Mollusc Realism

The Rural Cosmopolis project, based at RIFS (Research Institute for Sustainability, Potsdam), focuses on freshwater infrastructures. It imagines the rural cosmopolis as an adaptive, creative eco-culture by investigating the freshwater infrastructures and imaginaries of Berlin-Brandenburg through the transspecies, transhistoric and translocal lenses of freshwater mussels and Minoan (Bronze Age) Crete. Freshwater mussels are highly adaptable and biodiverse; they have successfully colonised much of the world’s freshwater ecosystems, adapting to ecological niches, and their presence is an indicator of healthy freshwater systems. Minoan culture extended creative craftsmanship from everyday objects for the home to social infrastructures, adapting specialist craft knowledge and skills and combining them with engineering knowledge for complex social and infrastructural purposes, such as designing and developing bespoke freshwater management systems. Minoans also had a visual culture with rich representations of freshwater environments.

The project engages in speculative, cross-disciplinary artistic research investigating the rural adaptive strategies of Minoan Crete and freshwater mussels that might be repurposed or reimagined for freshwater management in in diverse and biodiverse sustainable smart cities. The aim is to generate new imaginaries that extrapolate and recontextualise creative adaptive strategies, developing new processes and concepts for urban environments through artistic research, showcased in a final artwork.