Yuki Jungesblut

Superalge, 2019/2025

Super seaweed poised to leap. Berlin in 100 years?
This super seaweed is really a kind of kelp.

Staring at the Water

When you look out over the water, preferably at the sea, there is that wide view that clears your head, brings back your breath and lets your thoughts fly. But sometimes, when you stare at the water without that horizon line, those thoughts can take on different shapes, and while you muse – about life or about the future – it can happen that suddenly you dive down, deep into your thoughts.

And so you come upon the vast underwater world, with all its flora and fauna. And it is there that you encounter this super seaweed, which is really a kind of kelp and, as it so happens, one that is more at home in the Northwest Pacific than in the rivers of Central Europe. But still – wonderful. Such an encounter under water. In the raging rapids, where kelp forests sway, wild and creaturely. And our specimen here seems poised for a leap. And – one more leap, voilà, it arrives in Berlin. Transposed. But what is it doing here?

Even when you stare at the water here in Berlin, even if it is only a little remnant of the Spree, squeezed between stone embankments, or one of the little canals that remain, you wonder – what does it look like down there? What is to be found beneath the surface? And what might it look like in the future? With global warming, sea levels will rise. Would Berlin finally be by the sea? Or would it, like Atlantis, lie beneath it? Perhaps it’s disappointing, but from what we know today, that is unlikely to happen this century. Berlin will remain far, too far, from the sea. Nevertheless, obviously things will look different under the water here, too.

So let’s stare at the water a little longer and so come back to today. And, well, yes, of course, it might also be an idea to act on climate change and global warming. And for that matter, these seaweed forests are no bad thing. Super seaweed ahoy. Save the kelp, save the climate.

Yuki Jungesblut is an artist based in Berlin exploring the boundaries between fiction, imagination and reality using photography, text, installation and film. She is inexorably drawn to transitional and threshold phenomena, the not-quite-fixed, the imperfect and the hybrid as a way of exploring potentialities, the construction of meaning and human experience. In her work she seeks to create spaces for thought which often centre on one particular question but which open up this question to a field of associations, where observations, shifts and translations interplay. She focuses on the implied, the understated and the comical in order to invite the viewers on their own journey of discovery and understanding.

Curated by Uwe Jonas