Iman Datoo

Kinnomic Botany: Freeing the Potato from its Scientific and Colonial Ties

2020, video essay

Who are my friends – Cartifact

Kinnomic Botany traces the seemingly mundane and cumbersome potato through its evolutionary history and along alternate trajectories, to reveal the bland and domesticated language used to categorise and order the plant world in botanical institutions today. As a parallel botanical institution, it intervenes in sites where the colonised are cast out, to counter their dominant, human-centric narratives of place. The Kinnomic Botanical Garden is a parallel site; tethered from Kew Gardens to challenge the Scientific classifications of the potato. Operating through a series of ‘cartifacts’–– alternative cartographic artefacts––we cultivate a method of mapping that reveals the many interrelated but not always complementary ways of knowing nature; and build a social structure of mapmaking that relies on participation to grow and sustain.

Iman Datoo (UK) is an architectural designer/researcher, and co-founder of the Emergent Knowledge Bureau. Using agents of vegetal origin, she challenges the colonial strategies that continue to sustain an absence of indigenous practices in the scientific community; working between object, narrative, and film to empower the multiple voices who make-place. Iman has exhibited and presented her work at the UCL Multimedia Anthropology Lab, Kingston University, and Southbank Centre’s Alchemy Festival. Her artistic and research practice speculates on the trajectories of our food and landscapes through world-building and storytelling. The potato is her entry-point into the emergent alliances between science and instinct, and co-creativity with non-human lifeforms. She am interested in the role of generative ‘story-spaces’ such as poetry, map-making, film, and children’s picture-books in transforming ways of knowing for food and nature.

Yiannis Pappas

Spatial Ataraxia

2013, artist’s book

Spatial Ataraxia, video stills

«For the purpose of anthropological and artistic research for my master thesis “Spatial Ataraxia” at the KhB Weißensee, I stayed five weeks on the isolated Mount Athos in Greece, exploring the practice of Asceticism with particular reference to the case of the communal ascetic society of Great Lavra Monastery (founded in 972 AD). During my stay, I created a series of performative documentations, using my body as a unit of measurement and as a medium for exploring the spiritual and material significations at this sacred center. I focused on the ascetic body, the sacred material culture, and the byzantine aesthetics on the concept of the emotional and the immaterial effect created by a community of interest. Throughout participant observation, discourse analysis, mapping a range of physical cartographies and performative juxtapositions, the work is an attempt to grasp the virtual rationalization of a unique sacrosanct space on earth.»

Yiannis Pappas is a visual and performance artist based in Berlin. He studied sculpture and photography at the Athens School of Fine Arts until 2008. During the last year of his studies, he attended Christiane Möbus’ class at the University of the Arts in Berlin (UdK), and completed the artistic and scientific Master of Arts Space Strategies at the Academy of Arts Weißensee in Berlin with Professor Maren Strack and Professor Kathrin Wildner. He has received awards from the Academy of Athens, Greek State Scholarship Foundation (IKY), Goethe Institute Residencies, and German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). Yiannis’ work has been exhibited in Israel, Germany, Mexico, France, Chile, Italy, India, Greece and Egypt. Religion, urbanism, nature and cultural spaces are central to his artistic themes, while the notion of intervention dominates his work.

Aksiniya Peycheva

Trauma Mapping

2018, relief map using computational geometry.

Bird

Trauma Mapping is a transdisciplinary project that aims to develop a methodology for creating “geographical” maps of physical injuries, illnesses or other damages the body experiences. It seeks to explore the inner processes of suffering; to look for visual traces, left by traumatic events–their projection on the body, the organism’s reaction to them, the way the cells are being rearranged by what has happened. Survey objects are stray animals from the streets of Bulgaria that have experienced stressful situations while living on the street–from fairly harmless to more serious ones (such as shooting)–which have a lasting impact on their lives and sometimes prove fatal. Sometimes the traumatic process is the result of deliberately causing harm, sometimes its etiology is vague, but the concept of continuing suffering and the visual processes that it leaves behind is still important.

Project Credits: Eric Osborn (US), software engineer; Siyana Petrova (BG), molecular biologist; Alexander Penkov, PhD (BG), geographer; BGVet clinic, Sofia.

