INTERVIEW Bettina Pelz
PUBLISHED 10. MRZ 2025
Tentakulum – these are the artists Katharina Berndt, Kuno Seltmann and Tom Groll. They develop joint artistic projects at irregular intervals.
In their joint work, they repeatedly refer to the concepts of Donna Haraway. The scientific theorist argues for generating a broader responsibility considering the complex interdependencies between humans, other living beings, and their environment. Haraway’s work provides a basis for artistic concepts that promote transformative thinking. She emphasizes the power of narratives: Stories shape worlds and can challenge existing power structures. Tentakulum is among the artists who explore alternative narratives in large-format projections. For LICHTROUTEN, they are showing the videography “Irdische Verwirrungen” in the windows of TUMO, the new center for creative technologies in Lüdenscheid.
// All three of you follow very different artistic paths; how did the collaboration come about?
The first time we worked together was as part of a larger collective for the Lüdenscheid Light Art Calendar 2020, which gave rise to the idea of starting a larger joint project as a trio as part of the Wunderkammern in Lüdenscheid’s municipal museums. We met weekly in the run-up to a one-week on-site work phase, and because we all live in different cities, we meet online. The work has changed a lot over the months. We were bubbling with ideas, which developed as if on a conveyor belt and were changed and shaped. Our creative process is very intense, and the result of the work is unique in its diversity.
// How do you work?
Our source material is always the film image or photo we take ourselves. This is important because we live in a world of image abundance; everything is available at any time and visible. The moment I record something myself, a connection is created between me and the material. It passes through my eye, it is anchored in this shared moment with the opposite; something is transferred.
In the second step, the links are made. Two worlds flow into one another and create a new meaning, a third world. We don’t use any digital effects; we work exclusively with cross-fades … This creates new thinking through irritation, humor, and poetry.
// Your joint work “Reset the Forest” was a kind of artistic mapping of forest decline. Your themes were how trees are losing their habitat or how human civilization threatens the habitat of animals and plants. You looked at climate damage and followed the tracks of pests. There were scientific and literary texts, documentary and artistic film material, and analog and digital artistic media. How did you come together on this topic?
We wanted to do something about climate change. Due to the current disastrous situation of the local monocultures, which we call forests, our focus turned to spruce dieback and the interweaving of cause and effect: drought as an aspect of climate change, monoculture, bark beetles, soil destruction through the use of harvesters, etc. So, we investigated the question: Who is to blame for forest dieback? The bark beetle is generally blamed. But if you take a closer look, it is a man-made problem.
Like using wood as a resource, which flooded the market en masse but remained a scarce commodity locally because the market economy sold the wood to China and the USA. In each part of our installation, we made subtle, sometimes humorous, playful, and poetic references to this. How do we deal with our resources?
In the Lüdenscheid Art Museum, every tree in the silhouette polder – on closer inspection – had been assigned a white-on-white price; another silhouette showed an oversized bark beetle feeding pattern, which was staged and backlit like a Christ’s cross and hovered above everyone’s heads in a worshipful manner.
Across the room, as a literal counterweight to the delicate paper cut, stood 700 kg cubes of waste paper. The raw material for this work was cut from newspaper remnants, and thus only used recycled material, which would have been destined for the garbage can (because the machines cannot print to the end of the paper roll). On the opposite side of the window, a projection at night reflected Kuno’s view captured on video camera, showing and poetically changing the situation on-site.
A radio broadcast, a sound collage of information text fragments, poetry, prose, songs, and invented advertising recordings accompanied everything. We develop concepts together and fill them out with our skills and possibilities.
// Tom and Kuno _ you have been working together since 2016 and have developed a series of audio-visual projections focusing on biological processes such as metabolism, transformations, and changes over time. What interests you about the visual worlds of organic processes?
A visual language is visible in nature, organic processes, and organic material. The universal force that shapes and determines everything. This universal aesthetic exists independently of humans and can be found everywhere in them and their surroundings. People are, so to speak, at its mercy and influenced by it. We see it as our task to explore these origins.
// What is important to you in your joint work?
It’s essential that we can spin around together indefinitely and that one of us always takes turns to take on the critical reality part. None of us insists on imposing our ideas, it’s a fundamental equality, a can-say-what-comes-into-one’s-head, a can-be-sure-that-everyone-is-really-listening, which can either be taken up and spun on or lovingly questioned and brought down. Sometimes, someone comes up with an idea, and then there is silence on all lines … It can come to nothing, or it can provide the decisive spark through wild explanations, and everyone knows crystal clear: that’s it!
