Studio Lapatsch | Unger, Studio Johanna Schmeer

Anja Lapatsch and Annika Unger are Studio Lapatsch|Unger, a design duo based in Berlin, whose work researches material cultures and cultural phenomena revealing layers of knowledge between the past, the present and the future resulting in critical reactions and envisions of future scenarios within historical, ecological and cultural contexts. Johanna Schmeer is a designer and interdisciplinary researcher based in Berlin and design professor at Folkwang University of the Arts. Her inquiry-based work explores technologically augmented ecologies, industrial flows of matter, and the reframing of the human within its interspecies, geospatial, and technosocial entanglements.

Bodies of Water is a geohydrological investigation into Berlin’s regional groundwater systems, which provides almost 100% of the city’s drinking water. Reflecting on the flow of water that circulates in and out of human bodies, the project explores the complexities that lie beneath the city, providing artifacts that allow for a new perspective onto the impact of geology on human life. The first part of the project interprets the data of two-dimensional geological sections of the city and translates it into sculptural glass vessels, conveying the three- dimensional shapes of Berlin’s groundwater reservoirs.The second part gives an insight into the aquifers beneath the earth’s surface, focusing on the water-bearing permeable rock that filters particles and bacteria, and provides natural purification of groundwater. The artwork presented here gathers specific rocks from the geological layers beneath the city and uses it to transform the mineral quality of any other locations’ waters into that of Berlin’s, allowing one to access local water specificities through ingestion, sensing and tasting, and temporarily transpose into the local aquatic environment.

Bodies of Water has been developed in the framework of Flow of Berlin, a S+T+ARTS residency hosted by STATE with the support of BMW Foundation Herbert Quandt and by Prof. Dr. Irina Engelhardt from the Technical University of Berlin. The residency responded to the concerns and calls for radically new approaches to rethink our future relationship with Berlin’s water bodies and connected ecosystems, threatened by multiple anthropogenic impacts and the accelerating climate crisis.

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Bodies of Water - Studio Lapatsch|Unger (lapatschunger.com)

JOHANNA SCHMEER

Ars Electronica Archiv (aec.at)

STATE – S+T+ARTS