Aksiniya Peycheva is a transdisciplinary artist, based in Sofia, Bulgaria. The focus of her work is the process of ‘visual translation’ where she explores the possible ways of moving pieces of information between different fields of knowledge – ‘how one or several scientific fields can be combined in order to answer a question only important to art.’ She often collaborates with scientists, and her projects are also accompanied by a theoretical part, the result of a long study on certain topics, which include the topic of the visual translation of music or pain. Light, kinetic, interactive of multilayered glass installations, her works contain different layers of information, using various scientific methodologies, which can be explored as an attempt to redefine the fields of knowledge and to rethink the initial need to set their boundaries.

Hanne Van Dyck

Khayma

Khayma

«Tighmert is an oasis in South-West Morocco where they create patchworks from old Melfa, large batik fabrics imported from Mauritanië that women wear. The patchworks were one of the last products the caravans brought to Morocco and are made in the form of tents or shelters to protect from the sun. During a wedding for example, two families join to create a Khayma, a tent, in the courtyard. By knocking on doors in the oasis and asking (using a recording in Darija) for a piece of old melfa and to stitch together, we connected to the women of the oasis and their tradition. After a week of collecting and collectively stitching, we used this khayma as a backdrop for a marhouf. A marhouf is a meeting where women come together to eat and celebrate, which was organised for this occasion by Soukaina Dabbah and Rachida Dabbah, two women of the village.  Khayma is a collaboration with anthropologist Alexandra Anzid Kollárová that came into being during Caravan Tighmert, a cultural laboratory in Tighmert.»

Hanne Van Dyck is a visual artist and writer based between Antwerp and Marrakech. Using traveling as a working method, Van Dyck allows deep spaces of reflection when translating her fieldwork into mixed-media installations, text-based performances, videos and publications, often collaborating with other artists and different media. Her practice reflects on the interrelationships between landscape, memory, culture and imagination; the organization of language as a mediator of human consciousness and rituals addressing the shattering of the relationship between subject and object, nature and culture, human and non-human, concept and material, reality and fiction. In researching the human relationship with mountains, she has completed residencies across the globe, including at Lijiang Studio and TCG Nordica in China, Villa Ruffieux and Institut Furkablick in Switzerland and Queens Residency in Morocco. Her latest publication Sugar Falls In Water is published by Onomatopee and Tique. Her installations and performances are often site-specific; apart from exhibiting in artist-run spaces (Komplot Brussels BE, LE18 Marrakech MA, DIENSTGEBÄUDE Art Space Zürich CH), cultural spaces (TCG Nordica Kunming CN, Campo Nieuwpoort Gent BE, La Friche Marseille FR, Netwerk, Aalst BE), and festivals (On Marche Marrakech MA, Plan B Bekegem BE, Dansem Marseille FR), she has shown and performed her work on the Jemaa el-Fna square in Marrakech, the Furkapas in the Swiss Alps, a horse- resting place on the tea-horse trail in China, her bedroom, the Todra Gorge in Morocco.

Matheous da Rocha Montanari

Algorithmic Landscapes

2020, video

* part of the online exhibition

AI prediction

This work makes algorithmic approximations of geographically distant places. As a result, we create a cartography of a space that emerges from the combination of images selected by Artificial Intelligence. Today, we see the rise of digital technologies, especially artificial intelligence, invading the most diverse fields. These types of systems have specific ways of operating, mainly on data-based forecasting. The algorithmic landscape project investigates the dimensions of the city landscape, taking into account the algorithmic layer that constitutes it. The project unfolds in three stages. The first part is a performance that culminates in an algorithmic walk in two different cities: Paris, France and Caxias do Sul, Brazil. This action produces more than 10,000 images that are used as a dataset for the work. During the performance, I make an algorithmic dérive guided by a music suggestion system. This software does a reverse image search on the dataset and finds the most similar locations in the two different cities. With these selections, we created a collection of images that approach two geographically distant places, from an algorithmic point of view. After that, the images are printed with a specific technique on acrylic sheets. When the different acrylic sheets meet, they bring out the image of what exists between them, revealing the algorithmic landscape.

