Bergit Arends
Curator & Researcher
- Projects involving social history, working on a sculpture project in Minsk. How the works and practices change every decade.
- Research management, how to raise funds and formulate a proposal.
- Link curating processes with research, funding and writing about curatorial processes.
- Work in museums, including the Natural history museum in London. Worked there for 8 years.
- Working with artists at the time, who’d been to the arctic. People do things as field work; how do you turn that into something that you show in an exhibition space. What do you find elsewhere? How do you work with other people through the materials you’ve got?
- Reviewing and revisiting histories, there are certain ideologies and histories that come into it. Keep on going back to see what kind of stories well.
- School in the GDR, tried to develop an education system, friendship countries.
- Curator called Mark Spencer, a botanist, had cardboard boxes of negatives of trees. Passed it on to Chrystel Lebas, prints her own work and is interested in the material culture of photography. Also interested in the images depicted in the photgraphs.
- Mark Spencer; understands how species relate to each other and understand how they develop. Had a forensic analysis of the trees etc.
- Looking at the environment, from a scientific and analytical point of view.
- Early ecologists working in the early 20th century, archiving their work.
- Being within a landscape and trying to see something from within the landscape.
- Constantly situating themselves within the landscape. Sense of seeing and seeing together. Sense of your body within the landscape, what do you see? How far do you see?
- Ecology looks at the way in which plants are connected, look at the plants within each other and that determines how you study an environment.
- Use of publication to convey the research processes which underpins the making of the work.