ABOUT

Symbiosis is a Berlin-based transdisciplinary initiative fostering the cross-pollination of art, science, and technology. It is a project of All About Curating (AAC), a non-profit curatorial platform working with artworkers across 150+ countries.
 

Symbiosis takes its name and its method from the evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis, whose theory of symbiogenesis reframed how life develops. Against the prevailing narrative of evolution as competition between discrete individuals, Margulis demonstrated that the most consequential leaps in the history of life emerged through merger: separate organisms entering into such sustained interdependence that they became something new. Complexity, in her account, is not won through rivalry but composed through relation.
 

We take this as more than a metaphor. The disciplinary separation of art and science is a historical construction, consolidated through the institutionalisation of academia in the 18th and 19th centuries and hardened by an industrial logic that assigned science economic value and art ornamental status. Symbiosis works against that inheritance. Following Margulis, we treat disciplines not as territories to be defended but as organisms capable of merging into new forms of knowledge and practice.
 

The initiative provokes artists, scientists, engineers, musicians, hackers, mathematicians, academics, and creative practitioners to work symbiogenetically — building multidisciplinary and multi-species alliances in which no single field absorbs the others, and something previously impossible becomes structurally viable.
 

At the core of Symbiosis lies a commitment to global dialogue, with a dedicated focus on underrepresented narratives and transdisciplinary practitioners from the global majority. Margulis's insight applies here too: ecosystems and knowledge systems alike grow more resilient through the diversity of participants, not through the consolidation of dominant actors.
 

Symbiosis is founded by Mahzabin Haque, a Berlin-based art curator, educator, and researcher with backgrounds in transdisciplinary art, photography, and engineering. Her research interests include digital culture, community building, socially engaged practices, and the convergence of art and neuroscience. She has curated, co-curated, and coordinated 50+ exhibitions and public events in collaboration with artists, institutions, and scholars internationally.