Matheous da Rocha Montenari is a Brazilian artist and researcher based in Porto Alegre. He is a doctoral student in Multimedia Arts at the University of São Paulo, where he integrates the Poéticas Digitais research group. Matheus has an interdisciplinary education in digital technologies and fine arts, his work investigates and creates possibilities of intersection and symbiotic relations between these fields. He currently develops works subverting algorithmic logic for poetic creation, he is interested in topics such as data-aesthetics, bio-techno-diversities, (non)human-computer interactions, and information v. sensation.

Monika Dorniak

Past Pieces Merging With What I Call Now

2020, video, sculptures

Past Pieces Merging

The multi-media work, consisting of video, text, sculptures, and performance, is reflecting on the subject of embodied maps, and intergenerational trauma. This position within & outside the organic world has introduced an apparent paradox to the human species: a dependence on nature that runs parallel to the aim of being independent, to become trans-humanistic. What differentiates natural from synthetic awareness, is the human-made delusion that everything can be controlled, a false perception resulting from the fear of the truth, which ultimately is the manifesto of all political systems of oppression. This fear is fuelled by insecurity and leads to the exclusion of those who question the ‘political delusions’ constructed by a homogenous group which forms a ‘disproportionate superiority to the rest of the population’. Man-made borders across fields, through rivers, creeping through forests and climbing over mountains, change positions with the moods of authorities. Vegetation has overgrown places where the bodies that fell fighting for those human territories are buried, yet the memories remain, silent, in the landscape, until they suddenly express themselves.

Monika Gabriela Dorniak is a German-Polish artist with an interdisciplinary background in choreography, psychology and design, who often merges media – specifically performance, (textile) sculpture, workshop, video, photography. In her multimedia practice she is exploring the structures of the Self through a multifaceted analysis of body, mind and environment, by taking into consideration the regressive history of the domination of nature, and social power structures. Her auto-biographical research on intergenerational trauma, migration and belonging is carried forward within her ongoing collaborations with scientists and diverse communities. As an artist she has presented her works at international institutions, such as Tate Exchange in Tate Modern London (2017 & 2018), Foreign Affairs Festival at Berliner Festspiele (2014) and Arts Catalyst in London (2016), and as guest lecturer at Al-Quds Bard College in Palestine (2018), Chelsea College in London (2017) and Garage Museum in Moscow (2019). Dorniak holds a Master Degree in Art and Science (Department Fine Art) from the Central Saint Martins in London (2017).

Marina Fraga

63 Perforations

2015, performance video

* part of the online exhibition

63 Perforations

«The work 63 Perforations is a recorded performance in which a world map was marked onmy body by sunlight. After three days of sun exposure, the drawing of continents and islands emerged on my skin. The drawing pigment was the very skin pigment: The Earth’s geographic reference is encrusted in the epidermis, so that body and drawing become one. It is over this first layer – the skin-map–that the actual performance takes place: on a single shot, the video follows an acupuncture session in which the needles are placed in the locations related to major oil reserves around the world. This work asks about how and with what interests do we access the energy resources of the planet. In the case of the analogy between the perforations in the body and in the Earth, both put the energies to flow, but with different objectives. Carbon-based energy is deeply connected to our history, our modes of social organization, power relations, and geopolitics. While the acupuncture perforation seeks to balance the body through the release of the retained energy, the oil drilling seeks to exploit the condensed energy of the planet, and end up causing an ecological and climatic imbalance.»

Marina Fraga is an artist, researcher and visual arts professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). Phd in Arts by State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ, 2016), she investigates the human agency on nature, the natural and artificial duality, Anthropocene and Climate Change, from an ecofeminist and Latin American point of view. Creator of Revista Carbono, member of Cooperativa de Mulheres Artistas and leader of the research group GAE Arte e Ecologias.

Marina Camargo

Fluid cartographies

Fractions of space

Cartography is a way to understand the surrounding environment through the medium of space. Maps consist of various layers of information, such as the history of places and the ways to inhabit spaces, which reveal several narratives marked by different economic, political, social, and historical periods. Maps are essentially representations of spaces, in the sense that they are various data collections of reality. Maps have been part of Fraga’s artistic practice for many years: whether it is a documentation of reality or a graphic representation of the cities as a projection of world order. Her work’s uniqueness lies in how the approach to physical and political reality can become part of an extensive practice based on representations of space.

