Context (Pool) 2: Art & Research

What changes if we – artists and researchers – work with elements such as wind, water or minerals not as mere materials and background to human activities, but as proper beings, real presences and potential collaborators?

Co-creating in one’s artistic (research) practice with non-human-beings goes beyond an interest in their material characteristics as resources, instead involves a broader relationship of care and awe. We will dive into different practices of engaging with natural elements and environments that deconstruct extractivist logics and build awareness of interdependencies. How can interactions and communication with natural entities create shared agency and avoid instrumentalization? What is the role of unpredictable and uncontrollable elements within such relationship building? And what makes it research?

Along a selection of examples of works and research projects that evolve around ecological, animist, feminist, new materialist or indigenous approaches, we will critically question the challenges and potentials of co-creation. Additionally, to their individual (PhD-)projects, the teaching-team draws on their joint experience within the research group “Liquid Stays”: over three site-specific residencies along the river of Rhone, from the glacier to the sea, eleven artists have developed a dialog around practices of retreat, rituals and relations in/with/through nature.

Link to "Liquid Stays":
https://www.zhdk.ch/forschung/ifcar/river-calls-23260/liquid-stays-artist-research-group-on-water-and-time-23882

About the lecturers:

Laura von Niederhäusern is a researcher, artist and activist situating her practice in the fields of essaysitic filmmaking, interventionist practices and writing. After having concluded her PhD about time perception in the accelerated present, she needed to follow a befriended river and lower the pace.

Maëlle Cornut is a visual artist and arts researcher working on the visualization of our interdependencies with the more-than-humans and the environment, currently developing a PhD project on air beings involving art/science exchanges and care practices.

Marit Mihklepp is an artist who plays with research, situating her practice in visual arts, writing and walking. In her PhD project “Meteolore: Air Stones, Ground Holes” she is listening to meteorites and their imprints on land and stories.