Wool is a natural product that we humans have been using for thousands of years knew how to use. In the 21st century, sheep are used in Germany for landscape maintenance and on fields and dykes to prevent erosion. Today, as then, the animal produces wool, so it has to be shorn once a year. Shearing used to be financially profitable and was a large part of the shepherd’s income. But a lot has changed in the meantime. The domestic wool is too coarse and rough for the requirements of the textile industry. The infrastructure for processing the wool, which is first washed, then combed and spun, has disappeared from Europe. The clothes that we can buy here in the shops are made from Australian, New Zealand or South African sheep’s wool, which is processed in Southeast Asia. The result is a falling wool price per kilo in Germany.
A sheared wool weighs about 4-5 kg. The shearing costs per animal are around 3-4 €. But in the market, the wool allowance is 10-40 cents per kilo. In addition, when the wool is disposed of, it is considered hazardous waste and its disposal means additional costs. According to the Animal Welfare Carcass Act, wool has to be disposed of these days.
So the question is: What can we do to put this valuable raw material to good use again? Therefore, raw wool is an exciting field of research from an artistic, creative and architectural point of view, which not only belongs scientifically but also aesthetically. For several years I have been exploring raw wool, a material – that insulates, acoustically filters, scents, greases, heals, warms and insulates – to develop new ways of giving this wonderful material a new use. By adding excavated earth, sculptural, constructive, acoustic and insulating possibilities are examined. One possibility is the production of noise barriers from sheep’s wool. Further use as an absorber material makes an alternative possible, since synthetic substances have been used there up to now. The noise barriers that run along railway lines are filled with synthetic materials and easily replaced with sheep’s wool. Sheep’s wool has the advantage that it can be compostable, untreated and a habitat for insects. The structure in the Uferhallen consists of noise protection walls, which will be set up later on the Tempelhofer Feld and from research results of the Institute for Architecture-Related Art TU Braunschweig. At the same time, it is a room that invites you to linger.

There are two places where Vera Meyer is sure to be found: at the Institute of Biotechnology at the Technische Universität Berlin, where she works as a professor of molecular and applied microbiology, and at the edge of a Brandenburg forest, where she has her studio and works as artist V. meer. Two passions that initially meant rather separate worlds but have become thematically closely interwoven. Vera Meyer’s research focus – fungal biotechnology – plays a key role in this. From the majesty of cellular structures of the mould Aspergillus niger under the microscope, V. meer arrives at the grace and elegance of the parasol mushroom, the shapes of tree fungi remind her of heads. Fascinated, she notices pears and apples eaten out by wasps, falls in love with the blossoming rust of a discarded cogwheel. Nothing seems useless to her, no thing lost. The artist is almost obsessively driven into the forest as her materials grow on trees, rots on the ground, lies in old sheds. Her mission is to give new expression to what she has found together. So V. meer devotes herself to creating sculptures, combining biological material with iron, gold and copper solution. She finds the point where her art meets her research: both give new visibility to the kingdom of fungi (Funga) – as a sculpture in public space or as a decoded genome through systems biology OMICs data. ARTOMICS is the name she comes up with for this kind of work, perhaps soon the term for a new genre of art? V. meer’s objects seem to have been brought to life as subjects by Goethe’s sorcerer’s apprentice, but one does not silently wish them back into the corner, because they enrich the view and the imagination and should gladly remain among us. Their sculptures made of mushrooms, wood, bones, lichen, fallen fruit, scrap iron and components of bioreactors could populate fairy tale realms or other planets. The philosophical tone in them is palpable: nothing disappears in nature, everything is transformation.

Vera Meyer, born 1970 in Hoyerswerda, Germany, lives and works in Berlin.