Join us for a conversation with Swiss artist, author, and video essayist Ursula Biemann, whose visionary works focus on the planet’s changing climate and its ecological impact. Grounded in a research-based practice, Ursula Biemann’s videos and installations exhibited in Becoming Earth at MQ Freiraum consider the relationship between politics and the environment across local, global, and planetary contexts.
In recent years, her fieldwork has taken her from the Amazon, where indigenous people like the Inga are struggling to preserve their ecosystems and cosmovision, to the depths of the North Atlantic Ocean, where even deep sea creatures must navigate human-induced environmental change. Underscoring how people, flora, and fauna are intimately connected, Biemann’s projects challenge globalist models of resource extraction and exploitation while inviting viewers to rethink their relationships with the Earth.
In this artist workshop, Ursula will discuss her collaboration with Indigenous Inga leaders and educators, cocreating the project Devenir Universidad – a platform for biocultural education in the Putumayo region of Colombia. Devenir Universidad engages with the living cognitive territory of the Amazonian rainforest and the ways in which the indigenous communities can protect and transmit knowledge generated over millenia. Biemann will also discuss her recent artist film, Forest Mind (2021), which unites diverse strands of knowledge on the metaphysics of plants, on plant-human relationships, and the coding of life with its form of storing information. Drawing on scientific as well as shamanic perspectives of engaging with the world, these videos take an ecocentric worldview in search for the intelligence of nature.
As space is limited, please register in advance at: ortsbezogenekunst@uni-ak.ac.at