Exhibition of the work 'Pollinator Pathmaker', by Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg.Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg
A first impression: carelessness, accumulation, an aggressive ugliness, the disorder of the patches of earth in which, in our cities, weeds and sometimes flowers thrive. It is not about that, however, but about a garden perfectly conceived and cared for daily that has a specific order, even if it is not ours. Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg – a multidisciplinary British artist born in 1982 – has been interested in creating sculptures that are "alive" and can be inhabited for some years. Pollinator Pathmaker, his installation, was inaugurated in front of the Museum of Natural Sciences in Berlin on June 20 of this year and is one of those sculptures; It will remain on display — though "exhibition" isn't really the word — until November 1, 2026.
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Ginsberg often addresses in his work our difficult relationships with nature and technology, but Pollinator Pathmaker integrates them: initially developed with funds from the Eden Project and the Gaia Art Foundation, as well as Google Arts & Culture, and exhibited in Berlin with the support of the LAS Art Foundation, a non-profit organization that works at the intersection between art, new technologies and science and explores unconventional exhibition spaces, Pollinator Pathmaker was created with the help of an algorithm to which Ginsberg fed with information on preferences and habits of the most recurrent pollinating insects – in Berlin, butterflies, moths, flies, beetles, bees and wasps – hence its name, which alludes to the ability of these insects to orient themselves in the natural environment and trace routes that others can travel. The work is, in the words of its director, "a sculpture made with flowers" – of some 80 varieties of plants, including sage nemorosa, scilla siberica, sanícula hembra and rudbeckia – with which Ginsberg aspires to remind us of the fact that pollinators – whose contribution to the continuity of the plant world and the health of the ecosystem is decisive – are disappearing as a result of pollution and climate disaster.
Artist Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg.FRANK SPERLING
What if our gardens were designed not for our satisfaction but for that of the non-human species? What would they look like? What plants would make them up? And how far from each other? How could we learn to look at them, finally reconciled to the idea that we are not the only inhabitants of our planet nor, it seems, the most necessary? The destruction of the physical world – increasingly difficult to deny, given forest fires and extreme temperatures, water scarcity in much of the planet and failed crops, the succession of unprecedented heat waves and its effect on the most vulnerable people, including outdoor workers and the elderly – has become one of the most recurrent themes of contemporary artistic practice. as Pollinator Pathmaker shows: the installation in front of the Museum of Natural Sciences connects in some way with the one that the Argentine artist Tomás Saraceno created for the Serpentine Gallery in London in 2021, when – as part of a larger effort to welcome people of all ages into the gallery space, but also insects, plants and animals—he "exhibited" a room covered in cobwebs. Web(s) of life not only offered a rare and lively spectacle, as the spiders continued to work during the three months they were in the Serpentine, but it also powerfully evoked the idea of a world, "other", in ours, a world radically different – and not without beauty and efficiency – that we could enjoy if we allowed other species to shape and modify it as they pleased; A prerogative that technocrats, addicts to disruptive technologies and infatuated narcissists seem unwilling to give up even in view of the fact that its result is the unviability of the physical world and the demise of our society.
How could we reconcile ourselves with the idea that we are not the only inhabitants of the planet or the most necessary?
Ginsberg and Saraceno talk to us about the need to "dehumanize" our gaze in order to reflect on our responsibility in the climate catastrophe and in trying to avoid its most extreme manifestations; recent books such as Cuando los animales sueñan, by David M. Peña-Guzmán (Errata Naturae); Planta Sapiens, by Paco Calvo and Natalie Lawrence (Seix Barral), and El mundo sin nosotros, by Alan Weisman (Debate), to mention just a few titles, are a product of the fact that – whether they are fully aware of it or not – many people seem to share at this moment the perception that attending to other forms of life and trying to see the world with their eyes can offer answers to the question of how to continue. After it became clear that the project of continued and potentially endless growth in a physical world that is not is turning our life into hell. As Georg Christoph Lichtenberg wrote: "I don't know if everything will be better if things change, but I can say this: they must change to make everything better."
A somewhat cold midday for the season, and not especially sunny, the garden created by Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg appears before the visitor's eyes as a stain of greens dotted with yellows, whites and violets, as in a late painting by Monet. There are children, a couple of office workers rushing lunch that have been brought from home, families who came to see the dinosaurs and some tourists. There are bees, flies and butterflies, but also cars speeding past a few meters away, the tram, a kiosk where teenagers drink cokes and smoke under an awning. The Museum of Natural Sciences is located on Invalidenstrasse, one of the most commonly used streets to go from west to east Berlin. There is noise and smell of burning gasoline, and the garden seems to be completely out of place there, in the center of a European capital permanently under construction. But it may not be, and Ginsberg's "living sculpture" is accompanied by instructions on a website (pollinator.at) for anyone to create their own pollinator garden for insects. It was designed so that they can feed throughout the year and, also throughout the year, it will change its appearance and population, in what is perhaps its most important contribution to our understanding of time as something that remains open, threatening, but also pregnant with possibilities if we learn to look, Finally, with different eyes.
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