Supported by:
OTHERWISE
was co-founded in 2018 by
design theorist Michaela Büsse
and artist Benjamin Burger.
info@otherwise.network
@otherwise.network (Instagram)
OTHERWISE — Polymorphic Futures is a hybrid festival dedicated to the potential of artistic research to contribute to societal and ecological transformations.
Over 8 months and in 4 on- and offline symposia, artists, designers and researchers will explore and share in various formats their own practices and urgent questions.
THE ONLINE PROGRAMME is divided into 4 blocks. Every block is dedicated to an own subject. The last block will be the final contribution of all associated artists at Gessnerallee Zurich.
Polymorphic is that which describes many forms and none at the same time. It is a state of constant transition with any fixed form only being a temporary expression. Our speculative symposium will bring together the common research trajectories.
#performance #symposium #newopenings
As a first part of the Polymorphic Futures Exhibition you can join the guided tour by Flurina Gradin, Seraina Dür und Jonas Gillmann through the closeby main station and look at it anew as an ecosystem. Following invasive plants, animals that are considered troublemakers, the biotope Gleisfeld and the renaturated Sihl, our view of the seemingly well-known slowly changes.
*The tour starts at Stall6 at 7pm.
** You need an extra ticket for the tour. The slots are limited.
Explore our polymorphic universe consisting of video works, sound installations and performances and exchange with the artist-researchers over a drink and snack from the bar.
Marit Mihklepp’s sound work invites you to listen to the troubled histories of fossilized organisms as they shift from shells to fuel to climate threads reminding us that awe and wonder always appear side by side. Oftentimes climate change is too big and vague of a concept to grasp which is why Karolina Sobecka’s audio-visual installation will ground the making of micro-climates in a heatmap generated from the surrounding area in Zurich.
Out of place and time, Michail Rybakov’s set of visual and installative works beg the question if there is something like vegetal intimacy and if we have the right tools to comprehend it. While Vanessa Lorenzo Toquero’s performance equips us with a set of prostheses needed in order to recognize our entanglements with non-human others. Finally, Bernadette Köbele’s film work draws our attention to the unconscious movements, gestures and patterns of speech that we are performing everyday, oftentimes unaware of their histories and effects on others.
Symbiosis is the voluntary or necessary collaboration between two different species. Parasitic or mutually beneficial, symbiotic relationships are survival strategies based on physical attachment. What does it mean to think of ourselves as more-than-one?
#biology #queerecology #parasiteorsymbiont
Seraina and Jonas are concerned with the creation of spaces that are welcoming both for human and non-human inhabitants. Since 2019, they have been working together with City Pigeons in the project "Parliament of Things, Animals, Plants and Algorithms” As part of the project they create performative settings which they co-inhabit together with pigeons and other human and more-than-human actors. Cities and their architectures – spikes, nets, and wires – are hostile to pigeons. Instead of designing spaces that separate us, Seraina and Jonas ask what a Caring Architecture will look like.
"Parliament of Things, Animals, Plants and Algorithms" is created in collaboration with Neumarkt Zurich.
In “The Land as Palimpsest” (1983) André Corboz introduces palimpsest as a concept that renders landscape a medium for detecting social and environmental change. Taking his theory as a starting point, Flurina will introduce her current collaborative research project on “unruly topologies” and discuss several examples that interrogate the symbiotic relationships between humans, biosphere, emotions and histories.
For the last couple of years, Marit has been listening to stones. She would be sharing some bits and pieces of her work processes shaped and inspired by geologic bodies and imagination. At the moment, Marit is moving towards a new research branch connecting meteorites, myth and family history.
In this showing Benjamin Burger gives an insight into his actual artistic research about loss. He looks at the psychological structure of Climate-Change and reframes it as Climate-Trauma as we are facing multiple extinction events and the transformation of our habitats. The term "solastalgia" describes a new psychological type of crisis which occurs by anticipating the loss of the world as we know it in a not so far future already today. It is a reversed form of melancholia.
In the showing Benjamin presents particularly unfinished thoughts and stories to investigate an aesthetic for loss - the things that remain silent and invisible. He connects biography, documentation and fiction to a dense visual performance. After every showing the audience is invited to share their experiences and talk about loss and grief in respective to climate as trauma.
Mutagenesis describes the mutation of DNA via spontaneous reaction with environmental processes or deliberate engineering. Damage and repair occur as results of the very same processes, challenging a normative reading of mutations.
#virology #biohacking #metabolicprocesses
Polymorphic is that which describes many forms and none at the same time. It is a state of constant transition with any fixed form only being a temporary expression. Our speculative symposium will bring together the common research trajectories.
#performance #symposium #newopenings
Symbiosis is the voluntary or necessary collaboration between two different species. Parasitic or mutually beneficial, symbiotic relationships are survival strategies based on physical attachment. What does it mean to think of ourselves as more-than-one?
#biology #queerecology #parasiteorsymbiont
If a crisis results in trauma, what kind of trauma does the environmental crisis create? And is there a cure? How can we think of transformation without falling back it neoliberal parols that promote every “failure” as an opportunity for growth? Ultimately, how can the performing arts support us in navigating the complex challenge the environmental crises poses?
