C/O Berlin presents a double exhibition of the winners of the After Nature . Ulrike Crespo Photography Prize 25: Lisa Barnard . You Only Look Once and Isadora Romero . Notes on How to Build a Forest from Sep 27, 2025 to Jan 28, 2026. The Opening takes place on Friday, Sep 26, 2025 at 8 pm at C/O Berlin in Amerika Haus.

In their prizewinning projects, Lisa Barnard (b. 1967, United Kingdom) and Isadora Romero (b. 1987, Ecuador) consider our relationship to the environment and examine how it is shaped by technology, knowledge, and perception. Both Barnard and Romero bring together documentary and experimental photographic practices in order to make visible complex connections between ecology, politics, and culture. Their work raises key questions about responsibility, resources, and new ways of coexisting in a time marked by global crises.

Lisa Barnard . You Only Look Once

In her first major project in four years, British artist Lisa Barnard considers perception in relation to both human and machine experience. She addresses the complexity of technological progress and the ecological resources on which its promises depend.

Barnard’s research focuses on California, unfolding a multilayered, fragmented and nonlinear story that encompasses photographs, an immersive video installation, archival interventions, alternative printing strategies and AI-generated image analyses that weave together in the creation of a dense visual entanglement.

The project’s starting point is the Salton Sea in Southern California. This area previously served as a site for military testing during World War II, but has now become the site of economic desire and technological solutionism in the form of lithium extraction. Barnard’s work depicts the clear signs of ecological depletion of this once flourishing environment, while addressing the military gaze that is tied to the site and part of its complex history.

Barnard continues to explore how technologies that rely on vision and soundwaves impact interactions between humans and machines. Using echolocation in bats, Barnard focuses on current modes of object detection that are now ubiquitous in autonomous vehicles. Much like humans, these systems rely on a wide range of sensors and imagery in order to perceive and navigate the world. Although artificial intelligence learning programs such as “You Only Look Once” enable real-time object detection, machines will never have genuine or conscious experience.

In “You Only Look Once”, Barnard makes us aware of the parallels and differences between human, animal, and machine consciousness, and of the moments when recognizing the world devolves into an active way of shaping it. Reflecting on the extent to which today’s global multicrises are interconnected, Barnard comments on the entanglements created by machine “autonomy”. So, at a time when the climate is in crisis, we must ask how technologies can be developed that are not only efficient but also sensitive to the world they are intended to capture.

Isadora Romero . Notes on How to Build a Forest

In her distinguished project, Ecuadorian photographer Isadora Romero creates a multilayered visual narrative about two rainforests in her homeland: the Chocó Andino de Pichincha biosphere of the Yunguilla community near the capital city of Quito and the Mache-Chindul reserve near the Pacific Ocean.

Her work opens up a sensitive and poetic view on forms of cohabitation with the forest in the past, present, and future. Her photographs were taken in over more than one year, working closely in tandem with local communities, scientists, and research organizations, focusing on community reforesting initiatives, agroecological practices, and sustainable forms of management.

Romero’s artistic practice moves between documentary photography and experimental processes. In the exhibition, her material-based experiments with plants and textiles are shown together with photos taken from local family archives that have changed due to humidity in the forest. Moreover, her use of infrared and UV technologies offer a speculative perspective on how forest fauna perceive the world.

A central motif in her thinking is cross-generational knowledge transfer. For Romero, this term also includes the traditional wisdom of indigenous cultures such as Yumbo and Jama Coaque. She traces the remnants of pre-Colombian trade routes known as culuncos, and photographs artifacts in local museums that she stages using brightly colored fabrics.

“Notes on How to Build a Forest” is a decolonial reflection on our relationship to the world. In it, Romero is able to tell a nuanced story of the forest as a living organism without reducing it to deforestation, a CO2 storehouse, or a romanticized Western idea of “untouched nature”. The work examines the forest’s possible futures as a shared habitat, a place of collective memory, cultural negotiations – and not least as a mirror for global responsibility in the Anthropocene era.

The double exhibition is curated by Katharina Täschner, Junior Curator at C/O Berlin. A corresponding publication will be released by Hartmann Books for each exhibition.

After Nature . Ulrike Crespo Photography Prize

The After Nature . Ulrike Crespo Photography Prize is a joint project of the C/O Berlin Foundation and the Crespo Foundation. Every year, the prize enables the realization of two research-intensive projects and honors artists or groups with advanced exhibition and publication practices who explore new concepts of nature in photography and visual media through their work. The prize carries a cash award of 40,000 euros for each winner as well as an exhibition at C/O Berlin with an accompanying publication. After its first stop at C/O Berlin, the double exhibition will be on view from March 13 to May 31, 2026, at the Open Space of the Crespo Foundation in Frankfurt am Main.

