NAIAD: Freshwater & Mussels in Brandenburg and Berlin

Invasive mussels receive much more attention than indigenous ones in Brandenburg and Berlin – meaning that mussels mostly have a reputation as a problem here, for all the wrong reasons. Freshwater mussels are keystone species’, important for healthy waterways; the problem is that they are globally endangered. Indigenous mussels are also found here, some of which are relatively abundant and others that are rare and endangered.

This project has identified six species of mussels currently or historically found in the area, from the Senckenberg natural history collection. The indigenous mussel species of Brandenburg and Berlin belong to a family called Unionidae. An alternate name given by zoologists for the family is Naiads, like the lesser female goddesses of Ancient Greece who were guardians of freshwater (including rivers, lakes, springs and brooks), describing their role as a keystone, indicator and umbrella species’ that filter and clean the water and riverbed for multispecies habitats.

In this set of paintings, the human-animal-environment agentic hierarchies represented by these different kinds of naiads are upturned. They depict close-up vertical views down into the waters of lakes and rivers across Brandenburg and Berlin, from Tiefer See and Heiliger See to the Spree and the Panke; and each water body has been designated a guardian deity, a naiad, in the form of a mussel that could or does inhabit its particular aquatic environment.

The paintings reimagine Berlin and Brandenburg’s different mussel species as nonanthopocentric deities of their freshwater environments, from which they cannot be ontologically separated. The paintings aim to encode multisensory and conceptual engagements with freshwater mussels into affective visual and material forms, symbolically restoring agency to freshwater mussels. This connects to questions considered by the wider project and the postcard artworks: What if we thought of mussels as protectors as much as animals to-be-protected? How might freshwater policy be written differently if mussels were given legal subjecthood, with their capacity to act in the world (their freshwater environments) restored to them?  

Please register here for the opening reception on 15 October 2025, starting at 4:30 p.m.

The exhibition in the RIFS building Helmholtzstr. 5 runs until 29 October.