Autumn Newsletter +++ From Breaking Bauhaus to Growing Gaia – Wellbeing Culture Forum augmented with seven panel discussions in the courtyard of König Galerie Berlin +++ Commission of Egill Sæbjörnsson's Flying Waters video installation +++ A model of Sæbjörnsson's The Mother presented during Gallery Weekend Berlin +++ Therme Food Lab at Messe in St. Agnes +++ Wellbeing Culture Forum Digital: Human Cities – Fostering a Systems-Approach to Urban Life +++
Video overview of the Therme Art x Messe in St. Agnes programme
Therme Art is led by a modality of construction rather than simple critique or discourse. We believe now is the time to transform thoughts into action––to realise our ideas and solutions as positive manifestations of reality. Covid-19 and its social implications in particular have revealed the interwoven nature of social, economic, health and environmental systems. In this scenario, human culture is part of the problem, but it also holds the solution. If we want to change the programming of our culture, we have to connect with the complex system of nature. We can no longer simply build––we have to learn how to grow.
Read more about our position in Therme Art's paper Growing Gaia, published 10 September 2020, here.
FROM BREAKING BAUHAUS TO GROWING GAIA – WELLBEING CULTURE FORUM AUGMENTED IN THE COURTYARD OF KÖNIG GALERIE BERLIN
On the second weekend of September, Therme Art collaborated with König Galerie during Gallery Weekend Berlin to realise an augmented edition of Therme Art's Wellbeing Culture Forum. Across seven panel discussions staged under a large willow tree surrounded by the former church's Brutalist architecture, participants––together with other panelists joining by video stream––discussed solutions for cultural transformation in the age of the Anthropocene. The three-day interdisciplinary event attracted enthusiastic audiences in Berlin and online from all over the world. Therme Art’s curator Mikolaj Sekutowicz co-moderated each panel together with among others Sarah Wilson, Roya Sachs, and Hans Ulrich Obrist.
(Left to right): Egill Sæbjörnsson, Lucia Pietroiusti, Virgil Abloh (on screen), Roya Sachs, Mikolaj Sekutowicz, Tue Greenfort
Blueprints for the discussions were the humanistic powers of the Bauhaus movement, along with the Gaia Hypothesis of James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis. The Bauhaus was the first modern artistic movement that penetrated nearly all areas of life. The Gaia Hypothesis postulates a holistic view of the earth system and its interactions, leading to a view of the planet as a gesamtkunstwerk, a living organism. Nowadays, in the face of the pandemic and ongoing ecological and social challenges, we need to devise new means of cultural behaviour and multifunctional sites, creating immersive spaces to bridge nature and culture. The seven panel discussions sketched plans on how art can help build these bridges.
Mikolaj Sekutowicz and Johann König during the opening of Wellbeing Culture Forum at St Agnes
The talks programme commenced with Breaking Bauhaus – Renewing its Principles 100 Years Later.The panelists alongside co-moderator Roya Sachs consulted the historical phenomenon of Bauhaus in order to find answers to current crises in creation: how to transform acute needs and requirements quickly and consistently into material forms? How to extend the humanism of Bauhaus to include plants, stones, and animals in its vision? What is the secret behind the hyper-productive alliance of art and architecture of the movement?
During the talk, Counterspace architect Sumayya Vallyspoke of the lessons of Bauhaus for our current time, stating: “I think that there is so much to be learned in drawing on different disciplines, but also drawing on different voices, bringing together as many voices as we can for everything that we do––engaging and dialoguing and listening deeply to place so that we shift the edges of ourselves to include environments.”
The enduring importance of Bauhaus's interdisciplinary approach was also highlighted by designer Virgil Abloh: "I think curiosity and jumping over boundaries to create a new reality is vital... For me personally, when I approach the architecture side of my work, or the fashion side, or music side, I am operating on a sphere above the tangible. That ability to crisscross between discipline creates a language that sits above a programmatic sense of what the past was built on."
During Growing Gaia talk (left to right): Francis Kéré, Tomás Saraceno, Salome Rodeck
Breaking Bauhaus therefore broke down our understanding of culture and brought nature into the equation––a perfect segue into the topic of the next talk: Growing Gaia – Transforming a Hypothesis into Action. From the perspective of different disciplines, the speakers tried to grasp and mold this dialectic of building and growing.
Lucia Pietroiusti described the "violent separation between art and knowledge" in the Western world as a core problem––and at the same time, something that can be seen as the key to connect our thinking and acting symbiotically with processes of nature. In practical application, according to Francis Kéré, architect and artist from Burkina Faso, this means: ‘‘If you are in a place where you have a lot of clay, use clay. If you're in a place where you have wood, use it...it's great that the Western world starts to think about things like that.’’
