We mobilise people and resources to create, curate, make sense of and use knowledge to inform policymaking across Europe.
These Relations are Forever weaves together agricultural policy, toxicology, water quality research, environmental law, and art around the common theme of chemical pollution. The scientific practices of four women researchers are conveyed and re-imagined following the thread of Endocrine Disrupting Chemicals (EDC's), which permeate food, soil, and water, and are increasingly more persistent and everlasting in daily lives.
The four screens form a space across which the collaboratively created rituals are performed. The women communicate, stepping up at key moments to symbolically take part in each of the four rituals, showing support across time and space. In these rituals, methods from dominant scientific practices are woven together with spoken text, movement and symbolic locations and objects. Here ritual is used as a tool to create a moment outside of everyday life, to slow down, be present and show gratitude and to acknowledge the alterations chemicals make to bodies and ecosystems.
Four-channel video installation
Credits:
Jemma Woolmore | Caterina Cacciatori, Sandra Coecke, Irene Guerrero Fernández & Saskia Vermeylen
Related links:
Director - Jemma Woolmore
Performer - Jemma Woolmore in place of Irene Guerrero due to illness.
Director of Photography / Camera Operator - Cristina Amate Garcia
Sound production - Tilman Böhnke
Sound Edit and Design - Jemma Woolmore
Sound Mix - Jana Irmert Thank you to Caravati Industria Agricola for the use of their field.
Performer - Sandra Coecke
Sound Edit and Design - Jemma Woolmore Sound Mix - Jana Irmert
Thank you to Jessica Ponti for the use of your lab, to Susanne Bremer-Hoffmann for your advice and to Pascal Colpo for the full exploration of all the lab equipment.
Thank you to all Sandra's colleagues in the Directorate Health and Food (Units F2 Technologies for Health & F7 Digital Health).
Performer - Saskia Vermeylen
Director of Photography/First Camera Operator: Jubal Battisti
Second Camera Operator: Valentin Braun
Sound production - Thai Tai Pham
Sound Design - Christoph Scheurich
Sound Mix - Jana Irmert
Set assistant - Cosmo Schüppel
Thank you to Christian Dorausch, Mrs Grob and the team from MDSE Mitteldeutsche Sanierungs- und Entsorgungsgesellschaft mbH for facilitating our access to their site in Bitterfeld.
Thank you to Kerry-Ann Staton for your music curation.
Performer - Caterina Cacciatori
Sound production - Jemma Woolmore
Sound Design - Jemma Woolmore Sound Mix - Jana Irmert
Thank you to Virginia Bernardi, Caterina Benincasa, Adriaan Eeckels for all your organisational support and for making this project possible.
Thank you to Kerry-Ann Stanton for your council around ritual, proof reading and general guidance and support.
To Ingeborg Reichle for curatorial support, Christoph Scheurich for holding everything else together throughout this project.
This project brings together the knowledge of four researchers, whose work sits at different stations along a flow of chemicals; from agriculture via law and policy through bodies and into water. Collaboratively we will create four rituals that acknowledge our entanglement with chemicals, celebrate the healing and restorative capacities of bodies and ecosystems and give space to and thanks for these processes.
The four researchers are presented as Wise Women, holders of knowledge and protectors of life; their scientific practices are reframed as relations of care and ritual becomes a vehicle to make connections across bodies, scales, cycles and scientific disciplines. This work will address fertility, community and (more-than-human) health, telling stories that explore the power of positive imaginaries, offering a way of 'staying with our troubles' whilst envisioning alternative ways of being in the world. Through ritual and storytelling we bring into being new possibilities.
These Relations are Forever website.
Jemma Woolmore is a media artist, originally from New Zealand and based in Berlin. Caterina Cacciatori is an environmental engineer working on water management. Sandra Coecke is a toxicologist working on Food Safety and One Health. Irene Guerrero Fernandez is a geoinformatician and agricuiltural ecologist and Saskia Vermeylen is legal anthropologist working at Strathclyde University. The researchers first met Jemma at the SciArt Summer School on NaturArchy which took place in June 2022 at the JRC, and Jemma then connected the group.
"The main idea that I had by coming into this project and performing a ritual was to slow down science and the way we do science. So it was really about stopping and reflecting on when we produce data as scientists. where are we getting this data from? Should we be grateful for the data that we collect and for the entity from which we collect data? So in my case, it's waters. The ritual is bringing up this idea of slowing down and stopping and using other senses to perceive the environment while we do science.I think it's super important for science that we don't just see science as a pure production of information, but that these information are linked to our society and to our also relations with nature."
"The main idea that I had by coming into this project and performing a ritual was to slow down science and the way we do science. So it was really about stopping and reflecting on when we produce data as scientists. where are we getting this data from? Should we be grateful for the data that we collect and for the entity from which we collect data? So in my case, it's waters. The ritual is bringing up this idea of slowing down and stopping and using other senses to perceive the environment while we do science.
I think it's super important for science that we don't just see science as a pure production of information, but that these information are linked to our society and to our also relations with nature."
Presentation of Residency at JRC | 03/03/2023
Jemma Woolmore presentation at re:publica festival 2023
These Relations are Forever testimonial with iMAL during the NaturArchy exhibition
These Relations Are Forever | Ritual 1 Teaser
Residency at the JRC Ispra | 27/02/2023 - 03/03/2023
Presentation of Residency | 03/03/2023
Residency at the JRC Ispra | 22/05/2023 - 26/05/2023
Jemma Woolmore @ re:publica festival | 06/06/2023
Production update @ JRC Ispra | 04/08/2023 - 09/08/2023
Law and Arts: Dancing the Law - by Saskia Vermeylen
Production update @ JRC Ispra | 10/10/2023 - 13/10/2023
Jemma Woolmore at the 2024 Citizen Participation and Deliberative Democracy Festival | 13/06/2024
Showing of These Relations are Forever @ PFAS Pollution Event | 27/06/2024
These Relations are Forever website
These Relations are Forever Catalogue
Artists-in-Residence
Collaborating Researchers & Policymakers
NaturArchy Residencies 2023
NaturArchy Residency Projects
Residency Presentation Recordings
More on NaturArchy: Towards a Natural Contract
More on Resonances IV
More on the Resonances IV Summer School
04 Feb 2026 | 14 Jul 2026
