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IN THE THICK OF IT
Lecture at TU Delft, Borders & Territories, June 8, 2023
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DRECKSARBEIT / DIRTY WORK
Lecture at IKA, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, June 20, 2022
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Amidst contaminated landscapes, covered with tenacious traces and endless claims and ideologies, with hopes, dreams, fears and stories, with waste, waste, waste, architecture – like all art and all life – is dirty work.
Instead of adding new promises and toxins, would it not make sense to figure out what to do with all those that are already here and that won’t just go away?
Rather than starting from scratch, dirty work attends to accumulated pasts and attempted and aborted futures. It grapples with the leftovers, fragments, debris of things, ideologies and lives, with the facts and fictions that haunt every spot on Earth, with the many ghosts that abound and demand engagement.
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STAINED AND STORIED
Territories of Resource Extraction as Mythological Landscapes
Postdoctoral research project conducted at TU Delft, Goldsmiths, Aarhus University, 2022–2023
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Territories of resource extraction are credited to cover more than 80% of the planet, and contribute to the biggest environmental threats: to resource scarcity, to soil degradation, deforestation, species extinction and biodiversity loss, air and water pollution and climate change.
In order to understand these critical landscapes of the Anthropocene more comprehensively, in the project “Stained and Storied” I aim to study them as cultural landscapes with long human and more-than-human histories, mutually relating their material and narrative aspects. The latter include modern tales of Progress and economic prospects, political ideologies and stories of social injustice, violent conflicts and ecological loss, but also traditional myths, legends and folklore.
In order to investigate the reciprocal influence/agency of matter and stories, of facts, fictions and believes, I develop and employ a multidisciplinary approach that combines perspectives and methods from architecture, anthropology, and the arts. Through such a narrative artistic spatial anthropology – closely linked to my concept of “Phantasmography” – I attempt to reveal often overlooked factors and actors of extractive landscapes and contribute to a better understanding of these complex and contested more-than-human cultural landscapes. This forms a basis for an environmentally and culturally more responsible engagement with the land.
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TOXIC TEXTURES
Experimental seminar, module “Built Environment”, HSLU Lucerne, spring semester 2022, taught together with Alex Hurst
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PHANTASMOGRAPHY
Studio at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, 2021–2022
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In the PHANTASMOGRAPHY studios we critically engage with contemporary spaces and territories in relation to the phantoms and phantasms that inhabit and shape them. While PHANTASMOGRAPHY I deals with spaces of extraction, PHANTASMOGRAPHY II focuses on spaces of accumulation. Simply put, everything we make and build happens in a field between extraction and accumulation – between taking something away from somewhere and gathering it somewhere (else). Extraction and accumulation thus mark the poles of our cultural, political and economical life and underly all forms of spatial production.
Phantasmography, as we envision it, is a spatial practice concerned with establishing connections and understandings between the material and the immaterial (stories, memories, histories), between the visible and the invisible, between past, present and future, between the living and the dead, between facts and fictions.
Phantasmography is a practice that combines methods and techniques from the disciplines of architecture, art and anthropology, in order to develop a multidisciplinary and multisensory understanding of contemporary spaces and man-made landscapes.
Phantasmography coordinates and aligns two different modes of thinking and making: a scientific, secular, fact-based, modern, Western and an artistic, nonsecular, speculative, nonmodern and nonwestern mode. Only by combining and intertwining these commonly upheld oppositions is it possible to understand how diverse phantoms and fantasies contribute to shaping the world we (and many others) inhabit.
Phantasmography is a situated, site-specific approach that places concrete sites in relation to other sites (and non-sites) that they are entangled with through manifold processes and dependencies.
Phantasmography combines research on, within and with spaces and landscapes with their transformation in critical design projects. Reading and writing, understanding and transforming are thereby inextricably intertwined.
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LINKS
Institute for Art and Architecture, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna
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PHANTOM FORUM
Seminar at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, 2021–2022
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The seminar lecture series PHANTOM FORUM, which is associated with the studio PHANTASMOGRAPHY at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, unfolds a larger discourse on the agency of diverse phantoms and phantasms in relation to contemporary spatial realities and practices. Assembling original international voices from the fields of architecture and urbanism, contemporary art, anthropology, philosophy, sociology, literature and post-apocalyptical studies, the seminar inspires discussions on spaces and landscapes at the nexus of human and nonhuman action, active and passive matter, living and dead persons and species, secular and nonsecular practices, reality and imagination. In the course of two semesters spaces of extraction and accumulation are thus entangled in a multidisciplinary web of artistic and scientific stories.
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LINKS
Institute for Art and Architecture, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna
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FLY ON THE WALL
Experimental seminar, module “Built Environment”, HSLU Lucerne, spring semester 2021, taught together with Suzanne Song
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FIELDWORK
Experimental seminar, module “Built Environment”, HSLU Lucerne, spring semester 2020, taught together with Lukas Raeber
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BERG DER ENGEL
Experimental seminar, module “Built Environment”, HSLU Lucerne, spring semester 2019, taught together with Holger Schurk
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FETISH-FACTISH
Experimental seminar, module “Built Environment”, HSLU Lucerne, spring semester 2018, taught together with Holger Schurk
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INDEX ROT+++
Experimental seminar, module “Built Environment”, HSLU Lucerne, spring semester 2017, taught together with Holger Schurk
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Leventina – Envisioning A Valley
Summer School ETH Zurich, 2014
Program Director: Michael Hirschbichler, co-teacher: Nils Havelka
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EASTOPIA – Entwerfen im Bestand sozialistischer Utopien
Design Studio Prof. Marc Angélil, ETH Zurich, Autumn Semester 2014
Director of Studies: Michael Hirschbichler
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Roh, Rau, Robust / Raw, Rough, Robust – Architecture as Infrastructure
Design Studios Prof. Marc Angélil, ETH Zurich, 2012–2014
Director of Studies: Michael Hirschbichler
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Experimenta Urbana
Summer school, participation with a group of ETH Zurich students, Kassel, June 27 – July 7, 2012
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A Tropical House
Design Studio, Papua New Guinea University of Technology, 2009–2010
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