The artist Nana Petzet works conceptually and realizes her projects in a range of media including installations, performances or artistic research projects. Her temporary light installation Light Trap Hamburg (2015/2018) represents a pioneering work of light art, drawing attention to the problem of light pollution in public spaces which are likewise habitats for non-human beings, especially insects. Thereby, Nana Petzet has made a crucial contribution to the discourse on the ecological effects of light art and artificial light in the era of the Anthropocene.

In the Anthropocene, humans have become one of the predominant factors influencing the Earth’s biological, geological and atmospheric processes. Based on this thesis the scientific and political debate on climate change, ecological crises and human interaction with the Earth system has gained a new focus, since it has been scientifically proven that global changes have been caused by humans and, in many cases, they are irreversible. Consequently, the question of human responsibility – along with humankind’s pivotal position in the sense of anthropocentrism – and questions concerning of a moral, ethical and political pressure to act and a better coexistence of human and non-human beings have been raised, anew and with urgency. In the process, alternative terms have been proposed, not least in order to avoid once more lending the human being, the anthropos, a prominent position and to point out that not all humans bear equal responsibility. With the notion of abandoning an anthropocentric perspective, Donna Haraway speaks of the Chthulucene, for instance, which means the “Chtonic”, the earthbound, and brings into play an entire array of non-human actors with whom we are in a joint, sympoietic process of co-becoming, or the Capitalocene, describing the responsibility connected with capitalism. Clémence Hallé and Anne-Sophie Milon have summarized the numerous neologisms in A (Hi)story with a Thousand Names. *1

Nana Petzet, together with biologist Bernd Reuter and a team of scientists and volunteers, has investigated in which way the city marketing project Blue Port affects insect diversity in the port of Hamburg. During this spectacle the harbour is bathed in bright, short-wave blue light that simulates a blue hour and particularly attracts insects. Nana Petzet built a light trap equipped with corresponding blue light sources, mounted it on a boat and studied the diversity of nocturnal insects in the harbour ecosystem. She thus demonstrated how the city, illuminated by spectacles such as Blue Port and advertising in general, itself becomes a light trap – and the night disappears. It is not least this work that has triggered a fundamental rethinking both in light art and in urban planning.

All of Nana Petzet’s works tell of a vital interest in ecosystems, cycles, networks and the relationship between living beings and their environment and is marked by the interweaving of different spheres, for example, art and nature, art and science. While she draws on the epistemic potential of art, she is critical of the concept of artistic research – after all, according to Petzet, all good art is also research. She conducts what she herself calls “artistic research into science”, this is to say, she concretely questions the sciences and their practices themselves. *2 Petzet’s approach thereby proves compatible with the thoughts of philosopher Judith Siegmund, according to whom one can only reasonably speak of artistic research if “art could be arranged or formed in such a way that, where applicable and in some specific cases, it contributes something to the practice of research.” *3

For instance, in her performance Rational Scientific Art (1987, project week, auditorium of the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich), where Petzet introduced – in a lecture supported by fourteen painted panels – the award-winning fundamental physics research on the theory of gravitation by a certain Prof. Dr. Roland Zoschka. However, like the figure of the professor himself, the research was fictitious. The scientific terminology, the multitude of formulas on the display panels, apparent correspondences with school knowledge of physics and staged queries from “critics” in the audience all nonetheless left the recipients uncertain about the authenticity of the matter, despite the ironic undertone and the evident art context of the performance. Petzet thus brings into focus the power of scientific lectures in suggesting truth through their rhetoric, staging and visualization. “Natural science is declared as art.” This sentence from Rational Scientific Art is not only to be read as an expansion of the concept of art as such, it also points to the “artificiality” of acquiring scientific knowledge, stated at a time when authors such as Donna Haraway or Bruno Latour are only beginning to examine the construed and situational nature of knowledge in a network of actors, and long before the latter are on everyone’s lips. Petzet initially studied the science theorist Karin Knorr-Cetina (The Fabrication of Facts, 1984); later she also read Bruno Latour’s writings. But she also refers to scientists such as Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg, who had shown that the measuring process, the observation within the microcosm of elementary particles, always has an influence on the observed phenomenon, which with second-order cybernetics then finally leads to the observation of observation.

