Speculative Image Ecologies at the Forest Edge: Artistic Research on Urban Biodiversity in Berlin

This artistic research project investigates how working with images in the Westlicher Düppeler Forst, a Natura 2000 urban forest at Berlin’s western edge, can decentre anthropocentric habits of seeing and open up new ways of imagining urban biodiversity as a web of more-than-human life. Rather than treating photographs as isolated neutral representations, the project approaches their sequences and constellations as speculative image ecologies that help shape what becomes visible and thinkable about these relations where conceptual and indicator-based understandings reach their limits.

The work unfolds through procedures that trace a gradual shift in authorship from human-directed staging towards more-than-human co-creation. Contextual photographs situate the forest within its urban surroundings and mark where city and woodland meet. Staged, portrait-like photographs of fungi, ice, stones and roots explore sculptural presences that usually fall outside charismatic images of urban green. Authorship then shifts as image-making is partly delegated to wildlife cameras triggered by animal movement, so that images arise from encounters shaped by more-than-human agency. Finally, 35mm and medium-format film is placed under bark, in tree hollows or on the forest floor so that humidity, soil and decay inscribe themselves into the emulsion, inviting the forest to act as an image-making agent.

Drawing on theories of visual thinking and posthuman and speculative philosophies, the project explores an aesthetic-epistemological approach to urban biodiversity. It asks how composed image sequences, built from these different image modalities, can generate ecological knowledge that does not emerge in textual or quantitative accounts. Here, iconic syntax is used to build relational visual structures and correspondences across images, foregrounding relations, agencies and sites that remain marginal in scientific imagery. In this sense, aesthetic practice becomes a way of thinking with and through images about urban more-than-human relations and the conditions under which they can be perceived and understood.

The contribution is proposed as an oral presentation with projected image sequences and invites discussion of artistic image practice as contributing to an aesthetic epistemology that expands how biodiversity is imagined and made legible in urban environments.