Alumni in Residence: Lena Michalik

Lena Michalik (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and researcher working between Vienna and Bolzano. In her work, she connects spatial practice with performance and poetry. As an alumna of the Master’s program Social Design – Arts as Urban Innovation, the residency is not only a return to the University of Applied Arts Vienna, but also to the AIL. Her collective graduation project RE:SONANZ, developed together with Leah Dorner, Maria Kanzler, and Stella Krausz, was shown in 2022 in the exhibition Sonic Sensibility in the spaces of Postsparkasse. For the project, the group received the graduation award from the federal state of Styria.

Michalik’s general interest lies in the becoming of space, its inherent power structures and the relations between entangled entities. With a critical view, she places artistic practices of embodiment in relation to technologies and explores what emerges in-between. Currently – as a PhD scholar in the program Experimental Research through Design, Art, and Technologies at the Free University Bozen-Bolzano – she is investigating Snow. Thus, in her practice based research project Poetry & Porosity of Snow – Grasping Disappearance in a Heating Data Cloud, she is thinking with, caring for, and saying goodbye to suffering Bodies of Snow, in search of new intersectional feminist perspectives coming from the Alps.

During her residency at the AIL, by thinking with snow, Michalik will inhabit the fluid and porous terrains between apparent dualisms such as urban and rural, tradition and progress, distance and proximity, up and down. She will attend to the embeddedness of her own body in the local water cycles by sensing and tracing upstream the currents to the porous Alpine Bodies of Snow. In doing so, she will critically confront technologies often used in snow hydrology, such as remote sensing and GIS, with the artistic means of figuration, poetry, and embodiment, testing whether such high-end technologies can contribute to one’s own abilities of situatedness and knowing place.