In this invitation by the German Architecture Center DAZ in Berlin, we will look back at previous projects of the “Reassembling the Natural” cycle and share some considerations motivating our current research; here, we are interested in how the relationship between organisms proposes alternative approaches to depicting natural history. Instead of beginning from the assumption that the speciated organism is the basic unit of evolution, what if we consider nested ecologies of life as symbiotic kin that challenge ideas of competition and fitness? Following our readings of Lynn Margulis, Ed Young, Scott Gilbert, and David Quammen, among others, we ask, how can novel spatial strategies and interventions in the standard display technologies of the Natural History Museum contribute to de-naturalizing its presentation of human supremacy?

Curated and moderated by Lidia Gasperoni, Matthias Böttger, and Christophe Barlieb of fieldstations.net. The association promotes research about the Anthropocene – the new geological age in which human activity has become one of the most dominant influences upon the transformational processes of the earth.

The event, in cooperation with the Department of Architectural Theory at the Institute for Architecture at the TU Berlin, is part of the DAZ series “We need to talk!”.

Club Donna is about a renewed relationship with land, matter, "nature" and localities against the backdrop of the new climate condition. Participants and organizers (Sophie Dars & Carlo Menon, Accattone magazine) explore the work of contemporary artists, photographers, architects, botanists and landscape designers. At the same time, in practice, they borrow from them the tools to investigate our own environment—built and unbuilt, domestic and public, imaginary and actual. Looking forward to being today's guest!

Spanning three days, "Earthseeds" is an online exhibition and event series celebrating the work of the cohorts graduating the MA City Design and MA Environmental Architecture at the RCA's School of Architecture. Led by the student community from both graduating cohorts, "Earthseeds" features talks, conversations, performances and group discussions, focusing on issues of care, the environment, technology, climate, and social justice. The title, "Earthseed," is in reference to Octavia Butler’s book "Parable of the Sower." To sow, to care, to adapt, to persist in the face of adversity and to change: a story that speaks to the uniqueness of this year and to our students’ capacity for adaptation and creativity even in the most difficult circumstances.

After months of not being able to travel and/or visit the institutions where a lot of our exhibition-led research takes place I look forward to engage with the cohort of students led by tutors Lily Jencks & Jessica Reynolds. In collective and individual projects, the studio class has been exploring the role of the natural history museum in the context of current ecological emergencies. Due to the pandemic constraints, which have prevented the students to be together in London, each one instead engaged with a museum that is local to them in their home country. After identifying a specific local ecological and/or curatorial problem each designed a proposal for an intervention that rethinks the museum's structure, role, and purpose. I look forward to learning about their ideas and strategies, and to contribute to their reflections via experiences gathered through "Reassembling the Natural"!

The UnNatural History Museum: Unbuilding the Museum Typology, a year-long experimental studio led by tutors Lily Jencks & Jessica Reynolds at the Architectural Association 2020–21

To mark the release of Dora García’s publication, "Love with Obstacles (Amor Rojo)," the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University in Massachusetts is hosting a virtual book launch and conversation exploring the rich legacy of Alexandra Kollantai. Kollontai (St. Petersburg, 1872–Moscow, 1952) was an October revolutionary, social activist, feminist, and intellectual who was a key agitator for the sexual and social emancipation of women. Moderated by Senior Curator-at-Large Ruth Estévez, Dora García will be joined by Rina Ortiz (a Mexican scholar of Kollontai and contributing writer to the book) and Anna-Sophie Springer (the books editor and director of its publisher, K. Verlag), and by Shoniqua Roach (Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies & Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Brandeis University). Tune in for a lively discussion on Kollantai’s contributions towards protecting women’s rights, the importance of fiction and private correspondence in the construction of political thought, and how Kollantai’s ideas on radical social change continue to inspire and mobilize a new generation of feminist thinkers and activists. The conversation will be hosted online via Zoom Webinar. Please RSVP to receive login credentials!

