Open Lab: Touch Point Snow

If we consider the body as an archive, there must be a pulsating, all-encompassing network of knowledge, carried within and amongst us, moving along the ground, passing through the weather, and traversing time.

The artist is interested in how this concept unfolds from lived encounters with snow. What stays in our bodies, and what becomes visible when memories are shared and placed alongside one another. As snow is an ephemeral body, and its future presence is uncertain relatively to humanity, this raises the question of how to (re)gain access to these embodied knowledge networks before snow might be gone.

With the open lab format, Touch Point Snow Lena Michalik invites to an open practice of remembering and sharing. Together with the artist, visitors explore ways of entering the bodily archive, revisiting the snowy sites within, and leaving something behind, a gesture, a word, an object, or an action. Through sharing and juxtapositions, imprints become traces that might allow access to that profound network.

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.

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.