Katharina Weikl works at the intersection of art, science and society and holds a Ph.D. in the history of science from the Humboldt University of Berlin. She is the head of the Art x Science Office at the University of Zurich, where she works with scientists from all disciplines and creates collaborations with a wide range of artistic fields. Notable exhibitions she has curated in Switzerland include "Planet Digital" at the Museum für Gestaltung, "100 Ways of Thinking" at Kunsthalle Zürich, and "Transactions" at Manifesta 11 in 2016. Internationally, her work has been shown at the Mun Gallery at the Dongdaemun Design Plaza (DDP) in Seoul, South Korea, as well as the Science Gallery, in Bengaluru, India. We interviewed her in Bengaluru in April, during her very first visit to India, facilitated by Swissnex-India.
You have a PhD in History. How did art come into your life?
I think art was always in my life. Art is just one way of perceiving or reflecting on the world, and science is another one, and they go together. This whole distinction doesn't make much sense in my opinion. I was always in between choosing either going to art school or going into architecture or the history of science, which is what I ended up doing.
What was your first-ever art-science collaboration?
In Europe, there is a biennale called Manifesta focused on contemporary art, which goes through different places within Europe. In 2016 it came to Zurich and the University of Zurich participated in it, and we created an exhibition where artists and scientists worked together. The overarching theme was “work”, and in our exhibit Transactions, we brought together more than 50 artists and researchers to collaborate on the question “What people do for money“ and transform the main building of the University of Zurich into an experimental space for artistic and scholarly exploration.
The title “Transactions” is inspired by one of the oldest scholarly publications still in print: Philosophical Transactions, established in 1665. To this day, the journal continues to unite all academic disciplines within its pages. It is in this open-minded spirit that we invited researchers from the University of Zurich’s seven departments, and artists working in a broad variety of media to participate in a multidisciplinary exchange of views. The exhibit was quite a success with a huge media response, which motivated me and the University of Zurich to continue this type of transdisciplinary collaboration.
In your experience, has there been any medium that has been most impactful or effective in communicating?
In this work, you quickly run into practical issues like how to transport an exhibition or how to find a space to show things. All these issues don't have anything to do with the immersion or the engagement of the visitors, but it's cost and space. In that way, the medium of film is an amazing medium because you can send it around without any cost. You can show it on different scales.
Could you explain the process behind Triggered by Motion, the exhibit here at Science Gallery, Bengaluru?
I was always into image photography and video. I was gifted this camera that came with a motion trigger that would do all the filming when I wasn’t there and that changed everything. I ran into the forest and installed the camera in the forest near my home. This is something that is allowed in Switzerland. My apartment was on a dead-end road that continued into a forest.
Something very nice about Zurich is that you have these hills around the city, and forests that have quite a lot of wildlife, which I didn't know before. I woke up super early the next morning (usually I’m not a fan of getting up early), and I checked the camera in the woods, and it was full of wildlife. A fox had come by, a weasel and a badger - the most comical, cute animal I have ever seen was my neighbour. It was amazing!
“This completely changed my perspective of the city and my local forests because suddenly I knew, when I went to sleep, this forest started to have a party.”
I started to see things that I didn't know before. The badger was sitting there taking a lot of time scratching like its a morning routine, and then the other badger came by and then together they started their scratching and then I saw how they came back to their underground house early morning; it was wonderful.
Ecology is a very important research area at the University of Zurich - I think the University of Zurich is right now ranked number 4 worldwide in the field of ecology. They have many different research sites in South Africa, Turkey, and Botswana…there's a collaboration with the Zurich Zoo and the Lewa Wildlife Conservancy in Kenya and several others; in the Alps for the Ibex in Italy, Switzerland and other places. So I started to connect with different research departments to bring out the idea that we could create a video installation. At first, I was thinking of a smaller scale with fewer places and then they got very excited about the idea. Swissnex was very important in this. For example, Swissnex in India helped us to find a connection with IIT Madras and Susy Varughese and Vivek Puliyeri who are very engaged, dedicated and wonderful researchers.
We started to have conversations with more and more researchers around the world if they would like to participate. Most of them are researchers who work with camera traps to do wildlife research. We had 22 locations and then the pandemic hit the world and everybody was locked in. Luckily people doing wildlife research were allowed to visit their sites and the post still worked. So we sent cameras to each of the locations and decided to spend more than a year collecting data from everywhere in the world.