«I understand my works with maps as constructions of non-linear narratives related to contemporary issues of the world: how could the divisions of the earth be understood? Why should we use a squared and rigid structure to represent a world that is somewhat in constant change? How could maps be constructed after the new technologies of mapping? How could a representation of space be perceived through sound works?»

Marina Camargo is a Brazilian visual artist who works in various media including video, photograph, installation and drawing. She lives and works in Porto Alegre (Brazil) and Berlin (Germany). Born in Maceió (Alagoas, northeast Brazil), Camargo moved to Porto Alegre at the age of nine. She began university there, before completing her arts education in Barcelona, New York, and Munich. She studied for a Bachelors and a master’s degree in Visual Arts at Instituto de Artes / UFRGS (in Porto Alegre) and holds a Diploma from Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, where she studied with Peter Kogler. In Camargo’s work, the notion of displacement defines a modus operandi for dealing with an established order of World: whether as a physical displacement through space and places or by conceptual shifts. Cartographic and geographical references are often the basis of her projects.

Deborah Mora

0° N, 0° E

2020, video installation 16’55”, digital, mixed media.

* presented in space at the opening, part of the online exhibition

0° N, 0° E, video still

0°N 0°E is an invitation into a collective, technologically mediated memory of nature. 0°N, 0° E retraces the origins of the Null Island, a fictional island imagined to float at the intersection of the prime meridian and the equator, at the coordinate position of 0°, 0°. The null value is attributed when data is absent, thus all those images, files, registrations that are uploaded online without specified geoposition, are erroneously associated with the location 0,0 by the software. In this way, the Null Island becomes an archive, the place where all those lost objects come together. The Null Island is thus considered a cyber-myth, as it tries to give shape and context to an internet phenomenon and contributes to our understanding of it. Using the Null Island as a metaphor and using worldbuilding as a methodology, the work is an immersive exploration of the island and its visual and sonic landscape. Focusing on natural landscapes and objects, the island is constructed with original and downloaded photographs, satellite photos, 3D models and sound recordings from different sources. In this way, the island becomes a timeless, collaborative archive, floating in a liminal place. Through the digital-natural environment of the Null Island, the work investigates how experience and knowledge is generated when the only way to access nature is through a hypermediated modality.

Deborah Mora is currently based in the Netherlands. Her practice brings into play more-than-human perspectives, exploring notions of memory and preservation, rewilding and resilience, transience and grieving. Moving away from the distinctions between nature, culture and technology, she researches how ephemeral objects and experiences are preserved and how they perpetuate in the digital era. She focuses on nature processes and environments, as well as (human) cultural artefacts, voices and myths. While disclosing different ways of sensing and experiencing the mediated world, invisible stories are unfolded and silent imaginaries are unveiled. Her practice shifts between the play of digital aesthetics, technological translations, storytelling and meditative rituals, researching how these materialities could acquire new immersive, sensorial qualities and create new languages of expression.

Latent Community (Sotiris Tsiganos/Ionian Bisai)

Ocean is Future

2020, expanded video, HD, 5′

* part of the online exhibition

Ocean is future, video still

Ocean is Future is a deep dive into the depths of underwater geography, reimagining human and more-than-human relationships attempting to destabilize traditional land-based modes of thinking and living and the structures that control them. The unexplored darkness of the oceans––vast bodies of water which constitute the largest habitats on this planet––has been a neglected arena of geopolitical, economic and cultural conflicts. In Ocean is Future, the artists interweave imagery of a hidden world: the liquid subfloor, seamounts, hydrothermal vents and queer aquatic beings are encountered during bathymetric mapping from underwater vehicles in the deep ocean. With the sequences of images structured in a split-screen view and the narratives nested within one another, the video work reflects the rhythmic fluidity of water and the continuous swelling and recession of the tides. Submergence into this ancient yet unexplored world allows us to think of hybridity and interconnectedness, fostering engaged ways of caring for the oceans. This video work is an attempt to find new creative ways of digital research during an unprecedented global stasis: the pandemic. The footage is taken from various operations of E/V Nautilus, an exploration vessel exploring unknown regions of the ocean, seeking out new discoveries in biology, geology, and archaeology. Through the expeditions, E/V Nautilus offers the global public a remote exploration experience via live video, audio, and data feeds from the field.