After 2.5 years of a council ban to host public events at our studio compound, Fahrbereitschaft, our landlord finally got this permission again. To celebrate this good news the ASSET studio and K. Verlag publishing aterlier is participating in the Open Studios. Come by and peruse the K. Verlag book table or watch a re-run of my recently curated video program "silvopasture works" (see below) on Friday, 2 Oct, 6–9 pm. Hope to see you on Friday to kick off the days of the Open House weekend!

In Fall 2020, the exhibition "Naturecolony" (curated by Anna-Sophie Springer & Etienne Turpin) was planned to take place at The Blackwood Gallery, University of Toronto Mississauga. A new instantiation of our "Reassembling the Natural" project, this interdisciplinary exhibition was focusing on histories of colonial transactions in the Western hemisphere and had been in the works for two years—when it was abruptly called off in May due to the extended campus closures during the Sars-Cov-2 pandemic. Luckily, one position—by Martina Pozzan—which was already produced to be displayed in the outdoor area of the university campus, emerged as a solo installation. With her research project "Musa × paradisiaca L." Pozzan explores the messy space between natural and artificial dimensions of botanical collecting. In vitro propagation methods, seed banks, and both cryogenic and living collections operate at the intersection of technoscientific research and the market-driven commodification of life itself. The photographic series displayed focuses on techniques of biological multiplication in the service of capital accumulation.

This session with the MA students from DAE was originally going to happen in-person in February. It was my first professional engagement which got rerouted into an online seminar due to the Sars-COV-2 pandemic. Within the new circumstances of physical distancing and the highlighted perversities of supply chain capitalism, my talk "Herbarium Politicum" felt more timely than expected: with a virus currently reminding us of biological connectedness and shared (albeit asymmetrical) vulnerabilities, many urbanites not reliant on subsistence agriculture have recently taken up planting vegetables and/or gardening—whether as a welcome pastime while sheltered at home or as more conscious method towards a decelerated awareness for life's becoming. The role of gardens as spaces of care and survival (i.e. for political prisoners or the enslaved) suddenly took on an uncanny, quotidian resonance—albeit their singular and incomparable histories steeped in systemic violence and inequality. I want to thank Tim Roerig for the kind invitation and perfect organization as well as all attendants for their participation and feedback.

K. Verlag is one of this year's recipients of the Deutscher Verlagspreis 2020 (German Publishing Prize) by the Federal Ministry of Culture. We are most grateful for this fantastic recognition. This is the best. Congratulations to all the other bookmakers, too!

Uriel Orlow’s moving exhibition “Conversing with Leaves” at Kunsthalle Mainz gathers four of his major installations from the last years into one institution. In his recent work “Theatrum Botanicum” (2015–18), Uriel tells the story of the garden planted by Nelson Mandela and his fellow inmates in Robben Island Prison, South Africa. My presentation “Herbarium Politicum” connects these lifelines with the letters and herbarium sheets of Rosa Luxemburg—for whom pressing flowers and plants into neat albums was a means for staying grounded and connected to the world during her years as political prisoner. Expanding from Uriel’s meticulous practice, I will also introduce a series of related projects by other artists and activists—many times both—whose work with seeds, gardens, and forests is inherently political—and often literally a question of life and death. Via the insights of writers such as Robin Wall-Kimmerer, Banu Subramaniam, and Sophie Chao we will reflect on the importance of reciprocity, kinship, belonging, and care—in order to understand even better what is so radical about “plant love” in the face of insect decline, uncontrollable forest fires, and decades-old agrarian anxieties. [Photo: “Squirrel's Revenge” (2017), Uriel Orlow. © Uriel Orlow & VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2019]

What could be better than concluding the year with a new publication embracing Love and Cosmic Forces?

 If you are in Berlin, please join me and my fantastic friend Hanna Mattes on Sunday for the release of "The Lunar System"—her new book of poetry and photography—featuring images taken during a total solar eclipse as well as from sites in Chile’s Atacama Desert. We'll have some snacks and drinks there and just look forward to spending some time in this beautiful place together. Hope you can make it!

