A sculpture of an artist's head sits on the facade of a former brewery in Neukölln. Bees crawl in and out through its nostrils and mouth. The figure is 3D-printed from cornstarch — biodegradable, edible, a temporary host for another species' architecture. This is Simon Faithfull's *Biotope no.1: Bienenstock*, as described in KINDL's exhibition materials. It tells you almost everything you need to know about where the lecture performances at KINDL on 18 April are coming from: the porous boundary between the human body and everything else that lives.

Faithfull, British, now Berlin-based, has spent decades making work that positions the human figure as an awkward, frequently absurd presence within larger ecological systems. His solo exhibition *Earth-ling*, running at KINDL's M1 VideoSpace through late July, gathers videos, photographs and sculptures around this central preoccupation — the body encountering what the exhibition materials call "the living fabric of this planet." The phrase is drawn directly from KINDL's own exhibition text. His lecture performance, *Explaining Taxonomy to a Bird*, places itself squarely in the tradition of the artist talk that refuses to simply explain. The title alone — that deadpan image of a human standing before a bird, attempting to communicate the classificatory systems we have invented to organise nature — carries a comic futility that runs through much of his practice, from GPS drawings made by walking straight lines across landscapes to Antarctic expeditions filmed with lo-fi digital intimacy.

Paired with Faithfull is Gabriella Hirst, an Australian artist and writer now also based in Berlin, whose work traces the entanglements of care, control and colonial history through moving image, performance, installation and — notably — gardening. Her lecture performance, *Ambergris*, takes its name from the waxy substance produced in the digestive systems of sperm whales: initially foul, it oxidises over years into something prized by perfumers, and remains the subject of peculiar legal and ethical dispute. Ambergris collapses categories. Animal waste or luxury commodity. Ocean debris or olfactory treasure. It is precisely the kind of material through which Hirst works — where plant taxonomies meet landscape painting, where art conservation intersects with nuclear history, where the archival meets the anecdotal.

Hirst's trajectory has been conspicuously international — residencies and exhibitions across Europe, the US, and Australia, including a solo exhibition at Kunsthalle Osnabrück and screenings at the Dia Art Foundation. Biographical details compiled from multiple institutional sources including Delfina Foundation, KINDL, and the artist's own listings. But the detail that matters here is what she was researching at Delfina Foundation in London: stillness, preservation, 'Keep Calm and Carry On' rhetoric, wax museums, death masks. A constellation that suggests her work is consistently drawn to the ways cultures embalm, classify and freeze the living world into manageable forms. The lecture performance on ambergris — a substance that resists classification by transforming over time — fits this obsession precisely.

The double bill sits within KINDL's broader spring programme, which includes Hirst's group exhibition *An Intimacy with Strangers* and Faithfull's *Earth-ling*, both of which opened in March. The conversation following the performances will be moderated by Jessica Ullrich, an art historian based in Nuremberg whose writing focuses on the intersection of art and animal studies — a fitting interlocutor for two artists whose work keeps circling the question of how humans narrate their relationship to non-human life.

The lecture performance as a format has become so prevalent in contemporary art that it risks its own kind of banality — the artist stands at a lectern, clicks through slides, tells a story that blurs documentation and fiction, and the audience nods along somewhere between TED talk and theatre. KINDL itself has programmed several this spring: Ana Prvački's *How Sex Keeps Us from Floating Away* and Alexandra Grant's *The Storm is Around You Not in You* both featured in the *Iliggocene – The Age of Dizziness* programme in March. Drawn from KINDL's own event archive. The format proliferates because it solves a practical problem — cheap, portable, no fabrication required — but also because it occupies an epistemological grey zone that suits the current moment. Not quite a talk, not quite a show. The artist gets to be simultaneously expert and unreliable narrator.

What makes this particular pairing worth attention is the way both artists approach the same fundamental territory — the violence and absurdity of human classificatory systems imposed on the non-human world — through markedly different registers. Faithfull tends toward the deadpan, the embodied, the slightly slapstick: a body in a landscape doing something faintly ridiculous with great seriousness. Hirst works through layered archival storytelling, pulling threads between colonial botanical gardens and nuclear test sites, between perfume and whale intestines. One performs taxonomy's failure as physical comedy; the other narrates it as a slow-burning historical horror story.

KINDL itself matters as a context. The former Berliner Kindl brewery in Neukölln — its expressionist tower and 20-metre-high boiler house converted into exhibition spaces — is a building that already performs a kind of taxonomic confusion: industrial heritage repurposed as art institution, a site where the ghost of mass production haunts the singularity of contemporary art objects. The Maschinenhaus, the Sudhaus, the Kesselhaus — rooms named for processes of heating, brewing, fermenting, now housing work about the porousness of bodies and the inadequacy of classification. It is not a neutral white cube, and work shown there inevitably enters into dialogue with the building's own history of substances processed and changed.

The event is free, in English, on a Saturday afternoon. Berlin still offers this — a double lecture performance followed by a moderated conversation in a former brewery, no ticket price, no institutional gatekeeping — even as the city's funding landscape grows more precarious. The question of whether lecture performances can sustain genuine criticality or simply become soft-power programming applies everywhere, not just here. But when two artists with this much specificity in their research — whale vomit, bee-colonised self-portraits, the absurdity of explaining taxonomy to a creature that preceded it — stand in front of an audience and speak, the format still has the capacity to do what a wall text cannot. It can hesitate. It can digress. It can look at its own categories and find them, briefly, laughable.