An Ecosystem of Excess

Pinar Yoldas (Porgramme for Visual & Media Arts, Duke University, North Carolina) and Regine Hengge (Institut für Biologie, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
Introduction by Heike Mertens (Schering Stiftung, Berlin)

The Turkish artist Pinar Yoldas centers her work on The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a garbage vortex made up of several million tons of plastic waste in the North Pacific. According to the “primordial soup” theory, life on earth began four billion years ago in the oceans, when inorganic matter turned into organic molecules. Today, the oceans have become a plastic soup. Pinar Yoldas asks what life forms would emerge from the primeval sludge of today’s oceans. With “An Ecosystem of Excess” she created a post-human ecosystem of speculative organisms and their imagined environment, an evolutionary experiment running during her exhibition at the Schering Foundation in 2014. Regine Hengge, professor of microbiology, has isolated and grown the bacteria from Yoldas’ “Plastic Soup” and includes them in a demonstration of the visual wonders of bacterial microfilms. Although invisible, bacteria colonize every spot on earth, including the human body. They can adapt to most extreme changes of their environment and have played a key role in shaping our current atmosphere.

In cooperation with Schering Stiftung