Art Climate Transition
Co-funded by the
Creative Europe Programme
of the European Union
18 January 2023

BERRU: creating unreal places with real possibilities

The Interview Series #8: BERRU

by Arie Lengkeek & Jacco van Uden
Berru, transforming energy, (c) Renato Cruz Santos Berru, transforming energy, (c) Renato Cruz Santos

Since ACT is about making a change, we need to talk about impact. We must learn about the sorts of impact art can make, about the role and place of impact in art practices, and about how art practices themselves are impacted, for instance by Covid-19. 

Therefore, as part of the Learning to Impact Work Package of the ACT project, we research the many faces of impact. We do so by interviewing artists. With The Interview Series we tap into their embodied, concrete artistic practices. We want to build an understanding of how these practices (may) evolve in the face of the current challenges. How the artists learn to ‘stay with the trouble’. How the urgency of climate change, ecology and biodiversity informs their attitude towards the social impact of their artistic work. 

#8: BERRU: ‘creating unreal places with real possibilities’

We meet with BERRU: three young Portuguese guys working ‘as a studio’, as they say. During the year 2022, they worked on a project for Culturgest and COAL: an experiment, an exhibition, something with the sea, with energy, with resonance, with large metal sheets, vibrant matter. A documentation around the work can be found here. In the ‘learning to impact’ interviews series, this is the first collective or ‘studio’ that we encounter. Although all other artists work, without exception, in lots of collaborations and entanglements, we have a conversation here that’s different. The zoom-interface offers three heads in frame. Three heads speaking, thinking out loud, pondering, sometimes contradicting each other. But there is only one collective, and the artists are also quite pressing on this: they are BERRU, they are one. So, talking with them about ecology, about the living nature of inert matter, about creating perspectives instead of solutions, the interviewers ‘witness’  the conversation between the three of them, ‘we are a dialogue’. Who says what is not of importance. What is said and what it provokes, is. 

>We are BERRU, we call ourselves a collective, we work as a studio. We create things.
>Our artistic work is done together. BERRU is one entity. We are the multiple souls of it.
Having multiple interests, amongst us three, this comes to a place where we do performance, installations, and whole different sort of stuff.
>We try to de-categorize, we try to do things of which you cannot say ‘oh it’s a sculpture, oh a performance’… We try to avoid that.
>Yea, we try to avoid that, we ‘re multi…
>…It’s not multi, it’s anti-disciplinary!

How did the work of BERRU start? 

>We started to think about installations as cinematic view.
>Ha, in reality it all started when some friends asked us to do light installations for the parties. People liked it, we enjoyed it. 

>It was organic –

>Me and Bernardo, we studied cinema, like video-work. 

>And I, I’m a multimedia engineer…

>…but please do not use our names! It’s BERRU… 

>…organically we started doing installations- and now it’s all we do. 

>We started to be together. Think together. Share time together. Share thoughts. Share friends. Share life, share everything…. 

>Actually, I think we have a pattern! Which is: something that we all like. If us three like the idea, the concept of it, it all starts with something that all three of us like. 

>…we shared a lot of things, saw movies together, lived together, worked together. Let’s do this! Then we started thinking: what’s the material that’s needed? What’s the amount of energy that’s needed? What do we want to do? 

>What attracts us the most, as you were kindly saying, things that affect us three- not me as an individual, but us- as a studio, as society…
>Yes,more universalized things, I think. 

>We don’t have that individual artist doing his own job, … introspective…., no: we don’t have that because we are three. … Yes we are three. ….

We are a dialogue, not introspective. 

>It makes sense for us, when we think together, when we put things in a different perspective, it’s easier to understand other points of view. So, we tend to understand: what are we looking for? What do we need this space to think of, or to create awareness… Our intention is to create awareness. 

Do you consider yourselves to be ecological artists?

>I don’t think so, no. In what way?

>But what does it mean to be ecological? What does it mean?

>What does it mean? What does it mean to be ecological? My Ecological might be different than yours.

>Of course, we are ecological in a way that we know where we live and the time we live in, but we don’t tend to be so openly politic. No, no. We of course, everybody’s ecological, but we we try to…

>I don’t think so.


