ALI(E/A)NSI Conversation #8

Sophia Fernandez — Water Is a Kind of Common Ground

For Sophia Fernandez, ecology begins through close observation: fungi orienting themselves through space, materials absorbing or resisting moisture, and living organisms carrying traces of their environmental histories.

Working with the mycelium of wood-rotting fungi, Sophia’s research gradually developed into Wetscapes, a series of material propositions that use water not simply as a subject, but as a way of thinking about relationships. Water becomes a common condition connecting organisms, environments and human-made structures.

The conversation moves from mycelium and material transformation toward the immediate ecology of Schöneweide and NOVILLA. Sophia lives around the corner, works nearby, and describes the fungi themselves as part of the neighbourhood. Soil, trees, grasses, dead wood, the Spree, clouds, humans and other organisms become part of a shared territory.

Within ALI(E/A)NSI, this expands into a question of what an ecological collective might be. Rather than treating ecology as something observed from outside, Sophia asks what changes when humans understand themselves as participants within these systems, and when artistic practice becomes a way of building more-than-human alliances.

The exhibition is also understood as a beginning. A greenhouse imagined for NOVILLA could become not only a place for growing, but an infrastructure for artistic and ecological knowledge: experiments, residencies, artworks, readings, radio and forms of collective research that remain connected to this particular place.

Below is the conversation with Sophia Fernandez, reproduced exactly from the original transcript.

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Origin

1. What came first: the need for a greenhouse/water infrastructure, the idea of an ecological design practice, or the relationships that required such a place?

Currently, I work with living materials, more specifically with the mycelium of wood-rotting fungi.

For the past two or three years, I have been growing and observing many different specimens, watching how they orient themselves in space, which directions they grow in, and what they seem to be attracted to or repelled by. At the beginning of my research, I had a very primitive image of these organisms. I imagined them growing evenly in all directions, almost like a pulsating dot in a simple animation. But the longer I observed individual colonies—or “inocula,” in mycological terminology—the more complex these rhizomatic structures became.

Water became particularly important through this process. Mycelium is hydrophilic. With the right amount of moisture, it flourishes; too much moisture, however, creates conditions for competing bacteria and fungi. Water therefore became a way of interacting with the organism.

This led me to the idea of Wetscapes. They are neither moulds nor simply scaffolds for mycelial growth – or any other type of organisms to grow. I think of them as invitations not just to think, but to grow physically and metaphisically to grow—on them and with them. The artefacts intent to open possibilities for interspecies communication – and to see our spaces as shared lived Environments between different life forms. Water is the common ground that all organisms access and rely on and therefore a central theme within my Research around living materials, but also when we talk about environmental activism.

Exhibition Relation

2. What does ALI(E/A)NSI provide as NOLAB’s first public constellation, and what should NOLAB retain after the exhibition disappears?

The work has an intimate relationship with the place where the exhibition takes place. It is literally my neighbourhood. I live around the corner and my studio is here. But it is also the fungi’s neighbourhood, because they live in my studio too.

Novilla and its garden bring together a particular constellation of elements: soil, trees, grasses, dead wood and fungi; the river and its water; and even the pink clouds you often see in the Schöneweide sky at sunset from the bridge behind Novilla.

I like to think of the place almost as a small Noah’s Ark. It gives refuge to these different elements and creates connections between them.

The exhibition does something similar. It brings together different materials, velocities, practices and stories. I like being part of this bright Blumenstrauß—something that mingles, senses, observes and connects. Perhaps it behaves a little like a fungal rhizome: forming alliances and dispersing again.

Collective Ecology

The word ecology feels very fitting in this context. It emerged from the biological sciences as a way of describing environments and the relationships between organisms and their surroundings. I am interested in expanding this towards a more-than-human understanding of ecology.

An ecological collective can be shared, just as a territory is shared, among trees, insects, birds, clouds, humans, rivers, fungi and many others. I am interested in how we might understand ourselves as participants within these systems rather than as something outside them—and how, in a Harawayan sense, we might build interspecies alliances.

Architecture as Practice

For me, this work is a first seed planted here. I hope that we can continue developing these ideas collectively and in relation to this specific place.

One possibility would be to establish a small residency programme for artists and perhaps scientists working with ecological questions. It could help us develop deeper knowledge of the site while building a broader community of allies who care for and engage with it. Over time, this could also contribute to a collective archive of knowledge connected to this particular place.

A greenhouse could provide an initial architecture for this. I imagine it not only as a greenhouse, but as a small infrastructure for artistic knowledge production and exchange. It could host ecological experiments, artworks, radio shows, readings or other small-scale formats.

We already have concrete plans and some initial funding to continue exploring this idea.

The Name — Wetscapes

Wetscapes is an invitation to look at materials and places through their relationships with water and wetness. How do they receive water? How do they hold, transport or repel it? What role do they play within larger systems of circulation?

I am fascinated by the economy of water because we all depend on it. In one way or another, every living organism does. Water is a kind of common ground.

This makes me interested in the roles different organisms, materials and environments play in holding, sharing, maintaining and responding to water—an essential resource that is becoming increasingly scarce.

Focusing on water means paying attention to something that is often invisible precisely because it is so fundamental to our lives.

The Patterns

All living organisms have a relationship with water. Humans are not the only ones who drink.

In that sense, all organic matter has a kind of “wet past” or “water history.” We can see traces of this in tree rings, for example. They register differences in temperature and moisture from season to season. Growth is always an interaction with environmental conditions—with water, light, temperature and other forces. It is neither linear nor regular, because our environments are not linear or regular either.

To create the patterns in Wetscapes, I use different organic materials as inlays. Each ceramic element contains a different material, such as organic fibres, yarns or powders. These materials have already been shaped by both biological growth and human intervention. A plant grows, for instance, and its fibres are later extracted, spun into yarn or processed into powder.

Each material therefore carries different degrees of growth and human transformation. I am interested in bringing them together and looking at them as material phenomena: How does human intervention change their relationship with water? What remains of their capacity to receive, hold or transport it?

For me, this also opens up a larger question about design. Human inventiveness can extract, control and damage, but it can also maintain and repair. How might we use our capacity to make things not to separate ourselves further from ecological processes, but to create conditions in which water, organisms and environments can continue to sustain one another?