Puddle Forensics
Research class by Mirja Busch
What can a puddle tell us about the current climate crisis? Can it serve as a witness, sentinel, or forum for environmental change? Puddles are largely human-made, anthropogenic phenomena. They inhabit fixed places and reflect their location on many different levels. They are collectors of material traces in their surroundings, ecological niches for insects, hydrological reservoirs, and meteorological archives. This class will explore contaminated puddles as nature-culture assemblages and speculate on how they might serve to look at the world and the planetary crisis. Framed as a speculative forensic investigation, students from the Academy will be invited to conduct research in the field.
We will engage with specific urban sites in Antwerp where puddles show signs of contamination and investigate the scene. Are there other non-human actors that might be affected? Does contamination entail collaboration or pollution? Using artistic strategies, we will engage with scientific traces of contamination and explore the site-specific entanglements of different actors, paying attention to the clues and mysteries they might leave behind. A 'speculative forensics' approach will help us discover their stories—past, present, and future—and take a broader look at their translocal and transtemporal entanglements.
In dialog with scientists from the University of Antwerp's Environmental Studies program, we will discuss different methods, interpret results, and generate new questions.
We will conduct fieldwork at three sites and do off-site studio/lab work. Our group will set up a 'headquarters'—a room where we will learn to use basic lab equipment, conduct artistic experiments, install a research wall, and place our evidence samples, which will also serve for our final presentation.
Mirja Busch
Mirja Busch is an interdisciplinary artist and artistic researcher based in Berlin, Germany. She studied Fine Arts at the Braunschweig University of Art (until 2006) and participated in the postgraduate magister program for art theory and art practice at the Universidad de Chile, Santiago de Chile (2008−2009). A research residency at the Special Collection of the former Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2013) led to a longstanding engagement with Land and Environmental Art movement, centered around the question of how ‚authentic‘ experiences are created and mediated through documents.
Her artistic practice focuses on the materialization of the immaterial and the capturing of background phenomena, such as distilling theory or archiving puddles. She is a founding member of the artist collective Pathetic Sympathy Seekers and was co-director of the Alps Art Academy (2018−2023), Switzerland.
Mirja Busch took part in the Hydromedia research project, initiated by research group Thinking Tools of the Academy.
mail@mirjabusch.com
(image: Mirja Busch, 'Heavy-Metal Vibrations: or the dissection of a water Body', 'Ecosystems' exhibition, Academy, 2023, photo by Wannes Cré)
>> This research class is part of the Research Week during the annual research festival ARTICULATE.
