CARBON SPA
Berlin Film Community e.V. presents Carbon Spa, an enclosed, cage-like installation simulating a wetland — inviting visitors to enter, relax, and breathe amid artificial peat materials, mid-climate plants, spa ambiance, and subtle monitoring devices tracking CO₂ reduction. Soothing music emerges from the plants via electrical conductivity, turning "nature" into a performative wellness tool, while quietly harvesting data on the chemical alterations in soil, air, and bodies.
This is not a linear journey from outside to inside, but a dynamic entanglement: the cage's permeable boundaries blur ecological restoration with colonial extraction, green care with chemical violence. Visitors "relax" into a space where the outside — extractive peat markets, Nazi-era drainage, farmer expropriations — infiltrates the inside — personal wellness, commodified nature — revealing borders not as rigid lines but as fluid processes of power, imagination, and complicity.
Inspired by a socio-ecological systems analysis of Brandenburg's MoorFutures peatland-rewetting project, Carbon Spa maps the cracks in carbon offsetting — provisional markings that shift under market logics and chemical interventions. Echoing Michelle Murphy's concept of alterlife and Saidiya Hartman's critical fabulation, the installation circles three tensions: care versus extraction, visible versus invisible, and the human/nature divide — becoming a symbolic map not of fixed reality, but of borders as open spaces where belonging, ethics, and aesthetics renegotiate amid climate complicity.
Opening: October 31, 2026 Galerie Vincenz Sala, Sigmaringer Straße 23, 10713 Berlin
This marks the first presentation of Carbon Spa in a gallery setting.
Credits & Acknowledgments
Presented by Berlin Film Community e.V.
Carbon Spa is a transdisciplinary artwork developed by artist and visual anthropologist Linda Paganelli, in collaboration with scientists Felice Diekel and Rosalie Arendt.
The work is grounded in an ongoing case study on the socio-ecological systems analysis of the MoorFutures project for peatland rewetting in northern Brandenburg, led by Felice Diekel and supported by Josef Kaiser, Markus Berger, and Rosalie Arendt.
Financed by Alfred Toepfer Stiftung F.V.S.
Carbon Spa extends Berlin Film Community's commitment to work at the intersection of art, ecology, and critical inquiry — turning a technocratic policy instrument like carbon offsetting into something visitors can physically enter, touch, and feel.
It's a fitting embodiment of what the community values most: making complex systems legible through embodied, participatory storytelling, and opening space for underrepresented voices in the climate conversation.
