Plants & Walks: Artistic encounters @ PACT Zollverein June 2023

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Can we hear plants or feel the energy flow of microorganisms in the earth’s soil? What happens when we no longer primarily rely on our sense of sight to orientate ourselves in the world? What shifts in our perception and self-conception as human beings are necessary to achieve this? On a performative excursion to the Zollverein colliery slagheap, visitors are invited to encounter the plant and bacterial inhabitants of this man-made, and now densely overgrown, hill formed with waste matter from coal mining.

Close by PACT, artists Deter/Müller/Martini attempt to make contact with plants while the bacilli collective from Japan share artistic methods for harvesting alternative energy, and dancer and choreographer Márcio Kerber Canabarro and his team explore the possibilities of a practice of »seeing« that involves tactile and auditory perception and all our receptive faculties.

https://www.pact-zollverein.de/en/programme/plants-walks

The Japanese artist collective bacilli nurture active spaces for living with dirt, people, food, microbes and spirits. Through artistic engagement with earth, they build hopeful models for how we can live in co-habitation with more than human life. While in residency at PACT, bacilli are artistically investigating the energy created from microbes inside dirt in Essen and questioning whether we can live synergistically together with energy currents flowing through the earth? Starting through geological research on coal histories in the Ruhr area, the three artists are conducting interviews with residents about shifting energy models currently in progress and connecting power currents past and present through imaginative thinking. At their picnic, bacilli invite visitors to share their own stories, exchange ideas, or simply enjoy the conversation. bacilli will also offer insights into their work and share artistic methods for harvesting alternative energy to bring it back into the hands of citizens for their creative enjoyment in the creative format of ›Dirt Radio‹.

6:00-19:00 h ongoing
Close to PACT
bacilli collective
›Dirt Currents‹
Picnic / Talk / Residency Insights
Admission free

“Composting Knowledge” @ lumbung: documenta fifteen

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Its participants are active in the creation of such actions through their own unique perspectives that embrace cooperative, non-hierarchical, neighborhood centered principles. Composting Knowledge aims to build a supporting system for these initiatives to cooperate in engaging and critical ways.

Currently the composting network reunites over twenty participants from Kassel, Tokyo, Sofia, Holualoa, Singapore, Beirut, Zurich, Toronto, Stockholm, and London, who are engaging with own capacity and pace in the spread, research and activation of the topics exchanged within the network by challenging their own practice, involving local communities and institutional partners.

The network is growing. Current members are:

  • Färgfabriken, Stockholm
  • Global Art Practice, Tokyo University of the Arts, Tokyo
  • ICA-Sofia, Sofia
  • James Jack & Donkey Mill Art Center, Hawai’i
  • Myvillages, Rural School of Economics, London/Rotterdam/Berlin
  • YCAR (York Center for Asian Research), Toronto
  • Dorothee Richter, Ronald Kolb: OnCurating.org & Postgraduate Programme in Curating, ZHdK
  • knowbotiqs, Zurich
  • Sandra Schäfer, Joseph Rustom, and students, Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Munich and Académie Libanaise des Beaux Arts, Beirut

Quote by ruangrupa:

“Composting is growing. It’s a process which calls for a change in our understanding of the subject of knowledge, an uncontrolled mutation of ingredients, which transcend a cartesian or logical system in the production of experiences, and facts but instead transform every material collected in fertile soil for our community. As the water is part of every living being and primal, juicy engine for the rotting activity, so the compostable transformation is nourished by every idea, intervention, activity and contribution by withdrawing from disciplines and one-sided knowledge and expertise forms. Each person is welcomed to participate as a cultivator, contributing with awareness to a multi-ingredients compostable practice. The material for a florid mixture is brought from friends, are those guests, one-time visitors, students, researchers, from all corners of the globe, each one will be a grower and harvester of an abundant, yet non-definable knowledge pot. For the shared growth of yet unknown knowledgeable terrains we invite you to contribute to this compost pot.”

Composting Knowledge