Theories and the question of the empirical verifiability of their observability are thus often the focus of Nana Petzet’s work, as are themes explored in equal measure by art and science, for example, matter and materiality, concrete and abstract space, or elapsed, experienced and abstract time. Besides this, her projects are always accompanied by a proper dose of wit and irony with which she satirizes science’s claim to objectivity and truth and demonstrates the absurdity of many theoretical models.

The performance and installation Reversion as the Realization of Negentropic Processes in the Macroscopic Realm (1992), for instance, examines time and phenomena of entropy. While human experience suggests the irreversibility of time, science assumed the fundamental reversibility of physical processes until Ilya Prigogine was able to demonstrate the irreversibility and historicity of physical and chemical events with his theory of dissipative structures. *4 In Petzet’s work, Prof. Dr. Roland Zoschka, in turn, attempted to restore a glass destroyed by sound waves to its original state in a process known as “reversion”. Against the background of the thermodynamic definition of entropy, he considered this to be possible.

The work Schrödinger’s Cat (1992), in turn, comments on the tragedy and brutality if Erwin Schrödinger’s well-known thought experiment were actually tested in a real experiment with a living animal. In Erwin Schrödinger’s thought experiment, a cat is locked in a closed space with a tiny amount of radioactive substance whose atoms will decay with a certain probability within a certain period of time. The decay, measured by means of a Geiger counter, triggers the release of poison gas that kills the cat. As long as the box is closed, there is a state of indeterminate overlapping, meaning the cat is simultaneously dead and alive. With the observation, the measurement, the state of the system changes. Schrödinger intentioned to show the incompleteness of quantum mechanics and to point out that quantum mechanics is misinterpreted as a “blurred” model when, for example, the indeterminacy in quantum physics is verified by means of macroscopic experiments in which evidence is gained with the aid of direct observation and sensory perception. At a time when the interpretation of theories and the exploration of quantum physics was still in full swing, Petzet’s work posed the question of how we want to deal with such scientific findings and models, including their possible applications.

Petzet also addressed the question of the (ir)reversibility of time and the processuality of matter in the work The Thousand-year-old Room or TYOR (1988). Within the framework of a “research programme on the relationships of the human organism to the surrounding external world”, this “novel complex ageing simulator” was used to investigate the ageing of living spaces, accelerated by a factor of 10³. With the help of a simulated climate, an artificial sun, a dust machine, with assistants who wore and damaged the room, and craftsmen who renovated it every few days, the room aged by a thousand years in 365.26 days. Panels with diagrams and lectures served to provide information on the project. Wall and floor samples were presented like serial art. Though, of course, such scientific simulations of alteration and ageing do exist, here, they appear completely absurd – with the effort and gain in knowledge entirely out of proportion. Using real individual cases, the artist thus empirically pursued philosophical questions, similar to the thought experiment of the “Ship of Theseus”, pondering whether an object loses its identity when many or even all its components are replaced one by one. Above all, however, with these works Petzet was preparing discourses on materiality in art that were to unfold in the 2000s.

For her work Model Test Red (1991), for instance, Nana Petzet painted a series of 73 identical, monochrome pictures, each divided into three fields, painted in acrylic, oil and egg tempera. Petzet then sent the red canvases on journeys to exhibitions. During regular control examinations, she documented the traces on the paintings resulting from the participation in the art world with its travelling exhibitions and the biennials that were increasingly being staged in the 1990s. The canvases became objects of scientific investigation, “models of painting”. *5 Petzet was thus among the first to demonstrate how not only the social context of the institution influences the production and reception of art, but also how art objects change under the material conditions of global art networks. It is the material situatedness of art objects, their transformations within the stakeholder networks in which they are interwoven, that take centre stage. The concrete-abstract paintings are understood here not only as objects, but rather as being involved in a process. What is more, her preoccupation with the concept of art, with systems and materiality also led Nana Petzet to a new perspective critical of institutions.

