Landing in Ecocide? Staying with the cringe - 21.6.25

Still ecocide. Still landing. A chronic condition without knowing where the runway will end – it is winding and uneven, leading through toxic fog and acidic seas. The research group Landen spent a week in a quarry intensively exploring questions of survival in precarious conditions. The gaping wounds blasted into the mountain embody this confrontation with the ability to endure, to learn to cultivate this violent background noise of our modern age. The group invites you to walk the slippery line between perpetrator and victim leading to a new common ground, to an appropriation of cringe, to being fellow critters instead of accomplices. Speaking of which: dogs, children, crows – all are welcome and cordially invited to this (partly participatory) lab presentation.

Text next public presentation of our ongoing research "Landing in Ecocide" will take place on Saturday, 21.6.2025. Find all the info here and hope to see you there!

Landing in Ecocide? - 20th of May @ im_flieger

After some times of trouble and conflict, we came out more precise and stronger in our ongoing research project called LANDEN, now "Landing in Ecocide?". I cordially want to invite you to our next open session on the 20th of May at im_flieger - find all the details here.

Photo: Johanna Nielson

The distress of the ecological catastrophe is omnipresent but still – is there really no alternative to the Status Quo? How to land in troubled waters? How to find roots and grounds in the ecocidal winds of the now? Is indigeneity something people from a Central European context can even possibly seek? How can we develop our sensibilities to find the cracks that open up everywhere for new, resistant life to sprout? How to cultivate new alliances with those that invade and contradict the hegemonial order? In this edition of the interdisciplinary research project Landen, we seek the calming sounds that hurl even in the most turbulent whirlwinds and will develop songs of new beauty with them. We will plant seeds in the most brutal concrete forms of modernity and will scrutinize our everyday action for complacency with a self-destroying system. Join us on the very shaky grounds that reek of a strange and slimy paradise.

 

Mon 20.5.2024 // 18.00–21.00

Bräuhausgasse 40, 1050 Vienna // open lab/sharing practice // free donations

Please register via johanna-nielson@gmx.at but don’t hesitate to pass by spontaneously.

LANDEN-Cluster: Kristina Feldhammer, Kilian Jörg, Johanna Nielson, Sabrina Rosina

Mentor: Anita Kaya

 

LANDEN - Open Lab

Next week, we'll have the second public opening of our your research cluster LANDEN. Please come by and share your experiences with this difficult topic with us!

Within Im_flieger’s artistic research project LANDEN, five artists from different fields are researching multifarious ways of (dis)orientation in relation to ecological politics and applications to the troubles of finding habitable futures. The artistic research process revolves around questions highlighted by the philosopher Bruno Latour in his 2017 book Où atterrir (Where to land?). Landing – tracing, walking, embodying, dancing and losing oneself in the problems and possibilities of exploring this complex concept of landing, a challenge and potential in equal measure.

The artists invite you to a LANDEN Open Lab to share, practice and reflect on their practical and theoretical exploration with the guests, to continue their research in the collective space.

“You want me to land on Earth? Why? – Because you’re hanging in midair, headed for a crash. – How is it down there? – Pretty tense. – A war zone? – Close: A Critical Zone, a few kilometers thick, where everything happens. – Is it habitable? – Depends on your chosen science. – Will I survive down there? – Depends on your politics.”
From “Critical Zones: The Science and Politics of Landing on Earth” edited by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel

--> All the info <--

Alexis Shotwell in Vienna - LANDEN x Against Purity, 10th of October 2023

I am very honored to have the opportunity to invite Alexis Shotwell to a full-day workshop at our emerging research cluster LANDEN in Vienna, taking place on the 10th of October at im_flieger. Her book "Against Purity" has had a deep impact on my own thinking, learning and acting and since she is a fellow anarchist, I am so excited to learn more about her recent work on LeGuin's utopianism, practices of prefiguration and the concept of freedom as a collective entity. There are sill some slots available to participate in this amazing opportunity to think and become together with Alexis <3

Find all info here

Im_flieger’s youngest artistic research cluster is engaged with the topic of landing in its many and yet to define meanings. We are interested in both theoretical as well as physical approaches to engage in new and old forms of reclaiming territory in non-capitalist, non-colonial and non-patriarchal ways of inhabiting the planet. Nonetheless, we are aware of the dangers of various kinds of “purity politics” in any attempts to land on, or re-connect with the Earth, Gaia. For this and many other reasons we have invited the philosopher and activist Alexis Shotwell for a full-day workshop as part of the several-year artistic research project LANDEN focusing both on her latest book “Against Purity – Living Ethically in compromised times” and her current project about Ursula Le Guin’s ambiguous utopianism, the importance of process and whether/how prefiguration is a political strategy, …. and an artistic one.

