SOAP Art and Publishing

The Bergkvara Residency

Bergkvara residencies are intended for research and reflection, with an optional offer to exhibit in their gallery. Our goal during this visit was to explore the future through the framework of the Breadboy of Herculaneum.

To begin, we decided to identify a site-specific environmental problem where we could experiment with artistic and scientific research methods, as well as pyrolization techniques to create biochar. Through conversations with the environmental officer Pernilla Landin at the local authorities, we focused on fertilization runoff and deoxygenation of the Baltic Sea. We also looked at how the overgrowth of coastline reeds can contribute to the already stressed system if left to die back naturally. To prevent this, the municipality cuts the reeds every fall before they decay, but they were interested in finding alternative uses for this waste. Pernilla gave us access to the previous year’s cut reeds.

From the literature on biochar, we learned that it can be used to filter out excess nutrients, such as fertilizers. We decided to experiment with making biochar from the reed waste and subsequently using the reed-based biochar to filter fertilized runoff water.

Biochar is essentially carbon in a stable form. It is listed as an essential carbon sequestring and storage technique by the IPCC. When used as a soil conditioner, it is usually saturated with some type of organic nutrient. When used as a filter, it can capture excess nutrients, store water for dry periods, and release water and nutrients back to plants, while also providing a form of flood mitigation. In theory, biochar that has been used to filter nutrients from runoff water could then be used to re-fertilize fields in a more controlled and stable way than artificial fertilizers, whose volatility contributes significantly to nutrient overloading and deoxygenation in the sea.

To test the filtering potential, we planned to lower a sack of biochar into a drain well. With the help of Pernilla, who accompanied us to take water tests, and the farmer Bertil Aspenäs, who gave us access to one of his manholes, we set up the experiment.

In the end, we failed to do the test as planned because the manhole contained internal mechanisms, and using the sack risked getting it stuck and damaging the system. To avoid this, we captured and filtered the water directly in lab test bottles but when the test results came back a few weeks later, we learned that while the biochar efficiently captured the nitrogen, it had unexpectedly released a significant amount of phosphorus.

The experiment taught us more about filtering techniques and highlighted the need to find a drain system without storage mechanisms like Bertil’s and to look at alternatives we visited Ödevata to look at the filter arrangement they have in the massive greenhouse, where they have integrated a fishpond and biochar system, which even sustains fruiting banana plants.

Together with artist Mats Rundberg we made a second test with a different kind of biochar made in a highly efficient district heating plant at Skåne frö. The results were much the same with a big addition of phosphor in the filtered water, so we decided to put further investigations of filtering water on hold for now and to visit Itaka Institute in Zürich on our way down to the residency in Italy next summer. The rest of the residency, we engaged with the metaphysical properties of Biochar.