Holobiont: Tour with Curator Lucie Strecker

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 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!

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

Lucie Strecker

works across media and performance on experimental systems in art and science. Until 2022 she worked for the Angewandte Performance Laboratory and since 2021 she is a lecturer at the Department of Art and Communicative Practice at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. In 2019-2020 she taught Experience Design at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano. 2016- 2020 she directed the Elise-Richter PEEK project on the performativity of the biofact. Works, among others in cooperation with Klaus Spiess were shown nationally and internationally. Together they received the ZIM Performing Science Prize and a Prix Ars Electronica Honorary Mention. Lucie Strecker has published in Performance Research, The Lancet, Leonardo and with Diaphanes Verlag. Together with Jens Hauser, she published the special issue ‘On Microperformativity’, Performance Research 25(3) in 2020.

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