Latent Community are Sotiris Tsiganos and Ionian Bisai, visual artists and filmmakers based in Athens. They operate as an artistic duo in research-based projects, focusing on the critical reading of underexposed stories and how those can twist through new contexts. Laboring in the age of augmented realities, the artist duo weaves social engagement and critique through participatory strategies and performative sequences, resulting in hybrid film productions – remixing documentary, fiction and archive. Their work has been presented internationally in exhibitions and festivals (Athens Biennale, Documenta14 – Public Programs, Thessaloniki Documentary Festival, School of Waters – Mediterranea 19 Young Artists Biennale, Recontemporary – Turin), they’ve been awarded by LOOP Barcelona, Sharjah Art Foundation, SNF ARTWORKS and they were ONASSIS AiR residents.

Paula König

24 Cyanotypes

2021, dimensions variable

Hunting of the Snark

On conventional world maps, the Arctic is generally depicted as a marginal region. For the global climate system, however, its melting ice masses are of central importance due to its albedo––that is, its ability to reflect and thereby diffuse light and heat. The polar region is drifting towards a new climate regime at an alarming rate, approaching one of the tipping points in the global climate system. At the same time, industrial nations are speculating on resources freed up by the melting ice. They seek to claim their place in the polar sun, renegotiating shipping routes, fish stock, mineral resources and living spaces. Research on the seabed and continental shelf is also driven by interests in proving continental connections to the North Pole in order to substantiate aspirations to claim territory in the region. König’s book Hunting of the Snark references the Bellman’s Speech in Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark. It shows a collection of thoughts and reflections on the history of painting as well as cartography, both of which are restructured on the surface of a blank map.

Paula König was born in 1993 in Kiel, Germany. She is pursuing her masters degree in Fine Arts (painting) under Antje Majewski at Muthesius University of Fine Arts and Design. She also studied History, Art History and Education. Currently she is participating in the Maumaus Independant Study Programme in Lisbon, focused on Philosophy and Cultural Studies. She is working on her artistic practice in residency at Duplex Air, Lisbon.

Pedro Hurpia

The Hummmm

2020., video and other materials

The Hummmm, video still

The Hummmmm is a video based on an alleged sound phenomenon of inexplicable source. Hurpia derived inspiration for the project from many decades’ worth of reports from ordinary people in different parts of the world about the experience of hearing a strange low frequency noise. Independent researchers and enthusiasts began to classify these strange events chronologically in order to point out the possible sources of such occurrences. According to them, the number of testimonials (about 17,000) is too large to be dismissed as individual hysteria or belief in the supernatural.

Pedro Hurpia is a Brazilian visual artist and researcher. He is a guest artist at TSOEG – Temporal School of Experimental Geography (UK) and collaborator at the SEA Foundation Tilburg (Netherlands). Last year he earned a Research Grant from the Est-Nord-Est Résidence d’artistes (Canada). In 2019 he received a Research Grant from the Kone Foundation to develop his project at the Saari Residence in Mynämäki (Finland) during january and february 2020. He was contemplated with a monthly stipend from the municipality of Sandnes and County of Rogaland (Norway) for the Artist-in-Residence Sandnes in 2019. He was a resident at Nida Art Colony in 2018, with the support of the University of Vilnius and partly funded by the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Lithuania. Between 2015 and 2017, he was professor of Visual Arts at the Pontifical University of Campinas (Brazil) teaching Photography, Drawing and Orientation in the Final Year Project. He studied ‘Advanced Studies Program in Photography’ at Ateliê Fotô (São Paulo), coordinated by curator and critic Eder Chiodetto. Hurpia holds a Master ’s degree in Visual Arts from Unicamp (Campinas State University) with research on realignments between the pictorial support and the photographic image. In 2001 he completed his Bachelor of Visual Arts at the same university.

