Exhibition Opening: Holobiont. Life is Other

Opus et Domus by Maja Smrekar

Maja Smrekar includes her Hybrid Family in the Opus et Domus by producing yarn from her dog companion’s and her own body hair that she collected since 2017, spun into a social fabric that was defined by their hybrid relationship, including artifially produced serotonine, an odoriferous mixture, combining serotonin taken from the blood of the artist with that taken from her dog. The advanced technology implemented into the installation serves to underline the contrast to the symptoms of the ever regressing society. The archetypal relationship depicted in this tableau vivant thus paraphrases a conclusion that the roots of politics are older than humanity; a thought suggesting that nowadays hybrid processes in society are solely political statements.

ECOLALIA by Klaus Spiess/Ulla Rauter/Emanuel Gollob/Rotraud Kern

The performance installation ECOLALIA makes a statement about the simultaneous loss of diversity of microbiota and languages. It shows in real time that the oral flora uses vowels differently from consonants for its growth. The flourishing of the flora, supported by artificial intelligence and a speech synthesiser, suggests new sounds for new languages.

About the exhibition:

We humans are colonized by bacteria, fungi and viruses, just as we colonize homes, cities and environments. We also serve as hosts to ideologies, media and technologies.

The concept of the holobiont, introduced in 1991 by biologist Lynn Margulis, describes us humans as a total living being permeated by the biosphere.

It explores the self-conception of individual life, links us symbiotically with other organisms via our microbiome, disturbs the division into subject and object and offends our usual concept of ego. Understanding the world as a holobiont reminds us: Life is other!

The social and psychological transformations of the pandemic and the consequences of the climate and energy crises have brought to the forefront that life is first and foremost that of agencies other than human. Simple demarcations no longer stand up to this dynamic.

‘We’ experience ‘us’ as transitory beings drifting between digital and molecular worlds and sense the twisting of boundaries within us as the possibility of a new language beyond a symbolic distance from the world. With the exhibition Holobiont. Life is Other, the Angewandte Interdisciplinary Lab presents bodies, environments, texts, media, machines and biological organisms condensed into pictorial spaces – each of which represents a narrative about another life and about the lives of others.

Curated by Judith Reichart, Lucie Strecker, Thomas Feuerstein, Jens Hauser

With contributions by

Art Orienté Objet, Irini Athanassakis, David Berry, Julia Borovaya, Adam Brown, Juan M. Castro & Akihiro Kubota, Tagny Duff, Thomas Feuerstein, Karmen Franinovic, Ana Maria Gomez Lopez, Luis Hernan/Pei-Ying Lin/Carolina Ramirez-Figueroa, Hideo Iwasaki, Henrik Plenge Jakobsen, Eduardo Kac, Roman Kirschner, Lynn Margulis/Dorion Sagan/Bruce Clarke/David McConville, Yann Marussich, Agnes Meyer-Brandis, ORLAN, Špela Petrič, Chris Salter, Maja Smrekar, Klaus Spiess/Ulla Rauter/Emanuel Gollob, Lucie Strecker/KT Zakravsky, Tina Tarpgaard, Paul Vanouse, M R Vishnuprasad, Peter Weibel, and authors of the special issue On Micorperformativity, Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts, 2020, 25 (3).

Scenography: Wolfgang Fiel, Institute for cultural policy