Artist bios

Lisa Barnard (b. 1967, United Kingdom) is a British artist and lecturer whose photography focuses on real events. In her projects, she combines classical documentary methods such as photography, audio, video, and text with contemporary visual strategies and digital technologies. She brings together her interest in aesthetics and current debates on the materiality of photography with political questions surrounding new ecological efforts, technological developments, science, and the industrial military complex. Barnard is an associate professor and head of the online masters in documentary photography at University of South Wales.

She regularly exhibits her work and has published three monographs: Chateau Despair (2012, GOST, supported by Arts Council England), Hyenas of the Battlefield: Machines in the Garden (2014, GOST, supported by Albert Renger-Patzsch prize), and The Canary and the Hammer (2019, MACK, supported by Getty Images Prestige Grant).

Isadora Romero (b. 1987, Ecuador) is a visual storyteller working at the intersection of documentary and fine-art photography. Her work is characterized by a strong involvement in social and ecological justice, with a special focus on agricultural diversity, food sovereignty, and historical and symbolic connections between people and land. She documents and reflects on the connection between communities and their environments, using this to develop new perspectives that are always founded on a slow, collaborative, and context-based approach. She co-founded Ruda, a Latin-American female photographs’ collective.

Her work has been exhibited in Ecuador and abroad. She has completed residencies in Antarctica (INAE), Mexico (CASA), and Luxemburg (Neimenster). Her awards include Discovery Award at Rencontres d’Arles (2023), the global and regional Open Format Award from World Press Photo (2022), the POY Latam multimedia prize (2023), as well as the Marilyn Stafford Award (2021). She has also received support from Magnum Foundation, Prince Claus Fund, and National Geographic. She is the author of Moving, to See You and co-author of Siete Punto Ocho.

Simultaneous exhibition at C/O Berlin:
C/O Berlin | »Close Enough . Perspectives by Women Photographers of Magnum«

Friday, Sep 26, 2025, 8 pm
Opening reception

Guided tours
Saturdays, Sundays and on public holidays at 2 pm (German) and 4 pm (English).
Details & tickets

Saturday, Sep 27, 2025, 3 – 4 pm
Artist Tour (en)
With Lisa Barnard (Artist) and Katharina Täschner (Curator C/O Berlin Foundation). Tickets 12/6 € (incl. exhibition).

Saturday, Sep 27, 2025, 4:30 – 5:30 pm
Artist Tour (en)
With Isadora Romero (Artist), Lizbeth Morales (Member of the Yunguilla Community), Julieta Pestarino (Assistant Curator Getty Museum, Los Angeles), Katharina Täschner (Curator). Tickets 12/6 € (incl. exhibition).

Thursday, Oct 9, 2025, 7 – 9 pm
After-Work Tour + Drink (de)
Close Enough . Lisa Barnard . Isadora Romero. 20 Euro (incl. exhibitions).
Details

Tuesday, Nov 11, 2025, 6:30 – 8 pm
Artist Talk with Lisa Barnard (en)
With Lisa Barnard (Artist) and Vera Tollmann (Cultural scientist and lecturer in digital media). Welcome: Katharina Täschner (Curator, C/O Berlin).
Details

Thursday, Nov 13, 2025, 7 – 9 pm
After-Work Tour + Drink (de)
Close Enough . Lisa Barnard . Isadora Romero. 20 Euro (incl. exhibitions).
Details

Monday, Dec 1, 2025, 11 am – 8 pm
Extend Your Weekend
Free Monday.
Details

Saturday, Dec 13, 2025, 3 – 4 pm
Guided tour: Vision Machines – How Technology Enhances Our Gaze (de)
With Katja Müller-Helle (Art and media scholar) and Katharina Täschner (Curator, C/O Berlin). Held in German.
Details

Thursday, Dec 18, 2025, 7 – 9 pm
After-Work Tour + Drink (de)
Close Enough . Lisa Barnard . Isadora Romero. 20 Euro (incl. exhibitions).
Details

Opening hours during the holidays:
Dec 24, 2025: closed
Dec 25: 2 – 8 pm
Dec 26: 11 am – 8 pm
Dec 31: 11 am – 5 pm
Jan 1, 2026: 2 – 8 pm

Thursday, Jan 8, 2026, 7 – 9 pm
After-Work Tour + Drink (de)
Close Enough . Lisa Barnard . Isadora Romero. 20 Euro (incl. exhibitions).
Details

Thursday, Jan 15, 2026, 6 – 7 pm
Curator’s Tour with Katharina Täschner (de)
Details