Object Stories: Heide Barrenechea and the Berlin Stones

From the series: “Object Stories: Meet the Team”

For Heide Barrenechea, Head of the Humboldt Labor, the display case containing the Berlin stones embodies what On Water. WasserWissen in Berlin is all about. Positioned right at the entrance to the main exhibition space and serving as the first exhibit in the walk-through landscape, it brings together objects from all four institutions of the Berlin University Alliance (BUA) – and places them in dialogue with one another in a surprising way.

Here, a stone is not simply a stone. The specimens from the collections of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Technische Universität Berlin, and Freie Universität Berlin are each millions of years old and come from the former seabed beneath Berlin. Traces of that time can still be found in them today, including skeletal fragments of shellfish and the bones of a marine reptile. The stones from the Charité collection, by contrast, are human gallstones. It is precisely this unexpected juxtaposition that appeals to Heide Barrenechea:

“The display case with the stones speaks to me because it contains stones from all four Berlin universities in the Excellence Alliance, thereby fulfilling the aim of representing research from all of them equally in the exhibition. And because it does so in a way that is both humorous and conceptually consistent.”

The stones are brought together as an ensemble not only through their presentation in a shared display case, but also through their conceptual connection to the element of water. The group of gallstones of varying sizes tells of an imbalance in soluble substances, or more precisely, of bile that has fallen out of balance. The stones from Berlin’s former seabed, by contrast, preserve structures created by water in solid form and fix them in place over time. For Heide Barrenechea, it is the aesthetic presentation of the stones, the wit of the juxtaposition, and the surprising moment in which their different relationships to water become apparent that make the display case such a special object: “For me, it is the ideal introduction to our exhibition.”