Ginsberg is also focused on plants, albeit in a very different way. Her contribution is “Pollinator Pathmaker”, an 820-foot-long flower bed that was not planted to please people, but to help pollinators – bees and insects, many of which are in danger of extinction. “A lot of my work is about changing perspective,” she said. In her garden—near the formal 19th-century Italianate gardens and a 10-minute walk from the rest of the exhibit in the North Gallery—she looks at plants from a pollinator’s perspective.
“Pollinators see differently,” she explained. “They feel different. For example, bees cannot see the color red, but they can see ultraviolet. Butterflies can see red, green, blue and ultraviolet. Bees can remember the locations of the plants they visit and optimize the fastest route around all the flowers – and they can visit 10,000 flowers a day. So I started thinking, what would a garden look like if we didn’t make it in a tasteful way?”
A little crazy is the answer – “super dense, intensively flowering all year round, very colorful and full of strange combinations of plants.” But designing such a garden is complicated — so complicated that Ginsberg teamed up with a string theory physicist in Poland, Przemek Witaszczyk, to create an algorithm that would help her figure out what to plant. On the website pollinator.artyou can also use this algorithm to get instructions specific to your garden.
If “Pollinator Pathmaker,” as Ginsberg put it, “is a genteel way to think about” extinction problems, Carolina Caycedo‘This Land is a Poem of Ten Rivers Healing’ is more confrontational. Born in London, raised in Colombia and now living in Los Angeles, Caycedo spent years documenting the scars of dams. At the Serpentine, she uses aerial and satellite photography to capture the fate of 10 rivers in the Americas in immersive, floor-to-ceiling wallcoverings. One section documents the 2019 Brumadinho Dam collapse, when waste from a Brazilian iron ore mine buried more than 250 people alive in an avalanche of toxic sludge. Another response has been the construction of a massive hydroelectric dam that has flooded part of the Magdalena River, Colombia’s economic, social and cultural heart. “I always say the river called me back,” said Caycedo, who grew up on a farm on the banks.