Sina Hensel, Basel Academy of Art and Design

Fall Semester 2021

This PhD project thinks with microalgae and cyanobacteria as colouring sources regarding their colour shifts as signals of environmental change. Hannah Landecker asks: ‚What colour is the Anthropocene?‘ since the changing earth has created fluxes of chemicals and energy and therefore a myriad of shifting colour flows. Burning and ‚contaminated‘ (for whom?) environments produce flaring pigments which operate as both a defence and a signal of intensity, agents of stress and agents of care at the same time.

This PhD research proposes an understanding of colour whereas it refuses to be perceived as a mere decorative feature of matter and is rather seen as an agentic force with a processual nature bearing environmental information. This practice-based research sets focus on the performative and transformative qualities of microalgae and cyanobacteria pigments regarding their lightfastness, their compatibilities with each other, as well as third agents, tested in a climate chamber.

With the development of synthetic pigments and dyes, all colours could be imitated by the new paints and all colours that had previously come from minerals, lichens, insects, and plants were casted aside in some decades. Suddenly we found ourselves in an ‘’artificial paradise, the ultimate mimetic camouflage that allowed second nature to pose as nature.’’, Michael Taussig. In order to look forward this PhD proposal aims to look back respectfully at this tactile part of history before the arise of synthetic paint to reshape our current understanding of colour and how we can nowadays considerately and sustainably refer to matter and in consequence to the surrounding where it originates.

Next to a Colour Catalogue, multiple instructions (‘Handlungsanweisungen’) are developed in order to understand the performative and communicative qualities of these pigments in a design and artistic context. What is the embodied knowledge involved which in return affects our relationship to matter? How can this affect onto the researcher be traced, approached, and understood?

References:
Landecker, Hannah; Foreword to Salmon: A Red Herring; Isolarii; 2020 Taussig, Michael; What Color is the Sacred?; The University of Chicago Press; 2009