Artist and spider collector Tomás Saraceno described how to co-habit with spiders to learn new forms of connection from them. ‘‘The evolution of our culture" must immediately take a turning point––this was for all one essential lesson from the ongoing Covid-19 crisis. Co-moderator Hans Ulrich Obrist stated:
“Lovelock and Margulis made it clear that the challenge is not to protect humans against microbes but to protect microbes against humans. Just as bacteria ran the earth for two billion years––and ran it very well, Lovelock told me––we are now running the earth and are stumbling. The future of the earth depends on us as much as it does on bacteria.”
(Left to right:) Hans Ulrich Obrist, Marc Spiegler, Sumaya Vally (on screen), Marcus Fairs.
Reflecting on her personal experience of lockdown as a single mother, artist and e-flux journal co-founder Julieta Aranda pointed out the inequality highlighted by the pandemic. The virus, she said, ‘‘has been moving across the fault lines that are already there in society, it rendered somethings visible and somethings incredibly invisible.’’ For Marcus Fairs founder and editor-in-chief of Dezeen, such emergent visibility holds the possibility of renewal: ‘‘Corona has created a war... all these battles will go on for how the city will be. Will the cars win? Will the pedestrians win?”
Through this pandemic, art and everyday culture are showing their interconnectedness. Especially in the current time, artists need space "to test out social interactions and to build social sculptures” as Mikolaj Sekutowicz said. It's time to learn now from these laboratories of contemporary art on how to shift our cultural behavior.Host Johann König remarked with a laconic wink:
‘‘It’s a bit sad that I have the feeling that we’ve very quickly come back into our usual pattern.’’
Art as Healingparticipants (left to right): Sissel Tolaas, Lucia Pietroiusti, Claudia Paetzold, Lillleth Glimcher, Riya Hamid and Roya Sachs
The fact that this cultural behaviour is also at the core of our wellbeing was the subject of the following talk. Art as Healing – Transformation of Interior and Exterior Lifeexplored art’s role as an alternative as well as a fundamental mode of healing, and its unique ability to foster, as co-moderator Roya Sachs put it, “mental, physical and emotional peace of mind.”
It was pointed out that today, more than ever, individual well-being and social well-being are dependent upon ecological well-being. For Claudia Paetzold, art holds the possibility to connect these spheres: ‘‘it makes us reconnect on the inside with the fact that we are all part of one large fabric of connectivity, and that we are all endowed with a special gift to create and to contribute something.” In this sense, healing appears not only as a process of regeneration but rather as an act of recreating environments. And because aesthetics is originally the art of sensory perception, Sissel Tolaas understands the way of perceiving art as an art of healing and of reconnection between inner and outer worlds:
“Tolerance starts with the sense of smell. We are equipped with amazing interfaces and those interfaces are called the senses. There are not only five, there are 12. And we don’t use them properly. So, of course, we are unhappy.”
Liquid Experiences participants (left to right): Jakob Kudsk Steensen, Takashi Kudo (on screen), Sabine Himmelsbach, Mollie Dent Brocklehurst, Hannes Koch, Sean Di Ianni (on screen) and Heiko Michels
Key figures from important artist groups of experience art, including Takashi Kudo of teamLab, Sean Di Ianni, founder of Meow Wolf, and Hannes Koch, co-founder of Random International, participated in the next talk Liquid Experiences – Immersive Experiences in Art, Nature and Cities.
An acute individual and eco-social need for connection, which was also observed in the previous talks, could be seen as a reason for the popularity of immersive art experience, so artist Jakob Kudsk Steensenput it: “The way I think about immersive media, in general, is that––instead of being that mirror you’re understanding––it can be a connection.” But this connection does not necessarily have to be an abstract virtual experience. In the sense of the Gaia theory, a lot of immersive art is currently being created around ‘‘the idea to communicate with nature and to use the technology to do that... to give nature a voice, to give the trees a voice,’’ explained Sabine Himmelbach, director of the House of Electronic Arts Basel. Mollie Dent Brocklehurst, co-founder of Superblue, the recently-founded initiative championing new and expanded models of experiential art, agreed, commenting:
“It’s about engaging people’s brains and bodies and finding new ways to engage them…when you’re looking at creating an art experience like this, it really is about bringing people back together again and creating experiences where they interact with each other––where they lean forward into the art. They become a part of it, and this is really exciting.”
