As a participatory room installation common ground creates a space for inter-special connection – touching on topics of hierarchic, human-centred thinking, and wo*mankind’s relation to the unknown.

common ground invites visitors to experience reality consciously and in a shared space with the micro-algae Euglena Gracilis. Euglena Gracilis evolved at the overlaps of the animal and the plant kingdom – uniting in them many characteristics of non-human life on this planet. 
Sound – being the most direct path into the human mind – is used to help guide the visitors into a trance-like meditative state. How the Euglena Gracilis cell experience these vibrations is left open and up to speculation.
The installation does not intend to create a communication between species, or to show scientific results. It instead aims to make the visitors aware of their own ways of experiencing reality. common ground is a space where beings of different principles of perception can experience their worlds in their own way – in a unified field.

The installation consists of two video projection loop (ca. 45 min) of microscopic footage of Euglena Gracilis, Petri dishes hung from the ceiling with life specimens of the Algae and an ambient score played by stereo loud speakers. There is no interaction between the three. By creating this space of in-communication the installation opens up questions about hierarchic thinking in the Anthropocene: the human centered world view puts mankind’s intelligence above any other.

The original intent during the working process was to create a space without hierarchies – a space where different beings can exist on the same level. Throughout the process this attempt showed the opposite result. The more a non-hierarchic state of being was tried to be induced, the more the preexisting hierarchies – physically and in the human mind – were made obvious. These omnipresent hierarchies, deeply rooted in both the human perspective and in nature, are not denied in the work. Nor are they tried to be disproven, disregarded, or strengthened. The work tries to instead show them and to open a discussion about them. Both in the context of everyday life and in the artistic process when working with other forms of beings.

common ground was exhibited at >top Transdisciplinary Project Space and Biology Lab (June 2022) and was funded by the Bauhaus University Kreativfonds.