The K. publication "The Work of Wind: Land,” co-edited last year by Chrisine Shaw & Etienne Turpin—and designed in collaboration with Katharina Tauer—has won this year’s “Best Book Design Award” in the Canadian OAAG competition of the Ontario Association of Art Galleries!
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The publication is part of the curatorial initiative The WORK OF WIND: AIR, LAND, SEA, developed in 2018–21 by Christine Shaw, Director/Curator of the Blackwood Gallery at the University of Toronto Mississauga. Continuing K.’s curatorial approach to publishing by inviting the reader-as-exhibition-viewer to navigate a broad multidisciplinary field of inquiry and experimentation, the book aims to foster a deeper public awareness of the complex entanglements of ecologies of excess, environmental legacies of colonialism, the financialization of weather, contemporary catastrophism, politics of sustainability, climate justice, and hopeful resilience.
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Huge congratulations to everyone! I am especially proud because this is the second national design award K. Verlag has received this year together with designer Katharina Tauer!

During our collaborative residency hosted by Progetto in Lecce, Nina, Robin, and Anna-Sophie shared five-hundred hours together exploring the town and the surrounding Salento region. This experience culminates in the launch of the "Vegetable Teratology Colouring Book," by Nina Canell & Robin Watkins, and published by K. Verlag. We are presenting this publication in a two-fold launch: a veggie market stand and an exhibition. The first intervention takes place on the evening of the organic farmer's market at Le Maniffature Knos, a local cultural center; at Progetto itself, the "Vegetable Teratology Colouring Book" is the centerpiece of a shelf structure set up from found materials holding our material archive gathered throughout the residency and a selection of publications from K. Verlag's program.
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In the light-flooded rooms of the palazzo housing Progetto, this multifarious structure created by Anna-Sophie Springer and Robin Watkins is merely one part of the exhibition opening on 19 October. In other rooms of the space we present a series of sculptural assemblages by Nina Canell. These were made on-site with found objects and primary materials such as clay and stone. Often using location-specific conditions, Nina's installations respond to heat or moisture, calling for presence to replace form in sculpture. In the context of our joint residency—focusing on the deviation and contour of things as they come together or fall apart—Nina's assemblages echo themes raised by the "Vegetable Teratology Colouring Book" as they also emphasize material agency and sculptural process.
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With extra special thanks to Jamie Sneider (Progetto), Enrico Tramecere (Terraje Ceramiche), and Cesare Papaleo.

For much of this year, I've been daydreaming about an "escape" to Southern Italy at the end of summer and was planning to go to Matera in Basilicata to see Armin Linke's exhibition. Such joy then when Nina Canell and Robin Watkins invited me to embark on a joint artist residency at Progetto in Lecce (Puglia). We spent three weeks meeting and talking to local artisans, organic agriculturists, and food activists—as well as exploring the many fantastic beaches and our endless indulgence in food and wine. At the end our time there, we launched a new publication, the "Vegetable Teratology Colouring Book," co-edited by Robin & Nina and published by K. Verlag.

While forest fires have been raging in Amazonia, Indonesia, the Arctic, and many other regions worldwide, my two-day seminar will focus on the archetypal role of plants for life on earth. We will discuss the concept of the Forest philosophically and biologically as a concept for multiplicity, diversity, and reciprocity. Unpacking the meaning of the "Anthropocene" as a species concept with limited ability to capture the capitalist-extractivist dynamics that have produced the current ecological crisis, we will explore alternative terminologies centering specifically on human-plant relations—including the "Plantationocene" as suggested by Donna Haraway, Jason Moore, and Anna Tsing, and the "Planthroposcene" as suggested by Natasha Myers and colleagues. Throughout the seminar, we will counterpoint our theoretical work with examinations of curatorial, editorial, artistic, and writerly methodologies dealing with our subject matter in a manner of lived, ethico-aesthetic practices. Thank you to Margrit Ritzmann for the wonderful invitation! (The photo shows a pack of Birch Leaf Tea I brought back from Finland the week before and which we were drinking together throughout the seminar.)

