2014-16
Tessa Zettel & Sumugan Sivanesan
Residency and artistic-research project with various events, performance-lectures, honey-exchange network and exhibition featuring works on paper, installation and archival materials.
Solo exhibition, Plan Bienen: Statements of Profit & Loss, with discursive brunch event, Rates of Exchange, Art Laboratory Berlin, Berlin, 2015.
Plan Bienen was a collaborative interdisciplinary research project carried out by Tessa Zettel & Sumugan Sivanesan over a series of residencies at ZK/U – Centre for Art and Urbanistics, Berlin. The project investigated urban beekeeping via the intersections between parallel crises in European economic systems and bee ecologies, within the context of Berlin’s post-reunification development as a multicultural ‘creative’ capital. Using local histories and the current popularity of city bees as an entry point, the artists mapped experimental post-monetary economies, forms of exchange and emergent sociabilities occurring across Berlin’s food systems, intercultural gardens, migrant networks, hackerspaces and hausprojekts.
Outcomes included a facilitated honey exchange network and series of commemorative ‘Notgeld’ banknotes, exhibitions, events and artist talks, performance-lectures, workshops, symposia presentations, small-press publications and journal articles.