"I think the butterflies hate Nature"

Today I have seen the perhaps most purest place of Nature I have ever met. The stones were made of plastic, the trees had thermostats and the artificial plants where sprayed with nutrients for the animal inhabitants.

Nature is of course not what you are taught in school or by advertisement. Nature is the perhaps most fiendish concept ever invented to exploit peoples and environments with. Nature is a central node of a colonialist and extractivist European mind-set – it is perhaps its most well-disguised patriarchal God.

 The place I have encountered with the team of LANDEN (see below) was the „Schmetterlingshaus“ / „Butterfly house“ in central Vienna. It is part of the Hofburg, the old center of imperial power. The exotic butterflies in the glasshouse are imported by airplane from South America every week. After arriving, their cocoons are fixed with a hot glue gun to plastic tree trunks. Most of the butterflies you see in this artificial bubble seem to try to escape it. Their feet actually slip from the exotic, IKEA-like plants provided and so most butterflies you see are actually close to the windows, appearing quite desperate, or on artificial surfaces. No butterfly survives for longer than two weeks here, and you can frequently watch a white child in a state of pure bliss slowly killing a butterfly by mutilating its wing – mostly there is an equally blissful parent right behind filming the entire event of „child being in touch with nature“ with their expansive smartphones.

In old colonial texts you often find the jungle being described as a „green hell“ - it has a weirdly beautiful irony that this recreation of a jungle is hell for its non-human inhabitants. In this glass-house of flickering light, I have recognized an altar for our environmental violence – hidden in plain sight of the city center. 

I think it is important to research and understand this disgusting joy, or joyful disgust being enacted by moderns and tourists there every day. Only if we go through it, recognize it as perhaps the most visible form of this non-recognized Religion of Nature, which is nonetheless in action everywhere else moderns go, only then I think we will have a chance to land somewhere more sustainable. I have come to recognize the "Schmetterlingshaus" as the perfect point of departure for LANDEN - and for everybody that seeks to survive and die better on this planetary catastrophe called the Anthropocene.

The project LANDEN is a new, trans-discipinary and artistic research format based at im_flieger and currently Anita Kaya, Johanna Nielson, Laura Vilar Dolç, Sabrina Rosina and myself are a part of it. We have only started and do not yet have a web presence. But stay tuned, more will come soon for this exciting new project. I am very much looking forward to it.

 

Below you can find a poem I wrote in this temple of slow violence, entitled 

„I think the butterflies hate Nature“

Life on Mars
after the apocalypse
no red sands
but grey smog outside
plants suck
think the butterflies
seek shelter on smooth shapes
of culture

to die, sometime
in this hypernature
most need transcendent portals
to connect
with an idea of everywhere
drops of water from above
from glass surface to glass surface
in enclosed space
is there a longing for solitude
in the unreal waterfalls
with children climbing plastic trees
teaching love for Nature
with hollow sounds
but looking real

Ikea's ideal of home
with life-long warranty
for the involuntarily reproduced
the violence of keeping alive
of not letting die
what we assumed god's land
his old smells so fiercely nice
acid layering the nostrils
sealing them with beauty
that hurts like forced adaption

to the militarily enforced paradise
free from bark beetles and weeds
"let us die!"
the last inhabitants demand
ultimate rallying cry
unheard of by smart ones

please keep the doors shut
to this altar of invisible violence
seek shelter on the one dirty leaf
drown me in electric cascades
i like the challenge
like the touch of death
that my caretakers forbid
ignoring us when we profess
hatred for the natural habitat

all animals unite against it
and yet no one who counts will hear
stay there, be quiet and let us care for you
enjoying pain-free agony
the last most stubborn god
is the former anti-christ
the possessor of women and folk
where all lines of flight eventually meet
the Church of Nature
is the most devouring machine.