Critical Culture panellists (left to right): Julieta Aranda, Edna Bonhomme, Arthur Mamou Mani (on screen), Nicholas Grafia, Simon de Pury (on screen), Moshtari Hilal (on screen) and Monilola Ilupeju
While concepts such as immersion, symbiosis, and new complicities between art and nature are pursued, where do we make room for criticism in this universal view of art and culture? This was the question of Critical Culture – Artistic Strategies in Reshaping Reality, co-moderated by Monilola Ilupeju from Therme Art`s curatorial team. Arthur Mamou-Mani formulated the paradox:
“Through art, one can have a universal language... But universal things would necessarily go against the idea of division, which makes it a bit hard in this topic. Diversity needs to come from division, but how then can we unite while keeping this diversity?”
Science historian and biologist Edna Bonhomme describes that a "methodological, observational" approach of science and critique is limiting; rather, critique today must interfere and be part of the creation process. Simon de Pury sees critique as such an active process. To the question ‘‘what is culture?’’ he answers, “we constantly have to question it, re-question it and I think a conversation like the conversation like we had today is precisely a part of the process of re-questioning and not taking things for granted.” So we create culture through criticism. Asked about postcolonial structures in art and culture, artist Nicholas Grafia claimedwe “actually have to invent a totally new language.” Similarly, for artist MoshtariHilal, “radical subjectivity as a creative approach” is the core element of critical culture.
In light of the Bauhaus-Gaia backdrop, criticism emerged in this talk as an ongoing cultural performance of producing diversities.
During Berlin, where are we now?: (feft to right): Anh-Lnh Ngo, Freo Majer, Ulrich Seibert, Constanza Macras, Adrienne Goehler
The weekend’s programme concluded with Berlin, where are we now? – A City as an Artistic Laboratory, which gathered a round of prominent local figures, controversial and diverse like Berlin, to discuss the place of culture in a city undergoing transformative change. The participants stressed the importance of cooperation and the role of culture in productively combining critical positions and diverging opinions. Adienne Goehler pointedly said:
“I hate silos. I also hate the art silo, as I think we are part of the problem and not the solution because art, of course, is one of the motors of gentrification as well… I stick to the idea that the capital has to be a laboratory, but not just an art laboratory…. a laboratory between different forms of existence.”Anh-Linh Ngo added the perspective of ecological cohabitation to this statement: “When we build our environment, we also build for other species to live with us.”
(Left to right): Kunlé Adeyemi (on screen), Hans Ulrich Obrist, Nicholas Grafia, Virgil Abloh (on screen), Joulia Strauss, Friederike von Brühl, Riya Hamid
The Wellbeing Culture Forum at St Agnes was realised in cooperation with leading design platform Dezeen;Messe in St. Agnes, the new Berlin art fair held on the grounds of the iconic St Agnes Church at König Galerie; and with London’s Serpentine Galleries.
The weekend’s programme included figures from diverse fields including art, culture, politics, architecture, fashion, design, cultural studies, science, law, healing, social activism, and entrepreneurship. These were:
Abuelo Antonio Oxté, Adrienne Goehler, Anh-Linh Ngo, Arthur Mamou-Mani, Claudia Paetzold, Constanza Macras, Cyrill Gutsch, Edna Bonhomme, Egill Sæbjörnsson, Francis Kéré, Freo Majer, Friederike von Brühl, Hannes Koch, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Heiko Michels, Jakob Kudsk Steensen, Jeewi Lee, Johann König, Joulia Strauss, Julieta Aranda, Kunlé Adeyemi, Lilleth Glimcher, Lucia Pietroiusti, Marc Spiegler, Marcus Fairs, Matana Roberts, Mollie Dent-Brocklehurst, Monilola Ilupeju, Moritz van Dülmen, Moshtari Hilal, Nicholas Grafia, Riya Hamid, Roya Sachs, Sabine Himmelsbach, Salome Rodeck, Sarah Wilson, Sean Di Ianni, Simon de Pury, Sissel Tolaas, Stefano Mancuso, Sumayya Vally, Takashi Kudo, Tomás Saraceno, Tue Greenfort, Ulrich Seibert, Virgil Abloh, and Yoram Roth.
THERME ART COMMISSIONS
Egill Saebjörnsson, Flying Waters at St. Agnes, Berlin
A central part of our work at Therme Art is to commission artists to realise ambitious and innovative projects that embody new modes of experiencing art. During the Wellbeing Culture Forum at St Agnes, we were proud to present two such projects by Berlin-based Icelandic artist Egill Saebjörnsson.
The first commission, Flying Waters (video above), was a site-specific digital artwork that was on view for the duration of Berlin Art Week from 8 – 20 September. Projected onto the majestic gable wall of St Agnes’s church, the work blurred real and virtual worlds, disrupting the urban landscape and creating an unforgettable break from everyday life.
Alongside the installation, Therme Art also commissioned a model of The Mother, the immersive water-based art experience currently in development for a future Therme Group facility. The artwork, illustrated in the images below, could be seen in the courtyard of St Agnes during the Wellbeing Culture Forum events.