Some locations are in protected areas but others are in city centers because it's important to remind each other that we are not living alone here. In the city as well, we share space with other species and it's important that we share the space respectfully with each other.
Did you ever meet those people involved in the project all over the world?
Yeah. We met them all. That was wonderful. I could travel around the world online. Suddenly, because of the pandemic, everybody was completely used to online mediums. And internet access is good enough in most locations.
I could meet them all and learn what's going on there, how they work, what they do and what their needs are. I'm so grateful for that. They are the most engaged, wonderful people. I'm the least important person in this whole project. There are more than 100 hardworking people, doing the research, taking care of protected areas, and taking care of the local people so that there is a good balance. I'm just the person who brought together a small installation.
After the cameras reached, how did everything come together?
The desire was to bring across this strong feeling that we all live together, humans and other species on this one very, very beautiful planet. This feeling that this is all interdependent and all connected.
So I asked the filmmakers to use the same editing style across. It was quite important that the camera was in one location for the whole year, didn't move around, and that we had a very calming view. We do, of course, have the videos that got triggered because of animal movement, but we also have lots of footage without any animal activity. We wanted to show an entire year passing by, all four seasons, and so the footage from all the locations is edited into a 20-minute film and it's all synchronised.
We wanted to create this very calm, subtle movement, of how our beautiful planet is moving around the sun. So we have the day and night moving around you. If you're in the centre of this installation, then the day images are in colour and the night images are black and white because the camera is using infrared light that's invisible, or hardly visible for mammals. That will move around you very slowly, and I think this creates a very calm atmosphere so you start to enter this almost meditative concentration of observing the world.
I think everything starts with taking a step back and observing first, and then you start to discover wonderful things. You start to wonder and start to ask yourself questions. That's the key in research as well. The most beautiful and important discovery for me personally is this friendship between different species that you can see.
There's this spotted deer in IIT-Madras and it has this friendship with the birds. The birds often land on the back of the deer, and then they stay there for a while. It's clear that the deer likes it. The bird probably takes care of its fur so it feels good. You have this very lightweight, yet big bird coming and landing on the deer and you can tell there's a friendship going on between those two extremely different species. I think that this is more than just a symbol. This is an example for all of us - that we should start more friendships between different cultures, between different nations, between different species, and respect each other for what we know what we can do and what the other does differently. For me, this creates some hope in this pessimistic state of the world.
Where did you put this exhibit together and where was it installed?
It was first shown at the Design Museum in Zurich in 2022. We wanted to take it to Seoul after that, but the Swiss version has a very beautiful but very complex design. We wanted to create a nest-like aesthetic, a parametric design, produced out of about 1500 individual pieces in different hues of green and blue, to bring in the colours of the planet. The designer Dino Rossi also used the sound-absorbent material Archisonic made out of recycled PET bottles, which was very important in creating this concentrated calm atmosphere. It's like a lovely 3D puzzle to build, but it doesn’t ship well. So, we created a second travel edition with architect Boris Gusic, which is now on display here in the Science Gallery, Bengaluru.
Where will it go next?
We are in conversation with the Swiss Embassy in Delhi to bring it to various places in and around Delhi. We specially want to collaborate with different schools, to reach the next generation. We continue to work on the project because it's very important to remind each other that many of the species that we see are threatened, and the current form of the installation doesn’t convey that.
I find this to be a very sad and urgent topic. Many of those species are threatened because the area they are living in is getting cut, divided or destroyed due to climate change which is happening so rapidly. It's so tough for them to adapt and most likely they don't have enough time to adapt. This is breaking my heart. There are so many species that we don't see anymore because they are extinct and they are extinct due to human actions, we are in the middle of the Sixth Extinction. So now we invited artists to draw extinct species to include them in the installation. These animated drawings are moving through the video installation like the souls of the extinct, which will remind us to act now.
Here in India, we often have snakes in the cities and they can enter people’s homes too. There is a dedicated group of people who create awareness about what to do if you spot a snake, and people can call snake rescuers. But there is also fear that can result in the snake being killed. Is there any animal like that over there that has a negative attitude from the people's perspective? And has this project helped change that?
To translocate the species in a way that is good for the animal and not a threat to humans is extremely important and we do need resources for that. Not everybody can know all the different types of snakes, for example. This is not an issue in Europe but the big issue in Europe is hornets. Hornets are threatened and important for the entire ecosystem. But people are afraid of them because they are huge and look scary, and they defend their territory when the little ones are hatching.
