Follow-Up: Lena Michalik

Lena Michalik 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 alumni of the Master’s program Social Design – Arts as Urban Innovation, the residency was 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 at AIL. For the project, the group received the graduation award from the federal state of Styria.

Dear Lena, tell us briefly what you have been working on during your residency at AIL and how is the project progressing now?

Coming back to Vienna for one intensive month felt important to me. I used to live here for five years, and I am still strongly connected to the city. I wanted to connect my main research interest, snow, to this place. I already knew about the connection of Vienna’s freshwater to the mountains in Lower Austria and Styria. Early on I have also learned that the fresh spring water is very important for the city’s identity. That made me wonder about the distant snowfields, lingering on the grounds, waiting to become melting water. I decided to research the relation between snow and Vienna’s drinking water more deeply.

Once I arrived at the temporary studio at AIL, with only me, my body and this idea of reestablishing connection, tracing back to the snowfields, starting from my glass of water, of which I drink many a day, felt the most situated thing I could in this period. And situatedness mattered a lot to me these days. I was standing in the studio, staring at the glass of water in my hands, and was wondering: How should I reach these far snowfields, the snow that this water might have been once?

I started to run a whole apparatus of research methods right away, which I navigated in the logic of tracing snow upstream the water currents historically and spatially. Methodologically speaking that meant: the unmaking of infrastructure, deconstructing the underlying mindsets and belief systems, which in that case was the water cycle, visiting field sites – noticing, listening, recording, in order to feed everything back into a studio practice – digesting, embodying, moving.

Eventually, and after reading in scientific papers on the importance of snow, giving away the water into the stone, very gradually, very slowly, being a wide, vast, saturated body of frozen water, I got invested in the temporalities of snow and how they are very different to the temporalities of our lived realities in the city. Being stung by this clear mismatch of rhythms – our human-made accelerated versus the slowness of snow – I started to study slowness as a spectrum with my body, which meant attuning to micromovements and exploring the progression of speed from frozen field to dripping body to a breaking current.

What does interdisciplinary work mean to you?

Working interdisciplinarily means giving the project and me time and space to understand my topic from many different perspectives. This happens for me at the very beginning of each artmaking process – this is exactly right where the AIL was supporting me. I like to see this early phase of a project as an encouragement to just jump right into the places of the unknown, places that surprise you, that turn everything upside down from what you have believed so far. It is almost like a thrill that keeps me going, especially within the context of snow, which is this matter that I was so sure about, since I have been growing up with it. During the process of turning snow upside down, it is inspiring and challenging to see how snow and the cold are culturally as well as epistemically constructed by the Global North – yes, the material itself is not a human product, but the way we relate to it is very much so. And I am not talking about technical snow (= artificial snow), which is something entirely different to snow by the way. Although I think it is worth recognizing here, how much the human has infiltrated matter at this point in history and how you can see this even at the deepest place within a snowflake. Snowflakes always form around a nucleus, a piece of dust flowing around in the atmosphere, onto which water vapour might freeze. And as we are following a material-intensive economy, entirely new, man-made particles like aluminium dust start to appear in the atmosphere. So the place and time where a snowflake is born is at times very much touched by humans. However, I want to emphasise here that within my work, I see snow not as a passive victim of global warming, I see it as this giant earthly, atmospheric phenomenon that is beautiful and dangerous at once and is far bigger than human existence after all.

Understanding this very intricate web that we have created, that is transforming the climate from an enabler of the life we knew, into a dangerous, uncertain threat, is what interdisciplinarity means to me. And if you want, it is a material gathering method for my artistic work.

How has your work changed over the course of the residency? Which processes have been influenced? Did you have any inspiring encounters during your residency?

In the moment, the research apparatus is running and I am in the middle of unravelling history and power structures, I am at three different spaces at three different times at once; everything is important, every direction seems worth peeking into, I can’t focus, I can’t prioritise; it is a rich period of the process, but it is also pure chaos. At that moment, being an artist feels the hardest to me, because I just want to show everything, and that is usually not good, yet it is a part of the process that is crucial.

I am very thankful that I got the chance to have a lot of inspiring exchanges throughout my residency; they help me to digest and find focus again, as well as enrich my work with their own snowy histories and their own snowy geographies.

I want to name two very important exchange partners specifically that I am grateful that I got the chance to speak with: Carolina Nöbauer, program curator at Tanzquartier Wien and Daphne Dragona, independent curator and writer, who was just taking on a fellowship with the Weibel Institute for Digital Cultures at that time. Although I spoke separately with the two of them, they both encouraged me to follow the one thing that caused the most insecurity in me - the movement studies of Snow. When showing my work, it was slowness that felt best in my body, but was the most challenging for me to watch – exactly because the movement was so slow and you have to spend time sitting down, watching closely, to see anything happening at all. Thanks to both of them, I now feel confident enough to continue exploring this ambivalent feeling of unbearable slowness. Especially since I see exactly this inability of understanding other than human temporalities is a crucial shortcoming that our modern, fast-paced society has to address in the context of the climate crisis.

Right now, I am now focusing on how to develop these movement studies of snow further into a performance piece. I am so curious to see how this sort of slowness flows through an entire ensemble of people, how a group of bodies, almost becoming a snowfield, can engage with outside parameters and attune their movements to some sort of climate. I am interested in exploring how a dramaturgical climate - scripted, yet inspired by reality, but speculated further – can define the whole performance logic and who performers can become one with it – and at the end I hope that this performance can bring an audience closer to the temporalities of snow or at least challenge their attention span.

All these aspirations to further develop my work in this direction are growing into an important part of my PhD, and I hope to have the support of institutions such as the AIL in the future, particularly for this performance development. Without places like yours, my work wouldn't be possible.

What is the outlook on your PhD project?

My PhD has the working title Poetics & the Porosity of Snow – Grasping Disappearance in a Heating Data Cloud – I keep on changing this title in my head all the time, but for the sake of recognition, I keep it as it is for now. Though, somehow I can still relate every progression, every version of the project to this preliminary title. At the beginning I was interested in disappearance as in the disappearance of snow from our landscapes, our lives, and as dramatic as I can get sometimes, the disappearance of snow for good – while right now as I am not interested in seeing snow, merely as a passive fleeting figure in climate change, but something that reaches far beyond these categories, I am interested in what vanishes and has to vanish from the preconceptions of earth shaped through modernity.

In times of drastic change and major uncertainty, it is beliefs, routines, constructions, and structures that we have to say goodbye to, while the snow will come back, even after the existence of humans. There is one allegory that I like to draw on when explaining this. Think about Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; it was born in the period of European Romanticism. This period was triggered by the tragic eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815. It caused something called a volcanic winter; a massive dust black cloud drifted over to cover the northern hemisphere in darkness and winter. It snowed in summer, and the snow was red.

Any other highlight or special moment during your time at AIL that stuck with you?

One of my 'aha' moments came when I was reading these scientific papers on the importance of snowfields for Vienna. I learned that it is the slowness of the movement that enables the water to find its way deep into the stone's pores. Rain, especially when it is heavy, rushes through the slits instead of being absorbed deeply into the stone.

I also always get drawn to the poetics of things, even if they are a scientific paper. Certain words and taxonomies have an intriguing sound, almost like a rhythmic metric that is produced. KARST* was one word that burned into my synapses, and I love to repeat it

– KAARRRRRRSST.

[* Karst is a special type of landscape]