A 35-minute train ride from the southern tip of Berlin’s inner city, I alight in Luckenwalde on a warm and sunny Saturday morning, ready to participate in a years-long conversation about a white-spotted puffer fish and the circles it makes on the ocean floor.
Almost seven years ago to date, The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish — or just “Fish” as the organisers nicknamed it — started from a seemingly simple premise that opened up a can of sea worms. Behind the project and now international forum lies the question: is art a human event?
What humans may perceive as tiny sand “drawings” remain elusive in their creation, intention, and meaning. Behind the designation of these drawings as drawings at all lies a human-centric interpretation — and perhaps even misunderstanding — of another animal’s mating ritual. If this is true, what does it mean for interspecies communication, or for the notion of past, present, and future coexistence?
Launched by Serpentine in tandem with its General Ecology programme and curated by Lucia Pietroiusti and Filipa Ramos, the series of symposia started in 2018 at London Zoo’s reptile house, with each annual episode since being staged in a new location, including Westminster’s Ambika P3, EartH Hackney, and Galeria Municipal in Porto, Portugal.
Today, Fish arrives in the German state of Brandenburg to celebrate its sixth incarnation and first major publication — a 400-page paperback by Hatje Cantz brimming with essays, interviews, and graphics that take an interdisciplinary exploration into the nature of minds — human, non-human, and otherwise. Hosted in collaboration with the Schering Stiftung at the most remote yet charged venue to date and titled Love and Lament, the sixth Fish makes a bid for care in a world characterised by collapse.
Following a group of artists, I wander through the quiet streets of Luckenwalde, making my way toward the festival site. Along the way, we pass a quaint cottage, its upper window slumping wearily into the roof. Nestled in a forest along the Nuthe River, Luckenwalde rose to prominence in the early 20th century as a centre for hat production.
In recent decades, however, post-Soviet industrial decline and rural depopulation have left the city sparsely inhabited — its streets lined with a wealth of historic, listed, and long-abandoned buildings. The sagging cottage and the iconic hat factory are just two of many striking yet neglected structures in the area. From Expressionist and Bauhaus styles to remnants of GDR architecture, the city’s built environment seems to call out for revival — a call that artist Pablo Wendel and his partner Helen Turner answered in 2019, when they transformed a disused brown coal power plant into something new.
Originally constructed in 1913, E-Werk is a power plant reimagined as a contemporary art centre. After lying dormant for over three decades, the colossal structure was revived to generate CO?-neutral electricity using wood gas. The energy produced here is called “Kunststrom” — or “art electricity” — a symbolic term for power that not only feeds into the grid but also finances artistic initiatives via its revenue.
In contrast to the day’s programmed topics of extinction, grief, and loss, the destination feels idyllic. A hammock-lined garden serves as base camp for talks, lectures, and readings, and in an uncoordinated inter-species contribution, many of the speakers mention how many ants keep crawling all over everybody.
Questions arise, are addressed, but not necessarily resolved: Has the economy become a bigger priority than the environment? Is our current state of crisis more acute than ever? If so, when is it time to mourn, how do we mourn, and does the public act of mourning parallel the internal, eternal, or beyond-human condition of grief?
Performances and screenings extend to interior galleries, an empty swimming pool, and the FLUXDOME — a bespoke, large-scale geodesic dome where artist Antoine Bertin delivers a hypnotic listening experience that mimics the sound of a fish’s heartbeat. Bertin also makes an appearance in the publication in an interview led by Ramos about his 2019 Fish performance, The Edge of the Forest. In it, the two discuss engagement with the sounds of an ecosystem and what archiving these sounds could mean for the future of “acoustic taxidermy” amidst loss of species.
Later in the book, an essay by Tim Ingold digs into the soil, and into the ethics, philosophy, and potentially dehumanising nature of archaeology. In fact, many of the book’s contributions address soil. A short and sweet contribution by Ramos ruminates on the existence of hermit crabs and their “calcium architectures.” It’s notions like deep-sea snail gentrification that, while absurd, are exactly the kind of anthropomorphic exercises that may be the key to ecological compassion.
Teresa Castro points out the delusion of tropical houseplants; which are not only remnants of colonisation but creatures who are victims of it. A passage written by a custom-trained AI presents a firsthand account by the earth itself describing the effects of wildfire on its “body.” Using vegetation data indexes, the transformation of regenerative growth is presented not as an environmental event but as a corporeal and sensory experience.
Packed with contributions from over 100 multidisciplinary practitioners — nearly 20 entries for each of its five sections — the publication is dense but diverse. The consensus of the afternoon is that even if our world is collapsing; even if species are going extinct all around us; and even if trying to make sure they are all accounted for before they’re gone forever is like running through a burning library writing down the names of all the titles in its collection, there is one good reason to do so: the next generation.
For their sake, the conversation alone is due diligence. Beyond that, the publication is a consecration of the events of the past seven years that is greater than the sum of its fish and, according to its publisher, an anthology — which means there are likely more to come.
As I board the train later that day that shoots me back into the urban jungle, it is something I am able to carry with me into the cataclysmic unknown.
A London launch of the publication is scheduled for September 2025.