I understand that families with little kids will freak out if they have a hornet’s nest for example. There's an amazing service in the city of Zurich that helps with this. They help people to understand what kind of species it is. There's a phone number you can call anytime and there will be someone who will explain what's going on. They will also very kindly help to move the nest to a location where it's more remote and still good for the hornets and not on the balcony with kids. This does need resources because we need biologists who are working for the city to take care of this service.
It's extremely important and it makes a huge difference to whether people will spray poison on the hornet's nest or not. We have a few left and we need them. Networks again, are very important for this, and we need to collaborate.
Do you have any particular fieldwork stories you would like to share?
We did have some very interesting discoveries. Usually in Switzerland, there are no golden jackals. But on this one side in the French-speaking part, a golden jackal was spotted in the camera trap. The jackal was spotted several times and then the researcher decided to maintain the camera there for further observation. So I'm curious to see how that research comes out.
I had asked the mediators here at the Science Gallery what is the species that people like the most and I thought it would be elephants, penguins or something you don't normally see in the city but they said it's cats!
There are different sites where we got plenty of cat footage from, in Zurich in the city, there are many cats. In Seoul, there is one camera in a city park and there are many cats there too. We do have another site in the French-speaking part of Switzerland where there are wildcats. They are extremely rare. They are genetically a completely different species than our house cats and it's an issue if these two interbreed. So it's important that house cats mustn't interbreed with the wild.
Kids like cats the most because they have a relationship with them. They either have them as pets or maybe because the children's books and films are full of pet cats. Ideally, we could expand this admiration for the pets to other species and turn it into a more respectful love and admiration that respects the needs and the space of the wildlife.
What are some of the other art and science collaborations that you are working on?
We are starting to work on a local project on the topic of food. In German, we say ‘Kunst und Kulinarik’ (Art and Cuisine). What we eat, how we eat, how we prepare the food, how we deal with the resources is a very fundamental topic for each one of us. It's an economic topic as well. It is also interconnected to many different other issues as well as climate change, sustainability, culture and so on. In the Arts, this is a very important topic right now.
Many artists are dealing with these questions, as are those in the Sciences and the Humanities. In many religions, the question of how you eat and what you eat is very central. For example, in Christianity, the topic of the Last Supper is a key element. The history of plants and cultivation, the capture of animals, the ethical aspect as well as the scientific question of how we process and digest food, are all important things to consider.
The most intense discussions you have are at the dining table on a holiday with your family. That's the moment when different opinions come together. It's the place where different genders and generations meet. We want to create dinners together and invite artists and scientists to engage on different topics around food and engage in discussions.
We also have another project called Wildlife in the City. It is a group of researchers who are working with citizen scientists. I think it's an important, beautiful moment of wonder, excitement and engagement when you can set up a motion trigger camera. They have a big network, with schools and with different people in Zurich, Berlin and Vienna. The whole aim is to try to create awareness about the living spaces of wildlife in cities and about ways to make sharing space easier. In Europe, there's this culture of putting fences around private gardens and often they are so dense that not even a hedgehog can get through. If they educate people and help people to look at their space and make little changes, the wildlife corridors won’t be blocked. For example, having holes in the fence for toads, or ramps if there are stairs. Toads spend the winter underground in the forest and during spring they need to go to the ponds for mating, and they need to cover quite some distance. They have routes that they always use. If there are obstacles on the road then they get run over on the street and things like that. So, all these little things can help make space for wild creatures in the cities. There are some species that people would like to keep out of their gardens.
You say that you are pessimistic about the future of the planet, but you are also hopeful. A lot of people working in this sector feel the same way. So what gives you hope?
Hope comes when I work together with wonderful people. In Triggered By Motion, there are over 100 people involved - scientists, designers, filmmakers, citizen scientists, and volunteers. On an even bigger scale, so many wonderful people are working towards a better future, and are willing to step back and reduce their consumption. They are thinking of alternative ways where resources can be used sustainably or are willing to vote for a politician who speaks the truth about this and is engaged in protecting the environment. We need to put a little bit of political pressure and create incentives. There is a chance, if we transform in different ways from what we eat, what we produce, how we use the resources or even traffic systems. For example, just better bike lanes or putting up solar panels on roofs has a huge impact.
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