Nana Petzet has also increasingly continued her research on material cycles with a focus on ecological systems and recycling processes. She developed the CPR System (Collecting, Preserving, Researching) (1995–2001) – as an alternative to the Green Dot. The Green Dot system takes over the task of recycling, removes it from the “consumer’s” sight, helping him or her to ease their conscience, whereas the CPR System is designed for local recycling and valorisation by the waste producer himself or herself. They are asked to collect all waste, clean it and then creatively make something out of it, repair it or repurpose it. While recycling often produces a material with inferior properties, including high transport and energy costs, Petzet introduced an entire upcycling system, and this at a time when the term had only just been coined. Petzet – productively yet with a twinkle in her eye – nonetheless reverted to traditional techniques and non-fiction books, such as Aus Alt wird Neu, Bastelarbeiten für unsere Soldaten (Old Becomes New, Handicrafts for Our Soldiers, 1944).

These works likewise focus on the process the object undergoes during its life cycle, along with its agency at the centre of attention. In a consumerist or throwaway society, she literally understands rubbish as a “valuable material”, with an inherent potential that calls for recognition. Rather than simply declaring everyday objects as art and assigning them artistic value on the conceptual level, she asks whether, in times of ecological crises, we can judge the value of an everyday object more sustainably by adopting an artistic perspective. She draws on the potential of art, which has always explored objects and materiality in order to be able to use and repurpose them creatively; even the title CPR – Collecting, Preserving, Researching – refers to the core tasks of the museum. Petzet resorts to handicraft, domestic and DIY techniques, repairs, restores, reworks, reprocesses. She is also interested in a social practice in which ideas are exchanged, in which energy footprints, the consumption of resources and transport routes involved are noted, including the method of LCA or “life cycle assessment of the total amount of waste”. The CPR System proposed by Nana Petzet was rigorously implemented and exemplified in the Self-Experiment: Living According to the Slogan “Collecting, Preserving, Researching”, Nýlendugata 15, Reykjavík (1997-1998). During a six-month stay in Iceland, she collected her family’s waste, recycled it and displayed it in her house. When Nana Petzet’s great-aunt Erika died in 1999, her estate became part of the artist’s collection – serving to illustrate the exemplary preservation of everyday objects by a generation that had experienced the scarcity resulting from two world wars.

In Nana Petzet’s work, the object thus becomes apparent as an actor in a network or system, as involved in a constant process. “Waste” is only a transitory condition the object passes through. The art object, similarly, is not conceived as a readymade that ends up in the ruins of the museum, but as an intermediate stage. The exhibition becomes a temporary storage facility: the bottle dryer is reused to dry washed-out milk cartons or as a postcard stand. Waste is understood as a recyclable material, while art regains practical value. But Petzet goes even one step further and questions the repurposing of waste as an aesthetic everyday object. A certain number of baskets made of plastic bags and doormats, room dividers or toiletry bags made of milk cartons are enough for a household, so that, ultimately, one is obliged to think about avoiding rubbish.
Moreover, beyond focussing on the European context, Petzet also has looked toward Africa, where, by necessity, an upcycling culture had developed early on, as Petzet shows in her artistic research on Recycling in Addis Ababa (2011-2012). With the project Community Cooker (2017), Petzet in turn refers to the communal cookers used in Africa that are fuelled by plastic waste. These, of course, pose ecological and health risks. While, placed specifically near a waste recycling plant in Germany, they draw attention to the fact that a lot of plastic is still being burned in Europe as well.