Only one thing is clear to us: we never know at the beginning what will come out at the end. Only then will something come out, and we will chew on it and discard it until it “clicks” for all of us. We are different; each of us has our skills, and they complement each other wonderfully!
// “Earthly Distortions” is the title of your work for LICHTROUTEN. What conceptual idea do you associate with this title?
It’s about invisible worlds that are, were, or will be when we are gone. Microcosms that are inconspicuous and invisible to most people in everyday life. Weaves, communication aids, organs of perception, and structures for food intake. In the water, on land, in and around us. It is about the relationship between man and nature, about comparing and combining artificiality and naturalness to lift humanity a little from its pedestal as the crowning glory of creation, and, last but not least, to raise the question of what relevance we have in the world as a whole?
The lithographs from the work “Art Forms of Nature” by Ernst Haeckel, who had already seen glimpses of the microcosms of unicellular organisms at the end of the 19th century and illustrated them for the general public, have had a significant influence on us: “Nature creates an inexhaustible abundance of wonderful creatures in its bosom, whose beauty and diversity far surpasses all the art forms created by man.” He aimed to create understanding through an insight into beauty. That’s what our work is based on.
We are also very inspired by how Donna Haraway thinks: how can the Chthulucene — the alternative age to the Anthropocene she proposes — be conceived and shaped from an artistic perspective? She designs an “other world” in which the various species cultivate an ethically motivated willingness to respond; she imagines the cross-species survival of the planet in the form of a collectively producing system (“holobiont”). Her way of speculating is truly beguiling for us. The projections’ visual material includes algae, lichens, fibers, threads, corals, arachnids, and butterfly species, processes of change and weathering in nature. We have generated various new materials that we are currently working on together.
// How do you prepare? How do you develop a place or a context?
We collect all the information and ideas about the location and theme, and then there’s a big, loose pile on the virtual table. Then we see where things start to react to each other—observing, looking at, describing, touching, feeling, letting ideas come to us – in a nutshell, “rummaging around.” In this respect, the title of our work is also the principle of our work.
// What role does the audience play in your project? What do you want from the visitors?
Even if this may sound egocentric, first and foremost, it’s about the work process and the search for the “click” moment. In other words, euphoria sets in at some point when you’re on the right track. It can be over again the next moment if a concern comes up that wasn’t there before, but when everyone feels: yes, this is it – this is what it’s all about. It will be good if this feeling is there and the work is enjoyable. No love, no quality. If the plan works, the viewer will also feel this energy.
Walking through the crowd and picking up on conversations is always very exciting. The nice thing is that we, as artists, are never in the spotlight, and nobody knows we are the creators. That’s why the comments we capture are unembellished and honest. We look for ambiguous forms and work both abstractly and concretely. If the visitors then argue about who sees and understands what, we have already won. We are enriched by the different perspectives of the viewers.
// “New Energy” is this year’s theme. As a curator, I am interested in how you map the city as an energetic system. How do you see your work in this thematic context?
The city is a culture consisting of natural and artificial man-made structures. There are slow-growing organic urban structures and a practical, quick drawing board check. If you look at the tentacle network of a city, it has a lot in common with the structures of life in nature: seemingly chaotic lines and intersections reminiscent of roots. Lifelines through which the goods needed for life, such as nutrients, are transported in the veins and pathways of the plant and animal kingdoms, communication networks that can also be found in nature – both inside (neuronal networks) and outside the human body.
However the accurate chessboard drawings of fast pixel architectures can also be found under the microscope. We take up these parallels and merge them into something new. We are always interested in the interplay between man/culture/civilization and nature. From our point of view, we humans see our world as the crown of creation, but we are only a footnote in world history. We produce wonderful things such as music and art, but with our claims to power and obsession with growth, we destroy our basis for life and, with it a great deal of other, wonderful, irreplaceable life, most of which we don’t even notice.
// Which of the other artistic positions at LICHTROUTEN do you recommend to visitors and why?
We prefer to be surprised, try to look at everything with as little bias as possible, and experience it anew. Not knowing what will happen. Even the artists whose way of working we know are completely different in new places. In this respect, we urge everyone to take their time and soak up as much as possible. That is also the quality of light art projects like the LICHTROUTEN – in contrast to the gigantic and geographically dispersed festivals where you can’t visit everything. Here, everything is close, approachable, and intense. We appreciate that.
FEATURED IMAGE
Groll Berndt Seltmann: Tentakulum. GOLDSTÜCKE Gelsenkirchen 2022. Photo: Jennifer Braun.