What's new
Margherita Pevere’s installation-performance Lament, exploring post-wildfire ecologies and more-than-human mourning, has recently achieved significant achievements.
- On 13 September 2025, Lament was presented as a 45-minute performance with solo performer, cello, and live electronics at the EU Capital of Culture, the Pixxelpoint Festival, and the TTT Conference in Ljubljana.
- Earlier this year, the work was awarded the COAL Prize 2024’s “Transformative Territories” Mention, underscoring its relevance at the intersection of art and ecology.
- Pevere also delivered the keynote lecture at the international symposium-workshop Critical Ecologies: Crisis, Grief, and Resilience in Philosophy, Art, and Science, where she discussed Lament in the context of grief, resilience, and artistic knowledge production.
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In a recent interview with philosopher Patrick Degeorges, Pevere reflected on the transformative role of artistic practices in times of ecological crisis, and on how art can nurture collective mourning and new forms of territorial engagement.
About Lament project
Lament explores post-wildfire ecology in soil, offering a space where ecological and more-than-human death and grief are dignified and where fires are treated as a phenomenon that belongs to the co-evolution of ecosystems and humans. At the same time, the work engages with current ecological shifts and fractures, encompassing changing fire regimes, vulnerable ecosystems, and their less perceivable but highly relevant interplay with soil.
Developed over eighteen months of research, the work combines ecological observation, bioart, sculpture, exchange with scientists and independent experts, musical composition, philosophical inquiry and encounters with communities who experienced devastating wildfires. The latter resulting in an emotional fire-scar map.
Lament features a performance with sounds of cello and burned wood. Onstage are organic elements from a wildfire site and sculptural pieces: hanging glass sculptures containing soil, soil on the floor and a costume made of tree bark. After the performance, these remain as a more-than-human deathbed installation for the exhibition. The audience is invited to notice the tiny changes inside the glass sculptures, which evoke untold stories of soil ecology.
The project has been developed in collaboration with JRC soil researcher Diana Vieira, environmentalist Celine Charveriat, EC nature conservation policy officer Lucia iglesias Blanco and celloist Ivan Penov. Lament has been commissioned by Joint Research Centre, European Commission.
Discover the Lament page.
About the artist
I have a stubbornly transdisciplinary background: in fact, I studied political sciences with a focus on environment, trained in new media and composition, am a plant geek and self-taught symbiotic and ecological observer. This allows me to make artworks and research that seamlessly weave bio(techno)logical components, hacking, composition and object making.
I see my work as a garden crawling with burnt soil, genetically edited bacteria, cells extracted from my body, sex hormones, microbial biofilm, bovine blood, slugs, growing plants and decomposing biological remains. In such a garden, I am only a guest.
My works regularly tour across established venues and independent spaces like iMAL (BE), Volkstheater Wien (AT), Kiasma Theatre (FI), Donaufestival (AT), Casa Viva (MX), Foundation L’Art Pur (SAU), Kunstquartier Bethanien (DE), Kapelica Gallery / Kersnikova (SI), KONTEJNER (HR), Bioart Society (FI), Ars Electronica (AT), Bandit Mages (FR), Art Laboratory Berlin (DE), Fields Institute for Matematial Research (CA). I was shortlisted for the Falling Walls Award / Category At and Science (2023) and received the Coal Prize / Transformative Territories Award (2024).
Art and science partnerships include the Institute of Experimental Gene Therapy and Cancer Research Rostock; the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission; the Department Experimental Immunology at the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research Braunschweig.
Collaborations across disciplines are an important part of my practice, including the performance group Fronte Vacuo and the exhibition Membranes Out Of Order. I am a member of the Finnish Bioart Society and the Queer Death Studies Network, and affiliated researcher of The Posthumanities Hub and the Eco- and Bioart Lab.
I hold a doctorate in Artistic Research at Aalto University on biological arts and queer theory. My publications cover arts, aesthetics, environmental humanities and queerfeminist studies, including Vulnerability as a Queer Art for Technoethics Arts (2022) and a chapter for the International Handbook of Queer Death Studies (Routledge, 2025).
Discover more about Margherita
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