In Cataloguing the Collection with HIDA MIDAS (2000-2017), Nana Petzet expands her conception of the CPR System to include decidedly institution-critical questions. On site at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, she catalogued her waste collection using the art inventory system HIDA MIDAS, originally developed to assess the complexity of artworks, their manifold relationships among each other and with other entities. It so turned out that, with some adaptation effort, the inventory programme was surprisingly well suited to record a collection of waste. Petzet thus not only makes apparent that art objects can be described as actors within a network – as they are produced, used, damaged, repaired, collected and composed of different parts, have different functions and pass through the hands of different owners – but also that an art inventory system can be suited for recording all kinds of everyday, recycled or waste objects. The work, therefore, exemplifies that such a system can be used to sketch or trace the network of actors of a given object. Yet it also raises fundamental questions about art itself, for example, what distinguishes an art object from other objects today.

Looking at Petzet’s website, one first comes across a diagram that reminds of an actors’ network. It shows how Nana Petzet began many of her recent projects: with a drawing based on four terms outlining the possible actors and their possible relationships with each other. This preoccupation with circuits and networks with which Petzet investigates the relationships between objects and their environment – their relationality – eventually allowed her to adopt an ecological perspective in another complex of works.
She has dealt intensively with the French entomologist Jean-Henri Fabre, who devoted himself to the behavioural research of animals in the 19th century. He was a pioneer of ecophysiology, exploring how the physiology of living beings is directly related to the environment. He was not interested in the modern methods of his time, based on dead specimens, but above all in living animals and the observation of their behaviour. For his passionate observation of insects, he set up a garden especially for this purpose to serve him as a laboratory. This observation in situ was still directly linked to contemplation, aisthēsis, and thus art. Fabre was also a poet who likewise interwove art and science in his work.

Especially now, in the age of the Anthropocene in which our relationship to nature and science is being reconfigured, the close observation of living individuals of the animal and plant world is gaining new significance. Katherine Hayles, for example, following Vilém Flusser’s essay Vampyroteuthis Infernalis, emphasizes the importance of establishing a non-hierarchical, symmetrical relationship with non-human beings and recognizing their agency if one wants to understand them not only biologically but also in their phenomenological experience of the world. *6 Flusser distinguishes between two methods, one based on scientific findings of biology and “intersubjective” scientific practice, which tends to abandon the standpoint of the subject towards an object to be inquired into and where the counterpart to be explored really “concerns” the humanbeing. *7 This “subjective science” becomes evident in amateur scientists and naturalists who observe nature and other living things not only from an object-scientific perspective but are also motivated by a personal passion, like Fabre and Petzet. It bears the potential for a new coexistence with the living fellow beings on this earth.

In her artistic science studies, Nana Petzet is therefore not primarily oriented on the latest scientific methods – obtaining knowledge abstractly and with the aid of digital technology using big data – but is instead guided by field researchers such as Jean-Henri Fabre, whose working methods she updates in her artistic practice. She is concerned with the real and concrete individual case, not the abstract or even virtual data quantity. She proceeds empirically and starting from observation. Thereby, the living being or object of her observation remains an individual. Recipients of her artworks thus get to know the actors – insects, animals, etc. – as cooperation partners, living beings with whom they potentially can enter a novel kind of relationship.

Against this background, the potential of the work Robby Rabbit Ethogram, presented at the group exhibition Say it isn’t so. Art Trains its Sights on the Natural Sciences at Weserburg Museum für moderne Kunst in 2007, becomes evident. For this work Nana Petzet replicated the basic features of her living room – complete with rabbit hutch – and placed her real-life pet rabbit Robby in it, who had been allowed to bounce around freely and without restrictions in the artist’s home. Not least on account of the domesticability of rabbits, their much-noted loyalty and their sociality towards their human family, the House Rabbit Society is committed, among other things, to teaching people how to keep rabbits as species-appropriately as possible within their own four walls. *8] These characteristics of rabbits then also lead to the fact that in the case of Petzet’s installation, one is immediately reminded of Donna Haraway’s remarks in her The Companion Species Manifesto, in which the author refers to the dog sport of Agility, among other things: In the essay’s initial guiding question, “How might we learn ethics and policies that allow significant otherness to flourish by taking dog-human relationships seriously?” *9, one may be inclined to replace the word „dog” with “rabbit”, and recognize in the pet’s demonstrated hurdling activities a kind of rabbit agility. Jumping hurdles is indeed an interspecific, athletic form of activity that – coming from Scandinavia – has been practised between humans and rabbits in human living rooms and gardens, for instance, already since the 1980s. Combined with countless behavioural studies, in the form of short videos accessible on the artist’s homepage, and the handwritten and meticulously elaborated diary-like protocols with documentary character, a complex, very personal rabbit ethogram emerges that bears the potential to reflect on new or different forms of coexistence with our, not only cuniculus-like, fellow earthlings.

