Berlin Blue

Artistic and Experimental Approaches to a Color

BB 12_E14.15, Mi_ B16.45, Mi

How can one make a color—its origin and its properties—visible?

Britta Lange and Kerstin Stoll take an artistic and experimental approach to Berlin Blue, a synthetic deep-blue pigment that was first produced by accident in Berlin in 1706. During the lecture, we’ll produce it ourselves and explore its material, historical, and political connections: for example, its various names in the 18th century—Diesbach Blue, Turnbull’s Blue, Prussian Blue, Bleu de Paris, Milori Blue, Saxon Blue, China Blue—back when there were no patent laws, or its use in Chinese green tea in the 19th century.

In doing so, we examine Western concepts that remain relevant today and shape contemporary narratives such as those surrounding “Chinese trash”: original and copy, origin, discovery, ownership, authorship, and copyright.

Duration: 90 minutes (approx. 60 min. lecture + experiment, plus 30 min. discussion)



Participants

Britta Lange is a cultural studies scholar and author. She works at the Institute for Cultural Studies at Humboldt University in Berlin and is currently a visiting professor of Visual Cultures at the weissensee kunsthochschule berlin. Her research focuses on cultural history and cultural techniques, colonialism and postcolonial approaches, the history of knowledge, and early photographic, film, and audio documents. Her monographs include *Passfotos unter Zwang. Deutsche Fotopolitik im Ersten Weltkrieg*(Berlin, 2025); *Captured Voices. Sound Recordings of Prisoners of War from the Sound Archive 1915–1918, Berlin 2022. Britta Lange lives and works in Berlin.

Kerstin Stoll views her artistic practice as a cultural technique: she evokes ongoing processes of transfer that mediate between the field of artistic practice and the realm of scholarship. She translates her experimental, process-oriented approach into installations, sculptures, and video collages that exemplify aspects of bionics, materials research, the latest construction and digital representation techniques, as well as anthropological research and sustainable architecture.

As part of a scientific-artistic collaboration in 2021, Britta Lange and Kerstin Stoll jointly conducted experiments with Prussian blue in the Object Laboratory of the Center for Cultural Technology (ZfK). They presented their research, among other things, in the lecture series “Politics of Colors” (2021) at the Institute for Cultural Studies. At TAT, they are now presenting their jointly authored and designed publication *Berliner Blau*, which was published on the HU’s e-doc server.

The event will be moderated by Felix Sattler, Chief Curator of TA T. In 2021, he participated in the experiments conducted by Britta Lange and Kerstin Stoll in the Object Laboratory of the Center for Cultural Technology (ZfK), an institution he established together with Jochen Hennig.



Accessibility

The lecture hall is accessible via an elevator. The historic seating is not accessible to people with limited mobility. Seating and wheelchair spaces for people with limited mobility are available directly in the lecture hall.

The lectures are made accessible to deaf, hard-of-hearing, and partially hearing individuals through AI-generated captions.

The presentation relies heavily on visual content from the experiments and is unfortunately not easily accessible to blind and visually impaired viewers.



Sensitive Content

Topics such as colonial violence and racism are not addressed; however, the lecture also discusses European stereotypes of China and Chinese stereotypes of Europe.



Concept, Speakers: PD Dr. Britta Lange and Kerstin Stoll

Moderator: Felix Sattler, Curator, TA T

Translated with DeepL

Meeting point: Animal Anatomy Theater - North Campus

Next date:

• Date Tuesday, 07/July/2026 18:00
• Venue Tieranatomisches Theater - Haus 3 (Campus Nord)
• Address Philippstraße 12/13, 10115 Berlin-Mitte