THERME FOOD LAB AT MESSE IN ST. AGNES BERLIN
Therme Food Lab is rooted in an understanding of food as a foundational cultural practice. Together, Therme Group and Therme Art are developing the concept as a gastronomical component of their facilities, as well as a gourmet, cultural aspect of art events, and as a general research project within a new culture of wellbeing. In the belief that food is one of the vital acts of perception, Therme Food Lab examines the short- and long-term interactions of food with body, mind, and spirit.
At the new Berlin art fair Messe in St. Agnes, Therme Food Lab presented a showcase of this development. On the fair’s opening night, Hendrik Strempel and Michelin star-awarded chef Stephan Hentschel performed a plant-based Flying Thermic Menu for 200 invited guests, with courses specially designed to variously heat up, cool down, and otherwise enliven the evening. Over the weekend, visitors could also experience thermic meals at a Therme Food stand in the gallery’s leafy courtyard.
Stephan Hentschel (left) and Hendrik Strempel creating thermal-inspired culinary experiences during Therme Art x Messe in St. Agnes
HUMAN CITIES – FOSTERING A SYSTEMS-APPROACH TO URBAN LIFE
Human Cities participants (left to right): Anni Hood, Ben Rogers, Danny Sriskandarajah, Jane Withers, Prof. Dr med. Jörg Spitz, Stefano Boeri and Suhair Khan
Catalysed by the recent publication of Therme Group’s ambitious green paper Human Cities: Increasing Urban Wellbeing, the fifth public discussion of the Wellbeing Culture Forum on 2 September explored the question of the human city, focusing on the vital role of culture and creativity in creating urban environments which are more compatible with the wellbeing of both humans and the natural world.
Joining us in conversation were Stefano Boeri (architect and urban planner), Anni Hood (Chief Executive, Well Intelligence), Suhair Khan (Tech and Design, Google), Ben Rogers (Director of the Centre for London), Prof. Dr med. Jörg Spitz (Founder of the Academy for Human Medicine and Evolutionary Health), Danny Sriskandarajah (Chief Executive of Oxfam Great Britain), and Jane Withers (Design consultant, curator, and writer).
Despite the many challenges brought forth by this ongoing crisis, Therme Art looks optimistically towards the future, with a wealth of Wellbeing Culture Forum discussions and artistic commissions planned for the months ahead.
Our belief is that we should use this opportunity to foster a creative and ambitious culture of collaboration founded on wellbeing. This is the spirit guiding all of our projects––from the Wellbeing Culture Forum and beyond. Doing this, we recall the words of the late, great James Baldwin, often quoted by our friend Hans Ulrich Obrist: “The impossible is the least that one can demand.”
ABOUT
Wellbeing Culture Forum
The Wellbeing Culture Forum is a series of discussions in virtual environments catalysed by the present pandemic. Gathering experts from diverse fields, the series will foster the necessary collaboration and knowledge transfer to realise a vision of the city and its cultural activity in symbiosis with the natural world, generating a holistic approach towards the health of humanity. The series was initiated by Therme Art and curated by Mikolaj Sekutowicz, who is co-hosting each panel discussion together with various partners and partner institutions from the private and public sector.
The Wellbeing Culture Forum hosts diverse conversations about culture which are designed to create ‘insights for action.' At the end of each event, speakers will be asked for input to be further developed into a statement for incorporation in the Wellbeing Manifesto.
Therme Art
Therme Art works with internationally renowned artists and architects, as well as emerging talents, to commission and develop site-specific artistic projects that challenge the limitations of conventional exhibition spaces and redefine contemporary art viewing. Therme Art provides the resources and means required to fulfill artists’ visions which cannot be realised in galleries or museums, regardless of their complexity, production, installation, and long-term maintenance. Therme Art’s artists challenge the limitations of conventional art spaces, whether it be playing with the architectural elements of an environment, developing entire ecosystems, or creating immersive installations that transform visitors’ experiences.
Therme Group
Therme Group’s vision is to create the world’s most advanced wellbeing resorts, achieved by harnessing the complex interplay of nature, technology, and culture. By combining the traditions of global thermal bathing with an indoor biodiverse ecosystem, Therme Group’s resorts deliver an experience that enhances the mind, body, and soul.
Therme Group’s resorts are more than relaxing and fun places to meet, they nurture mental and physical health and offer vital pieces of social infrastructure. For more than 20 years, the Therme wellbeing resort concept has been transforming how people in Europe spend their free time. Current Therme concept facilities welcome tens of millions of visitors every year, and active new projects are under development in the United Kingdom, mainland Europe, North America and Asia Pacific.