#psychology #roleplay #CBT
We will explore and play with Control Wars, a game, and at the laboratory, offering a platform to its participants to examine and transcend systemic inertias engendering the present surface potentials for alternative realities from the imaginaries of emerging philosophical and theoretical discourse and worldviews.
Participants will experiment with character development, auto-fiction, and world-building in this session, invoking relational and subjective transformations.
Pre-enacting Climate Scenarios: Patrick tries to make climate futures available through the process of pre-enactment. Performed scenarios consist exclusively of scientific studies, their data, tables, diagrams and texts. Through pre-enactment, these scenarios come into use, which couples the reception of knowledge to a concrete spatial, temporal and sensual experience. The performative scenario thus evokes experiences that move beyond text-based or visual scenarios.
Bernadette will take you along the path of her colonial family story in Indonesia in the beginning of the 20th century and towards her interest in the postcolonial field: the masquerade of colonial society. The masquerade is a social technique which comes into use in contemporary white- and greenwashing narratives and practices of well-known multinationals and scientific researchers. Masquerade exceeds the radius far more than the notion of the white disguise is mapping
Aldir Polymeris, Nina Willimann and Jose Cáceres Mardones will present the long-term project "Wallmapu ex situ", which deals with the history of Wallmapu in southern Chile. In the context of a speculative role play, experts from Chile and Switzerland take the perspective of non-human beings, who have become witnesses, observers, affected or profiteers of the transformation of this region from an indigenous territory to a landscape reshaped by agribusiness and plantation economy.
Although the climate crisis is a global phenomenon, its impacts are asymmetrically distributed. Global injustices are becoming increasingly apparent as a result of this process. Against centuries of violence and resource exploitation in the name of progress, who has the right to grieve? In this panel, we will discuss the uneven relationship between climate change and colonial histories. What traumas lie buried in landscapes around the world? How can they be uncovered and reclaimed? What evidence do they bear? And how do we orient ourselves in slowly vanishing worlds?
OTHERWISE fellows, Trop cher to share, and Psychologists 4 Future, an initiative that provides psychological support for climate activists, come together to discuss the notion of climate trauma.
Mutagenesis describes the mutation of DNA via spontaneous reaction with environmental processes or deliberate engineering. Damage and repair occur as results of the very same processes, challenging a normative reading of mutations.
#virology #biohacking #metabolicprocesses
Polymorphic is that which describes many forms and none at the same time. It is a state of constant transition with any fixed form only being a temporary expression. Our speculative symposium will bring together the common research trajectories.
#performance #symposium #newopenings
Symbiosis is the voluntary or necessary collaboration between two different species. Parasitic or mutually beneficial, symbiotic relationships are survival strategies based on physical attachment. What does it mean to think of ourselves as more-than-one?
#biology #queerecology #parasiteorsymbiont
If a crisis results in trauma, what kind of trauma does the environmental crisis create? And is there a cure? How can we think of transformation without falling back it neoliberal parols that promote every “failure” as an opportunity for growth? Ultimately, how can the performing arts support us in navigating the complex challenge the environmental crises poses?
#psychology #roleplay #CBT
"What is an interdisciplinary thematic residency program? And why is collaboration an important aspect of artistic research? In this talk, I would like to engage with OTHERWISE to share the aims and outcomes of the Mutations program, but also to discuss what role collaboration and interdisciplinary artistic work plays in expanding and redefining predominately western perspectives. The need is great to create new platforms and discussions that are inclusive of other understandings of the world and its natural, political, and social structures – that invite and even favour non-western and indigenous experience and knowledge."
— Interactive presentation with Rose Field, art historian & curator, project coordinator of Mutations, Akademie Schloss Solitude
Vanessa will be presenting the research project Mari mutare, a transdisciplinary design research on biocompatible prostheses inspired by the proto-Christian figure of the Greenman: a human-plant hybrid representing the nature-culture continuum. The project’s aim is to explore the multiplicity of subjectivities in ourselves and, consequently, to influence the perception of the "other".
We define ourselves by borders, by insides and outsides, by belonging to a circle or being excluded from others. But who draws these border lines and from what tradition does the border drawing come? Would we, if only we had other maps at our disposal, see the territories differently? Michail will present experiments from this research trajectory as well as some work in progress.
The Carbon Catalogue is a guide to a collection of carbon materials, objects, standards, algorithms, terms, and other carbon things. Simultaneously a process and a substance, carbon traverses and constitutes cycles from molecular to planetary, from geological to respiratory. In this presentation fragments of Carbon Media will reflect on articulations of eco-knowledge and geo-power contained in some of the entries in the collection.
Mutations are the reason why elephants and ants exist, why some of us develop cancer and why we can eat big yellow bananas. What is the biological foundation of mutations? And how do we use mutagenesis for our benefits but also as technological tools in biological research? Impressions from inside a lab.
All the speakers and artists from the block #¦mutagenesis will discuss the concept, share inspirations and speculate about a polymorphic future.