Hara Shin

Immaterial Mapping

2018, single-channel video, HD, color, stereo, 11’11”

Immaterial Mapping, video still

As an experiment in digital topography, the scenes in the video Immaterial Mapping drift along within the cognitive space—habitats and spheres of actions in nature, cities, and cyberspace. With ten assumptions for the immaterial mapping presented in this video, images of various textures such as bubbles, clay, sand, stones, plastic, glass, and plants consecutively interact with real and virtual spaces to create spatial impressions and their incomplete localization. By reflecting on the possibility of drifting between perceived space and real space in the digital era, the work deals with an expanded sense of space and a disorientation between spaces. The script in the video is edited from these texts: Formulary for a New Urbanism by Ivan Chtcheglov, Theory of the Dérive by Guy Debord, The Situationist City by Simon Salder, Subverting Cartography: The Situationists and Maps of the City by David Pinder, Locative Media: Geoplaced Tactics of Resistance by Marsha Berry, Psychogeography, Détournement, Cyberspace by Amy J. Elias, From Psychogeopraphy to Cybertopology: Situating “Place” in the Disoriented Dérive by Sher Doruff, and produced 10 Assumptions for Immaterial Mapping: 1) Obscurity, 2) Fragmentary Beauty, 3) Ephemerality, 4) Personal Empowerment, 5) Voluntary alienation 6) Transition, 7) Uncertainty, 8) New Syntheses 9) Randomness, 10) Virtuality.

Hara Shin lives and works in Berlin and Seoul. She acquired B.F.A at Hongik University, Seoul and Meisterschüler in Art and Media at the University of the Arts Berlin. Shin mainly works with video combined with installation, photography, drawing, text, and VR environment. Her artistic practices deal with alternative experiences, sensory perception of distances and movements of various material properties, and imaginaries arising from media-based observation and temporal context.

Luka Kedžo

A case filled with big data and small comprehension

installation

A case filled with big data and small comprehension

«What you can see here is a case on a stand with a thin metal mesh inside with something smeared on it. On the floor there are few standing objects looking knotty and incomprehensible. The case was used to carry optical equipment for brain mapping by a person who gave it to me. The person said, it is impossible for him to continue to do his work as a brain expert, researcher, because he is getting old but mostly because he thinks that brain is like a slippery squid that cannot be held in hand. When I asked him about the brain mapping job he told me that the human brain contains over 20,000 genes, more than 100,000 different types of proteins, more than a trillion organic molecules in a single cell, nearly 100 billion neurons, up to 1,000 trillion synapses and over 800 different brain regions. For a moment I stood still, my brain needed time to really process all that he said, the numbers, the information, the speculation. With that information in your mind, he said, you will have to cultivate two clashing ideas. One is to keep striving to understand the brain and the other is to accept that’s likely an impossible task. But is there something that can help me? Mice, he replied. Mice? Yes, rodents, our mammalian friends.What do you mean I asked him?You will need mice and a machine that cuts pieces of their brain tissue into 30-nanometer-thick sections which you put into electron microscope, where billions of electrons blast the brain slices, generating images that reveal nanometer-scale features of neurons, their axons, dendrites, and the synapses through which they exchange information.I just stood still, shaken and disturbed. How brains create memories, thoughts, perceptions, feelings is still a mystery to us. The consciousness itself may be hidden in this labyrinth of neural connections, he added. I mumbled that mice are so small, soft and sweet. Listen to me, he said. We need to start with the rodent brain because we don’t have computers big enough to reconstruct and simulate the human brain. Evolution of supercomputers is slow, it took 10 years to build The Large Hydron Collider and it cost around 4.75 billion dollars, you know. And mice are cheap. I mumbled resignedly. Yes, he said. Countless numbers of mice brains were used to get us to this point. We looked at each other for a moment, stopped talking and sat in silence.»

Luka Kedžo is currently living in Zagreb, Croatia. MA studies at the photography department, Academy of drama & film, Zagreb. BA studies at the cinematography department, Academy of drama & film, Zagreb, Croatia. He was awarded The Best Young Author Award at the 46 Zagreb Salon (2011), Franco Jesurun Award at Trieste Contemporanea (2015), as well as the Grand Prix Award at the 33 Youth Salon in Zagreb (2016). He has been exhibiting since 2010 in a number of solo and group exhibitions.