>No, I think: the three of us, we tend to agree that art is more than just another thing. It’s super meaningful, it’s a powerful, really powerful way to approach people because it approaches them on another level. It’s not about graphs, it’s not about numbers, about bullshit that people see in a screen or in a computer and then… forget about it. Our art tends to approach people in a sensible way.

>We try to not explain too much, we tend to create an environment, an happening, something… and we let people decide. But of course, we try to show some stuff. 

>I think we have been working on…well, normally you have a problem, and you give a solution. But now, we are more into… how do you change the perception? So, in Culturgest we worked with vibrating metal, so that people come closer to it, and touch, to feel how ‘inert matter’ as we say it, is actually a living thing, and that is how you come to ecology, I guess.

If we change the perception of people on how they look at things, this inert matter, they will look with another perspective at other things as well.  

>Whenever you, you explore the sensibility of something that is inert. That’s something that. …It’s not organic, right? So …. but it can have a sensibility. You can create a correlation between like organic or living beings. So it has a past. It has a history. This metal sheets that we used in the sculptures of the Culturgest: we shape, transform them. And then: they acquire a past, a history, they have a moment in space and time that they were created. We put the metal in the sea, where the sea meets the land. So the water and the sand transformed this entity, this inert matter.
 >Yes, of course, and even the sound that we were recording through the metal, through the sculptures, contributed to creating this notion of entity in the metal. 

>There’s a notion of entity, there’s a memory.

>You know, the characteristics we only attribute to humans.

>Do you know this book? Vibrant Matter, by Jane Bennett, ‘a political ecology of things’, this is what we explore in our work. To explore ‘what is typically cast in the shadows: the material agency or effectivity of nonhuman or not-quite-human things’, as she says.

>And then this project also began with the idea of harnessing energy and expanding it in the performance. And so we also did that in a way of recording the sea’s energy and then injecting it into the sculptures, that energy. So we, we harnessed energy and then we disperse it through the metal…
>Sorry. You talk too much. 

>…

Then, how does this perspective on ‘vibrant matter’ inform your process of working?

>OK, I’ll try to start. I think we’ve been working a lot with metal because it resonates. As soon as you inject sound or vibrate it through a mechanical exciter, through whatever technology, it resonates. A mechanical exciter is the technology that we used in this project. So it vibrates.

>…Oh no, I don’t think they want to know about technical things.

How does the work start? You know, we received an email saying we are from Culturgest, we are looking forward to work with you in a big project. Let’s meet. And the first meeting they told us this year in fact the theme was about the oceans, energy of the oceans or the energy that could be produced by the oceans.

>Yes. And that we had our work was to be related with the sea. This is how it started. This is what we are the first thing that we they told this like something related to the sea ….and we were working on energy…

>….That’s why I was trying to reach a point with the whole vibration thing! Go on.
>Well, it’s a way of recording and listening to energy itself …. because it is vibrating in the metal itself, it’s a perfect example of energy being sound. This is, I would say, the main importance. So, it was recording the energy and expanding in, in the performance, and those sheets. We folded them to give them characteristics, to give them specific tones, eh… the materials.

>So we use the metal with some copper to be conductive and metal with zinc, not to be conductive. Then you have an anode and a cathode. It’s the way for you to capture energy, like the lemon-and-potato-battery. 

>Now almost all ecology and energy is about the sun. We wanted to create a biological battery with the sea. We tried to understand what energy could come from the sea before the wave energy. So we ask ourselves which process in Earth that could generate energy. We researched and found the recurrence: a low voltage energy in the deep ocean that is a super low frequency oscillation from Earth. And we were trying to think: can we see the ocean like a battery!? How to harvest that energy? We looked for thermodynamic nano generators…

>… we looked for electrostatic energy generators transforming electrostatic energy to electrical energy. So we try some stuff. We saw some videos, we experimented. But we understood the problem was much bigger than this because these are like scientifical experiments, you know. This is not for us. We started to see how we can do it, what is needed. And we understood this was out of our league.

>No, we didn’t. I think it was not because it was out of our league. It was because our aim was never to find the easy solution of energy that would solve anything. I think it’s not about solving technically the energy problem.

It is much more about solving how we look, or how we interact. 

