From 9 to 13 April 2024, prototypes of Photosynthesising Flowerpots manufactured at KYOTO Design Lab will be on display during the exhibition of the New European Bauhaus Festival in Brussels.

The prototypes are the outcome of a collaboration between artist duo LarbitsSisters (Belgium), project researcher Gergely Péter Barna, associate professor Kazutoshi Tsuda and others, which took place during the summer of 2023.

During their stay at KYOTO Design Lab, they have conducted experimental research seeking to forge a symbiosis between a 3D clay-printing robotic arm and cyanobacteria microorganisms. Extrusion techniques and printing processes and strategies for 3D clay printing were investigated with KYOTO Design Lab. Focus was mainly on experimental research, hands-on experiments and on 3D printing with the KUKA robotic arm.

© Photo credits TAKAHASHI Kenji – Photo courtesy of Tokyo Arts and Space

Brief outline

Photosynthesising Flowerpots is an experimental work that features a flowerpot that photosynthesises crafted out of an uncanny symbiosis between a computer-generated 3D printed clay body and photosynthetic microorganisms.

A porous clay pot and photosynthetic cyanobacteria grow in tandem to form an artefact. While the pot structure supports or hosts photosynthetic microorganisms and feeds them with sunlight, soil, moisture and air, the microorganisms strengthen the body of the flowerpot through biomineralisation. The experimental work aims to achieve a symbiosis between photosynthetic bacteria, and the body of the flowerpot.

Photosynthesising Flowerpots searches for more sustainable processes so necessary in the context of climate change. The project strives for resilience among diverse ecosystems inhabiting an urban area, threatened, and unbalanced by human-induced domestication of nature. Technologies with their associated techniques and methodologies that increasingly separated man from his living environment are being challenged by processes that enable convergence between humans and their surroundings.

The work brings human artefacts and the living environment together in a symbiotic relationship. The crafts that have symbolised thousands of years of human civilisation, drawing man away from nature through art and the mastery of fire, are brought back to a reciprocal relationship with the living. Thousands of years of human craftsmanship are thus repurposed, reshaped, restored. And as in the living world, each flowerpot is manufactured slightly differently from the next, depending on the local weather conditions of the place where it is to be found.

LarbitsSisters
Since 2010 social media researcher Bénédicte Jacobs (BE) and media artist Laure-Anne Jacobs (BE) form the artist duo LarbitsSisters. The work of the Brussels-based duo is situated at the crossroads of art, technology, societal questions and ecology. Their collaboration grew out of a shared fascination for the creative drives and patterns in digital media and the friction between an unbridled faith in technological progress and everyday life. In 2011 they together founded Larbitslab that has become the breeding ground for international collaborations between art and science, resulting in social critical installations, performances and events. Gradually questions regarding the use of energy resources, related wealth inequalities, and ecology have come to the fore in their work, as an urgent topic in need of disruptive visions and speculative solutions.

The specificity of Larbitslab lies in the methodological approach, which combines observing practices, profound technological explorations and application to current societal questions in a networked society increasingly in need of new relations to ecosystems it is so complexly intertwined with.

Their work has been presented in several national and international exhibitions, festivals and symposia amongst other, Imal (Brussels), BOZAR (Brussels), Ars Electronica (Linz), McaM (Shanghai), Kellen Gallery (New-York), ISEA 2020 (Montreal), Elektra 2021 (Montréal – Brussels), TOKAS Arts and Space (Tokyo). Comprising social media researcher Bénédicte Jacobs and media artist Laure-Anne Jacobs, LarbitsSisters has won the NOVA New Media Interactive Art Prize, the Prix Ars Electronica Golden Nica and the NTAA New Technological Art Award. The duo was selected for various international residency programs.