since 2021 the Danish artist has grown it as a living simulation of the wetlands the city was built on. It came out of months of fieldwork in the remaining wetlands of Berlin and Brandenburg, research into Sorbian and Slavic folklore, and specimens of local rocks, plants and animals from the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin. Steensen builds the landscape with macro photogrammetry, 3D scanning and the Unreal Engine, so it never settles into one fixed picture.
The swamp also sings. Steensen and the composer Matt McCorkle made field recordings from canoes in the wetlands, and McCorkle shaped water and amphibian calls into rhythm and song around the voice of Arca. The work was first commissioned by LAS Art Foundation and shown at Halle am Berghain in Berlin. As the artist has put it, "Technology for me, in the sense of being a medium, is a connector."
The same close attention to plant life has also reached the blockchain. In 2022 Steensen contributed Frozen Fern Genitalia, 52 03'08.7"N 13 52'34.4"E, a colour image titled with a set of map coordinates, to Ecotone, a Feral File group exhibition minted on Tezos.
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