This September, K. Verlag is among the 12 invited publishers presenting their work in the Salon of the art berlin in the building of the former Tempelhof airport.

Within the curatorial field, the question of hospitality is so crucial. How lovely to receive an invitation to travel to Finland (for the first time) and be a guest of "Rehearsing Hospitalities" put together by the team around Jussi Koitela and Yvonne Billimore at Frame Contemporary Art Finland. Excited to join them for a dense week of events and looking forward to meeting new and old friends!

This winter, it was for the first time that I submitted a book to Stiftung Buchkunst Frankfurt's annual competition for the “25 Most Beautiful Books” made in Germany: "On Reconciliation / Über Versöhnung," edited by Dora Garcia, on the love relationship and intellectual friendship of Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt. In June, the jury selected this book as one of these 25, and today I will celebrate together with other publishers, designers, authors, et al. at the Museum for Applied Arts in Frankfurt! Really looking forward to being there—and congrats also, especially, to these three wonderful collaborations: Dora García, Etienne Turpin, and Katharina Tauer!

In this new co-authored essay, Etienne and I revisit our curatorial methodology of “Reassembling the Natural” by focusing on our fieldwork and collection research about the coloniality of ornithological science, especially regarding the tropical birds of paradise. The text was commissioned by Tristan Garcia & Vincent Normand for their edited publication “Theater, Garden, Bestiary: A Materialist History of Exhibitions.” The book follows the academic workshop series at ECAL Lausanne, where we first presented aspects of our work presented in the essay back in April 2016. The book also includes texts by Etienne Chambaud, Elitze Dulguerova, Anselm Franke, Tristan Garcia, Fabien Giraud & Raphael Siboni, Dorothea von Hantelmann, Yuk Hui, Pierre Huyghe, Jeremy Lecomte, Stéphane Lojkine, Sami Khatib, Rafael Mandressi, Vincent Normand, Peter Osborne, Filipa Ramos, Juliane Rebentisch, Joao Ribas, Pamela Rosenkranz, Lucy Steeds, Olivier Surel, Kim West, and Charles Wolfe. Published by Sternberg Press in August 2019.

Together with Etienne Turpin and artist Assaf Gruber, I am hosting a workshop stream during the workshop week "The Whole Life" organized by the Haus der Kulturen Berlin to take place in various art institutions in Dresden. Our workshop "The Transient Witness" starts with observations around the relocation of Edigio Marzona's extensive collection from his private home in Berlin-Charlottenburg to a purpose-built museum in the capital of Saxony. As part of the program, we will have the chance to visit the Grünes Gewölbe, the Porcelain Collection, and the Mathematics & Physics Salon of the SKD. We look forward to an inspiring week, especially meeting our international participants (Arnika Ahldag, Eva Bentcheva, Gulzat Egemberdieva, Anna Harezlak, Luidmila Kirsanova, and Ayman Nahle) and all of the other people taking part in this gathering!

I am proud to publish Paulo Tavares's contribution to the exhibition "Bauhaus imaginista": "Des-Habitat" is Paulo's graphic-textual intervention into Lina Bo Bardi's magazine "Habitat." The project mobilizes a series of design strategies central also to "Habitat" itself, such as re-appropriation, collage, and displacement. By focusing on the context from which materials were originally taken Paulo shows how, by virtue of its modern visual language, "Habitat" functioned as a framing device to conceal its own coloniality—a suspenseful media history in light of suppression, complicity, and decolonization. The publication was first presented at "Bauhaus imaginista" in São Paulo (2018) and will be launched at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin on 14 March 2019. Texts include an essay by Paulo Tavares and a preface by curator Marion von Osten.

