Meet the Curious Minds - Margherita Pevere
Meet the Curious Minds - Margherita Pevere
Interview by Lise Ninane & Fotini Takirdiki
Photos by Veronika Hubert Natter
Credit: Veronika Hubert Natter
What are the thinking processes and knowledge practices that guide your artistic research?
My practice is genuinely trans-disciplinary since it combines visual art and performance with biology and biotechnological methods. In the past, I widely engaged with digital media and I have a background in political sciences with a focus on environment. What guides my research is an obsessive curiosity for living matter. This obsessive, radical curiosity pervades both the artistic and scientific ramifications of my work. What inspires me is the interplay between the sensuous instability of living matter (embodiment) and the inherent friction enfolding nature and culture (environment). Such interplay between embodiment and environment permeates my practice when I work at a performance, when I research for a new piece, when I work in the controlled setting of the biological laboratory.
Credit: Veronika Hubert Natter
Your question suggests a reflection on method. With this regard, I would like to say how I have learnt to be a slow observer, and how I owe it to my long-time companions: plants. Plant’s amazingly different time scale invites us to think differently. Just think of the centuries-long life span of trees, or the time it takes for an apartment plant to get used to a new pot, a different room or light exposure, or to absorb the shock of pruning. It is necessary to observe, to understand what a plant needs and whether and how to intervene or rather not. This slow observation has become a habit and a method that sustain my research. In times of ecological complexity like ours, I find it important to be able to understand how my biotope (the Kiez, the city, the region…) is doing. What animals and plants live in the neighbourhood? Are they endemic, or exotic? Take the Spree river: how does the transparency of its water change over the seasons? does algal bloom happen, when? and why?
On the other hand, I learnt to be very quick. I owe this to the years of research behind me, which have brought me a deep trust in intuition. It’s an… “educated” intuition, but I learned to trust how one spots connections that are hidden in the information noise. Slow observation and trust in intuition are underpinning elements in my research.
What are you currently curious about? What makes you want to dig deeper?
In the way I work, everything that comes along in life comes together in the research itself. There is no real division from what I engage with in my research and my daily life. They just resonate with each other.
Credit: Veronika Hubert Natter
Apart from navigating post-pandemics reality, my upcoming months will be busy along three directions. One direction is writing the dissertation of my PhD. My research delved into the environmental implications of vulnerability and “openness” of human and non-human bodies from a posthuman feminist perspective. The PhD is practice-based and involved the realization of the artworks Semina Aeternitatis and Wombs.
Another direction is the new piece following Humane Methods, the trans-disciplinary theatre piece developed with Marco Donnarumma for Fronte Vacuo (the artist group I founded with Marco Donnarumma and Andrea Familari). The third direction is the preliminary research for a future artistic project – but it’s too early for releasing details about it.
The red thread connecting these three directions remains my critical curiosity towards the environmental emergency of our times and visceral fascination for biological matter.working on now whenever I have free time. We did 3D laser scans in forests and inside their server room, as well as some 8K filming. The film is reflecting about the connections between a technologized city and the outside nature exploring themes of (non-) human life, machine intentionality and future societal structures.
Credit: Veronika Hubert Natter
In what way does the current situation with Covid-19 encourage you to explore new ways of learning and collaborating together?
I am biased because of the transdisciplinary character of my work and because the implications of Covid-19 do speak along the lines of my research: openness and vulnerability of bodies and environment.
I am not a scientist and dare not to draw conclusions on a hugely unresolved emergency. I am an artist, an intellectual, which may allow me and my peers to see things from an unusual angle. Working with biological matter taught me the fundamental unpredictability of the living. I learnt preventing contamination and containment; I learnt to observe - and embrace – unruliness.
But who is the parasite today? There has been copious discussion about the Anthropocene in recent years. The geological concept suggesting that human activity has shaped a new geological era “infected” humanities and public discourse about human relation to the environment. But here we are. I am astound by the power of a liminal being such a virus to disrupt the world as we knew it. Humans are hunkered in danger because of a viral outbreak. Anthropocene, really?
I hope trans-disciplinary work will be at the core of the discussion and strategy on the current pandemics. We need virologists, politicians, economists, engineers to work together to alleviate suffering and counter economical collapse across nations. Importantly, we need to support doctors, nurses and caregivers. We need to protect those more at risk. We need engineers and designers to come up with compostable sanitary consumables such as masks and gloves. We need to tackle the environmental consequences of pandemic containment.
Credit: Veronika Hubert Natter
But we also need to think broader than “us”. We need to rethink our relation to other species and the environmental implications of the pandemics. We need to take care of animals, plants and whole ecosystems affected by pandemic consequences. We need to rethink the way our societies are not prepared to the moment “nature” kicks in. And so on. All these needs are interrelated: we have to address them transversally to be able to “see” things that are not otherwise evident.
With regard to the arts, we need to rethink how art can remain accessible to the audience. There are excellent examples of online platforms or streaming projects, but not everything can be streamed. I am aware of some initiatives that tackle the problems arising from a society in confinement (what about performing arts?), but also sustainability of the arts. I am afraid there are no easy-to-go solutions, and it’s time for a general radical rethinking. I hope that artists’ (and curators’! and producers’!) competence in unconventional and critical thinking may provoke and infect broader discussions in society.
Artist Profile