The Peutegrund(August 2008 – February 2011), concerned with the mapping and care of an endangered biotope in Hamburg’s port area, funded and carried out as part of the Art in Public Space programme of the Hamburg Department of Culture, was also committed to close observation. Contrary to its classification as a suspected contaminated site, Petzet’s project aimed at drawing attention to the biological value of the ten-hectare area located amid a primarily industrial environment. The biological value of such a biotope surrounded by commercially used landscape lies above all in the increase of biodiversity and species diversity, as the garden and landscape theorist Gilles Clément states in his Manifesto of the Third Landscape. *10 In the same spirit, but using mapping and film as a means, Nana Petzet also documented the fauna and flora she perceived during her explorations of the area. She thus once again became involved in a differentiated network of actors consisting of the creatures and plants on site, biologists, political actors – BUND – and the Hamburg Port Authority. Petzet was able to successfully convince the latter, namely in the frame of an art-based action, to sustainably remove the knotweed growing in the biotope, and which originally comes from Japan and contributes to the reduction of biodiversity in the area. To this effect, Petzet initiated a clearing operation of parts of the knotweed. The resulting biological waste product again served as a basis for her artistic design: by revalorizing and reprocessing the plant material to create, for instance, objects hanging from the ceiling, presented at a boathouse adjacent to the biotope. Drawing on the potentials and strengths of actors from different social fields, Petzet succeeds in involving them in a network. She enriches this with aesthetic interventions – which are not least conducive to the sensual-emotional mediation of a biologically highly complex process – and as a result achieves an overall effect on the real-political level.

Nana Petzet took a similar approach for Yamuna Sustainability Park, a project initiated in connection with the Yamuna/Elbe Project exhibition curated by Ravi Agarwal and Till Krause in New Delhi: the Yamuna River flows through New Delhi and is surrounded by floodplains that overflow during floods. Recognizing the value of these floodplains, owing in particular to their relative absence of human intervention, Petzet made them out to be refuges of biodiversity, contributing to the conservation and enhancement of biodiversity of the river landscape. In one area of the floodplains, the Delhi Development Authority had started work on a controversial park, for which parts of the natural vegetation of the floodplain had to be levelled. Nana Petzet took this as an opportunity for artistic interventions which, not least based on their aesthetics, were intended to unleash activist potential or at least shake things up. For a start, she reverted to the medium of photography to document sections of the flora and fauna living in the area. For the presentation, Petzet chose common protest aesthetics by presenting the photographs in wooden frames and stands reminiscent of posters or placards at demonstrations. Not only to emphasize the cropped nature of her photographs, but also to break with a pure protest aesthetic and visually provide an eye-catcher, one of the corners of the wooden frames was always missing; they all had five corners instead of four. In addition, the artist used the added value of art, namely to be allowed to imagine or to be able to open up spaces of imagination, and created a display board in the entrance area of the exhibition presenting her version of a Yamuna Sustainability Park. Here, too, the underlying motive envisaged in her sustainable version of the Yamuna Park is the significance of near-natural biotopes, as is the emphasis on social aspects, because farmers should be able to pursue agricultural activities here.

