Interfacing Ecologies Lecture Series || Dr. Alexandra Toland || 03 May 2022
Bauhaus University Weimar
Faculty of Art and Design
Introduction & Moderation: Karmen Franinović
— Dr. Alexandra Toland
«Soilkin: Relational Exercises With Soil and Stones»
Tue 03 May 2022
14.00 – 15.30
Online
Please contact Duy Bui for the Zoomlink.
In the essay “About a Stone: Some Notes on Geologic Conviviality”, Hugo Reinert (2016, p. 96) poses the question: “What modes of passionate immersion – or love, or intimacy could a stone afford?” In this presentation and series of performative exercises, we will engage with discourses in multispecies ethnography, geontology, and soil science to provoke reflection on the individual and collective agency of mineral and more-than mineral others and the boundaries of what it means to be alive. The exercises are imagined as simple activities for conceptualizing stones and soil as kin, to be seen as experimental aesthetic gestures making up an (artistic research) practice to be further developed and tested in different ecologies with different actors.
Alex Toland is junior professor for arts and research at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, where she directs the Ph.D. programme in art and design, serves as dean of studies for the faculty of art and design, and chairs the graduate commission. She earned her MFA from the Dutch Art Institute (DAI) and a doctorate degree in landscape planning from the TU-Berlin as a DFG fellow in the Perspectives of Urban Ecology Graduate Research Group. Alex has published widely and exhibited artistic research on the social and cultural complexity of urban soils, the role of plants in ecosystem services, and artistic approaches to confronting air pollution.
For the exercise, Alexandra Toland has asked that everybody brings a stone of some kind (or stone product) to the lecture.
