The short version
- MoMA is showing Berl-Berl, a game-engine simulation of the wetlands Berlin was built on, with a soundtrack made from real swamp recordings.
- Its songs, written with the musician Arca, draw on Slavic traditions of singing your way through a marsh.
- The work has drawn crowds before, with more than 31,000 visitors at its 2021 Berlin debut.
The artist Jakob Kudsk Steensen’s Wetland opened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York on October 12. Its centerpiece, Berl-Berl, renders Berlin’s vanished wetlands as “a singing, digital swamp” in a game engine, from macro photogrammetry and 3D scans of plants and specimens. Steensen made it with the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin and the musician Arca, after fieldwork in the city’s last wetlands. Field recordings from those swamps are reworked into rhythm and music.
The title is the old Slavic word for swamp, thought to be the root of “Berlin.” Arca’s songs, per the work’s earlier press release, were “inspired by Slav traditions where songs and verses were generally employed to navigate swamps and wetlands,” including Sorbian folklore. The piece debuted at Halle am Berghain in Berlin in autumn 2021, where more than 31,000 people saw it, then showed in Aarhus in 2022.
Listings give the closing date as March 7, 2027, and a MoMA page snippet says March 14; check moma.org before planning a trip.