>Yes, indeed. We found ourselves producing what Timothy Morton criticizes as ‘Easy Think Substance’, an apparently simple and logic solution, denying complexity and entanglement of all things and matter. It was like we were spending too much energy thinking on a practical fix whereas we should be looking the other way, like, what can we do without energy? What else can be energy? So how can we really use energy, do more, do more about it? And we believe it’s through changing how people perceive their surroundings.

What will your audience eventually experience from this process of exploration and creation?

>The process was really important. You know, it was a big, big part of the whole project to get those metal sheets into the sea, to give them that experience of the sea, for the natural causes to impress some of drawings, some scratches, some rust, even of a transportation of the sea.

>And also to access that idea of the energy from the sea. So we show five sculptures and the sound. And then in another room we had a video of the recording of that. So if you went to the exhibition you would see the metal sheets, the installation and then you would see the video of it. So we wanted for people to know about the process.

>But I think what I most enjoyed about the response of the public in the gallery itself, was to see the relation that they created with, with the sculpture. So this sculptures were made to be touched, to be felt and to be listened to. Closely, very very closely. This speaks about what we mentioned before, the sensibility of the objects and the memory in it. We see how this enables a relation, an empathy towards the object, towards the sculpture itself. So you listen to metal in a way that you’ll probably never do, and you touch it in the way that you usually don’t do. Yeah, I think that’s the most amazing thing that I saw the public’s response, this approach.

>Yes, this approach is amazing to see. You touch the metal and it vibrates, and it vibrates because it’s being injected, with the sound that was recorded in the water. You feel the sea, the metal speaks of it. And I think that’s a really powerful way of communicating and creating empathy, and closing the gap between people and the world, and between the living things and the non-living things too. 

>….

That is quite a clear agenda. So, to come back to our main topic: to what extent, if at all, do you ever work with an idea about the impact or an effect you want to achieve through your work?

>I have something else to say, which is that we normally don’t explain our work too much. We like for the public to go there open minded and to create their own relation with the piece. The work has no message, ‘I’m trying to say this to you’. We believe that change happens when you create your own relation to the things, and not to my ideas.
>Yes, we need to provide the space, the space to create your own approach to it. 

>Indeed, I think people are more engaged when we don’t say much. 

>In a way, it’s quite a paradox, and we still are struggling with it because in a way you want to talk about it and share, which was our idea…

>We leave things really open, but: when I say we don’t explain, it’s through text, verbally explaining. But I think we control a lot of how you see the installation, how it is posing, how you feel it. And I believe it’s through that, that we create impact. Through that, we can change a bit the perception for people to be more open to things you don’t normally see.

>For instance, we don’t write in the synopsis ‘Pay close attention, come close to the artwork’. We just lower the volume because that’s a design principle almost, that you invite people to come close because they want to hear the sound.

>We try to modulate perception. The lightning, the position of things, the forms that we use, the shapes, the …how it is displayed, what is the music, what is the temperature, what is the humidity, what you feel when you enter? And we try to experience everything that we think of, it’s really…. it’s dialogues.

>…as I, as we were talking about in the beginning: it’s a bit like cinema. So in cinema you have tools that provoke feelings, that provoke affect…. I can shoot a scene in many different ways and it would make you feel many different ways. And I think it is…

>…cinema in reality. It’s creating these scenarios that you experience. You walk around and you feel, you think and you revise, you go and think back on it, go again and experience a different feelings that you didn’t feel before. Our work is really similar to cinema, but it’s real-world cinema. We are creating these unreal places with real possibilities. 

>Not real, but common possibilities… We show processes that are there, but they don’t know. And when they experience it, they are amazed: ‘wow, this is already there! I didn’t know!’ Its’ not about dreams and phantasies, it’s about exploring a different reality.

So, your own curiosity, igniting the curiosity of your audience by creating these deep familiarizing experiences, connecting mankind and matter?

>Oh that’s really nice. Thank you very much. 

>Yes, for us it’s also about what makes us curious.

>Curiosity is quite important for us. 

 

 

 

More from BERRU: website

See the Relay Lecture with BERRU, relay lecture

See a ‘micro-site’ on the work discussed in this article: transforming energy

Read what inspires them most:

Jane Bennett: Vibrant Matter, a Political Ecology of Things (2010, Duke University Press)

Timothy Morton: Dark Ecology, for a Logic of Future Existence (2018, Columbia University Press)

 

This is the eighth article in The Interview Series on Impact.