October 15, 2024 | 19:00 – 22:00 | No Place Gallery (Google Maps Link)
Curated by Tanya Gautam (doctoral researcher at EcoLit) in collaboration with MESH
As part of the MESH Autumn Academy on Planetary Wellbeing, we are delighted to welcome you to our cultural event that brings together multidisciplinary practices of representing histories, futures and unfolding possibilities of multispecies co-existence and storytelling. The event is part of the public programme within our Academy, please also check out the Pop-Up Exhibition: Multispecies Storytelling at the International House (University of Cologne) on Saturday, October 19, 2024.
The entrance to the event is free - just come along and enjoy!
Ute Hörner and Mathias Antlfinger are professors of Multispecies Storytelling at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne and have been living together in a multispecies household with grey parrots for over 20 years. Their installations, videos and sculptures deal with relationships between humans, animals and machines and open up critical perspectives on changeable social constructs as well as utopian visions of equal interaction. Their communal living with non-human animals is characterised by shared social actions and how these produce a shared space. In 2014, Hörner/Antlfinger founded the interspecies collective CMUK with the grey parrots Clara and Karl.
Latika Nehra (b.1991, Jaipur, India) is a visual artist and sculptor, working predominantly with ceramics. Her work is concerned with the dialectics of nature; the natural and the artificial, the given and the created, and their recurrent topological interweaving which, so often hidden by normative connotations, blurs the boundaries of a false dichotomy. In her work she uses some of the oldest hand-building-techniques, hoping to reassert the preeminence of the tangible in a seemingly hyper-virtual world. She seeks to bring to surface the same conceptual dialectic in her own approach: the accidental in the effected and the artefact taking natural shape - the becoming natural of the artificial.
Latika lives and works in Berlin, Germany and frequently takes trips to India for craft-related projects. Academically trained in visual design from the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, Latika is self-taught in the field of ceramics and it has been her primary medium since 2020.
Lucy Allen (they/them) crafts objects, experiences, and participatory systems related to post-industrial ecologies and environmental justice. Lucy's recent work includes lake words, collaborative prose chapbooks about the ongoing death of the Great Salt Lake, and Miner Textiles, an earth-dyed clothing brand. With roots in California and Utah, Lucy is currently based in Cologne, Germany and is pursuing a MA at the Köln International School of Design. Lucy will present the Bodenlabor Kalk, a pop-up soil bioremediation lab and educational space they organize in Cologne-Kalk.
Jørgen Bruhn is currently leading the Linnæus University Center for Intermedial and Multimodal Studies in Växjö, Sweden and he has in recent years been intensely occupied with the pathways between intermedial studies and contemporary ecocriticism, including the notion of the Anthropocene. Bruhn's most recent publications are Intermedial Ecocriticism: The Climate Crisis in Arts and Media (a monograph co-written with Niklas Salmose, 2023), and Palgrave Handbook in Intermediality (co-edited with Vieira and Lopez-Varela, 2024).
Moonlit Brooks is a spoken word project led by Tanya Gautam and Denny Seidel. Combining poetry, piano, synthesizer and field recordings, they offer ruminations on everyday experiences of encountering more-than-human creatures.