Artist Simon Faithful becomes a beehive

“The queen bee was late laying eggs because of the cold January,” says the real Faithfull. There are still no bee colonies, no air traffic. The artist takes it calmly.

Two exhibitions at Kindl revolve around the relationship between humans and other beings in the biosphere: Faithfull’s solo show “Earth-ling”, as well as the group exhibition “An Intimacy with Strangers”, which he curated.

Cooperation with an ant

People become animals, like in Marcus Coates’ “Local Birds”, in which people from northern England chirp like the local birds. David Claerbout frees the Disney fauna from humanoid features in his “Jungle Book” remake. For a video work, Jessica Segall dared to dance underwater with alligators and tigers.

In photos from the performance “Tompkins Square Crawl,” Pope L. tends to a potted plant while simultaneously crawling on his stomach through Manhattan. In Zheng Bo’s “Pteridophilia” video, you can watch young men having sex with ferns.

Simon Faithfull, who was born in England in 1966 and has lived in Berlin since 2005, values ​​non-human life forms as artistic collaboration partners. While touring the exhibition together, he suddenly takes off his sweater to show his left upper arm. A dotted tattoo line winds its way there, which corresponds to the crawling distance of an ant.

During the action, Faithfull traced her path with the felt-tip pen as a preliminary drawing. But at the same time he also used it to control the insect, the artist admits. The red-haired area of ​​skin apparently bothered the ant, while Faithfull didn’t want to have the sensitive inside of his arm tattooed – the conflict of interest was solved with the pen.

Photos from the “Collaboration with an Ant” (2023/26) in the entrance, together with a work by Giuseppe Penone, form a hinge between the exhibitions. In addition to the country art of Robert Smithson and Richard Long, Arte Povera inspired him early on, says Faithfull.

Two pictures opposite his ant project show Penone’s sculpture “Toccare il tempo”, in which an artist’s hand cast in bronze touches a tree. In 1968 the hand was laid. When the photos were taken around 20 years ago, the tree and bark had clearly grown around the bronze fingers. In ultra slow motion, so to speak, the tree grabs hold of the people. “That’s only possible in art,” enthuses Faithfull.

Peggy Atherton’s casts of roadkilled animals were also indispensable for the group show – carcasses of the crushed or broken bodies of foxes, rabbits, crows or magpies, which are scattered across the rooms as porcelain figures from the “Roadkill” series. Faithfull says he grew up in the country, in a village commune. “I had to walk to the next town – past lots of dead animals. That’s why Peggy’s work touched me so much.”

Roadkilled animals as a model

Like his famous half-sister Marianne Faithfull (1946-2025) twenty years earlier, Simon grew up in Braziers Park, an estate in South Oxfordshire. The much older musician and actress “was like a distant relative to me, appearing sporadically. When our parents died, the contact became closer. She was an incredible woman: warm-hearted, brilliant, but also unreliable,” says Faithfull.

The Braziers Park School of Integrative Social Research, which still exists today, was founded in 1950 by the social reformer and doctor Norman Glaister. The commune, described by Marianne in her autobiography as a “mixture of lofty utopian ideas and lively sexuality,” may have had a lasting impact on Simon’s practice.

He studied art in London and Reading between 1985 and 1996. As part of the “Escape Vehicles” test series (1995-2005), he sent a chair to the edge of space in a weather balloon; a live video camera filmed how the furniture broke. The failure to “escape” from gravity is not a real problem: the Elon Musk dream of setting off to new worlds never really motivated him, says Faithfull, rather “the view from space of the planet as a whole”.

Lecture for a bird

A two-month Antarctic expedition from December 2004 sharpened the focus on the biosphere. In one of his “Earthlings” short stories on postcards that visitors to the exhibition can take with them, Faithfull describes the indifference of the Antarctic elephant seals, which seems eerie to him: “I am used to animals that disappear as soon as they sense the presence of a human (…), in this world of ice I seem to be completely insignificant.”

His examination of the theses of the US biologist Lynn Margulis, who advocates an evolutionary principle of cooperation and integration in an anti-Darwinian manner, culminates in an exhibition in the Berlin Natural History Museum in 2019 as well as in the lecture-performance “Explaining Taxonomy to a Bird”. The artist will give his speech addressed to a bird, in which Faithfull satirizes the history of anthropocentric classification, on April 18th at the Kindl Center.

The focus of his solo show is a film that was made in 2019 after Faithfull’s visit to a luxury residence off the west coast of Florida. The artist combines documentary photos of the once comfortable interiors with video footage in which the “Dome Houses” have become a flooded reef and the habitat of maritime life forms – such as seabirds.

He himself can be seen as a tiny figure on the half-submerged giant skulls of the domed buildings. Like a “last man on earth”. A second video, “Big Cypress, Everglades,” shows him standing on his back up to his shoulders in the swamp.

Faithfull says that a local companion from the Masuki tribe assured him during the shoot in December 2019 that the alligators would not show up due to the cold. He still felt uneasy.

He has recently taken up his olive tree idea again: “The ancient trees form cavities over time and I try to slip into them,” says Simon Faithfull. It’s a good thing that olive trees are rarely visited by bees.