Harmas KGV (since 2020) is a model plantation with twenty highly endangered native wild herbs in an allotment garden on a sand-lime sediment: a barren piece of land, a nutrient-poor, dry biotope where neophytes, prohibited invaders, also tend to settle. In this project Petzet again cooperates with scientists, amateurs and hobby artists and organizes workshops.
Petzet views art as a possibility to create networks from which, based on the interplay of different actors, something new emerges in a sympoietic way and which go beyond an artistically staged social practice. The recipients likewise become actors in the network: gardeners, insect collectors, collectors, preservationists, (amateur) researchers, etc. Similar to authors like Donna Haraway or Bruno Latour, she calls for a new way of looking at the systems we are living in – underscoring, in particular, the potential of an artistic perspective in obtaining a relational and processual understanding of the object. Against this backdrop, it is certainly rewarding to (re)read Nana Petzet’s oeuvre, in the age of the Anthropocene.

Idis Hartmann (*1983) studied law and art history at the University of Tübingen and art theory and film studies at the University of Sydney in Australia. Since 2010 she has been working at the ZKM | Zentrum für Kunst und Medien Karlsruhe as a curatorial and research assistant to the director Peter Weibel, in the interim as a freelancer and since 2022 as a research associate. From 2014–2018, she was curatorial assistant to the artistic director Peter Weibel of the lichtsicht – Projection Biennale in Bad Rothenfelde. She is also working on her dissertation project on Models of Complexity. On the Relationship between Installations and Systems with Prof. Dr. Barbara Lange at the Department of Institute of Art History of the University of Tübingen, where she also worked as a lecturer.

Tim Jegodzinski (*1988) studied art history and empirical cultural studies in Tübingen and Hamburg. In 2020, he completed his doctorate on living animals in installation art, since the 1990s with Prof. Dr Barbara Lange in Tübingen, where he also held teaching assignments in the field of contemporary art. Since 2022, Tim Jegodzinski has been teaching information literacy at Mainz University Library and will be a lecturer at the Institute of Art History at Mainz University in the winter semester of 2022/2023.

*1] Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (eds.), Critical Zones (The MIT Press, Cambridge/MA, London, ZKM | Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, 2020), pp. 44–49.
*2 Cf. Nana Petzet’s art in the context of the natural sciences: Susanne Witzgall, Kunst nach der Wissenschaft. Zeitgenössische Kunst im Diskurs mit den Naturwissenschaften, (Nuremberg: Verlag für moderne Kunst, 2003), pp. 214–222.
*3 Judith Siegmund, “Poiesis und künstlerische Forschung,” Wie verändert sich Kunst, wenn man sie als Forschung versteht?, the same (ed.), (Bielefeld: transcript, 2016), pp. 105–121, p. 117.
*4 Ilya Prigogine, Vom Sein zum Werden (1992); Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Das Paradox der Zeit (1993).
*5 Christiane Meyer-Stoll, “Arbeiten an der Erkenntnis: Nana Petzets Rational Scientific Art,” Nana Petzet. Der Tausendjährige Raum. Reversion. Schrödingers Katzen, exh. cat., Kunstraum München e.V. (Munich, 1993), pp. 4–7, here p. 6.
*6 Nancy Katherine Hayles, “Speculative Aesthetics and Object-Oriented Inquiry (OOI)”, Speculations: A Journal of Speculative Realism, Vol. 5, 2014, pp. 158–179; Vilém Flusser, Vampyroteuthis Infernalis, (Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press, 2012).
*7 “This implies a double gesture of using the biologist’s knowledge but also going beyond it into what can be known only because of the deeply shared relationship. […] we must liberate ourselves above all from a model according to which existence is the meeting of a ‘transcendental’ subject (a mind) with objects; of a ‘self’ with a ‘world.’ According to this model, for example, knowledge would be the meeting between the one-who-knows with what-is-to-be known.” Hayles, 2014, p. 166.
*8 Cf. website of the House Rabbit Society: https://rabbit.org/ (accessed Nov. 7, 2022).
*9 Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2003), p. 9.
*10 Cf. Gilles Clément, Manifest der dritten Landschaft (Manifesto of the Third Landscape), (Merve, Berlin, 2010).