Studio Corrupted Space at Floating University Berlin with Cloudcollective and raumlaborberlin 20

Katherine Ball is the artist-in-residence at Floating University’s Performative Water Filtration Laboratory. Her artwork explores the infrastructure of everyday life.

When did you become curious about fltering water? When and where did your interest started? I guess I became interested in water pollution from growing up in Detroit, Michigan. There is a river called ‘River Rouge’ because sometimes it turned red of all the chemicals put in by car factories. When I was a kid, every week my parents and I would drive over a bridge crossing the River Rouge, and they would tell me how the bed of the river was made out of poured concrete to bring the chemicals away from the factories. From each side of the bridge you could see all the factories extending out into the horizon…like a sea of factories, sliced in two by this big interstate bridge with traffc whizzing past in 8 lanes. This has always been kind of in the back of my mind. Then, when I read this book by the scientist Paul Stamets titled ‘Mycelium Running’ about how mushrooms can help to save the world, I learned that you can use mushrooms to detoxify soil and to flter polluted water.

Later on there was a call by the Indianapolis Museum of Art for a project to inhabit Indy Island, a kind of igloo, foating in the lake near the museum. The water of the lake is polluted because of the river’s connection running through the city of Indianapolis. When there is as little as .6 cm rain, the city mixes the sewage with the rain and puts it into the river. I lived on the island and tried to take the pollution out of the water by using long ‘mycobooms’, a mushroom flter shaped like a giant sausage. There was no electricity at the island or running water but that was ok for me. Actually I enjoyed it a lot. I stayed in the summer so I didn’t need heat. One thing you do need is time because you spend a lot of time rowing things back and forth from shore: drinking water, clothes, materials. I became aware that you always need a plan and ask yourself ‘What am I going to need?’ There is one thing I had to sacrifce and that is space. I lived in a very tiny and minimalized space and it always took me a lot of time to keep everything tidy and organized. I found that more problematic than not having water or electricit

Artists nowadays relate more and more to societal problems. But you go a step further and even try to contribute to solve some of these problems.

Did you take this position right from the start of your artist practice? I have always been curious about ‘how things work’. When there is a problem I not necessarily try to solve it but I start to search for other possibilities and to fnd out what could work. Benni Foerster-Baldenius of Raumlabor always says: ‘We are not trying to make solutions, we are trying to ask questions’, but I am not interested in the pure activity of asking questions. I am interested in how the act of trying to answer questions – by making interventions – can reveal deeper insights. First I ask for instance the question ‘How to flter the polluted water in the basin at the site of the Floating University?’. I try to address this question and to intervene and do something. Just the other day I learned at the Floating University site something new about the membrane flters. I spoke to a person from a membrane company and proposed him to hook up the membrane flter at the end of a series of bathtubs that will contain biological water flters at Floating University. He told me that it would be better to put the membrane flter directly from the rainwater versus the end, because when the water fows to the other flters bacteria and dirt will be added. So by making and experiencing and by trying out new questions, new problems will arise and you will be able to ask better-informed questions for new issues.

Indy Island