In early March, I'll be returning once again to the BFA students of the Art Institute in Basel. Last time, some in my group found they had learnt quite enough now about the eco crisis... which means that this time I am going to try to focus and bridge more thoroughly the political economic dimension of nature and the ways in which climate breakdown currently drives contemporary politics. On the reading list: Naomi Klein, Bruno Latour, Geoff Mann, and Alexis Shotwell. Looking forward!

The seminar “The New Education: Denaturalizing the Cultural Pedagogy of Museum Technologies” explores the traditional belief in human exceptionalism as one of the foundational principles of museum traditions. The goal of this week-long event, conceived by Anna-Sophie Springer & Etienne Turpin with Andreas Döpke for The New Alphabet School at Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin, is a collaborative research process for participants to better create and better understand a global-yet-partial taxonomy of the technologies of human exceptionalism in museological culture past and present. The group’s findings will be presented under the title “An Incomplete Museum of Anthroposupremacism” during the Opening Days of the Haus der Kulturen’s new two year cycle “The New Alphabet.” The curriculum event “(Un-)Learning Place” is curated by Boris Buden and Olga von Schubert; it brings convenes 80 international participants in a week-long workshop series led by eight Berlin-based collectives from the scenes of art, culture, and activism with the aim to develop transdisciplinary, decolonial, and anti-hegemonic strategies in relation to data-based knowledge, translation, archives, and embodied infrastructures.

Looking forward to my invitation to the interdisciplinary MA studio class by Giampiero Caiti and Kobe Matthys. I will speak for about two hours about the methodologies and research questions driving the exhibition cycle "Disappearing Legacies: The World as Forest," which is finally coming to a close this upcoming Friday, 14 Dec in Halle/Saale. All welcome, I think, but event starts at 9 AM!

On invitation Studio Tomás Saraceno, Anna-Sophie Springer & Etienne Turpin have prepared the one-day discursive event “On Networks & Colliding Voices” with a keynote by Bruno Latour, and talks and performances by d’bi.young anitafrika, Albert-László Barabási, Fernando Ferroni, Vincenzo Napolano, Lisa Randall, Bronislaw Szerszinski, and Estelle Zhong Mengual. The event is moderated by Anna-Sophie & Etienne together with Tomás Saraceno on the occasion of the artist’s current exhibition “ON AIR” at Palais de Tokyo in Paris.

"Session on Territory" is a series of public debates on the political economy of architecture and territory. Focusing on how the epoch of the Anthropocene reframes our conceptions of the urban and shapes new ecologies, the seminar’s objective is to unravel contemporary forces at work in the formation of the built and natural environment, and, as importantly to spur debates that challenge the status quo. Every intervention by a guest speaker is followed by a panel discussion with invited respondents. In my session, I will discuss a series of recent research and projects including the exhibition "Disappearing Legacies: The World as Forest." The event will be moderated by Dubravka Seculic. Thank you to Marc Angelil for the kind invitation.

"Scientific expeditions were crucial to projects of colonial expansion and contributed to accruing imperial prestige. The aspiration to dominate nature was intrinsic to imperial demonstrations of power that, as evidence of their superiority, sought to conquer and tame far away landscapes inhabited by exoticized humans and non-humans. The impressive amount of ethnographic objects, plants and animals collected—or rather, amassed and appropriated—over the centuries built the foundation for natural history museums as well as botanical gardens and zoos across Europe. This panel sets to explore how imperial ecological legacies and narratives reverberate in the Capitalocene. Moving beyond imperial (hi)stories that centre on the human experience, we find it crucial to contextualize imperial trajectories in environmental destruction and violence by extending our attention to the increasingly precarious livelihoods of nonhuman actors. The panel stimulates debate on how 'nature' remembers and provides us with rich archives that may enlighten our understanding of how institutions, practices, and ethics that originated under imperialism (e.g. natural history museums, forest management, hunting rights, and animal diplomacy) still figure today." Very excited to spend two days at this workshop at MPI Göttingen organized by Annika Kirbis and colleagues and contribute with a short presentation based on exhibition-related research; more info on program and other participants below.

The third iteration of the exhibition is approaching fast! Save the date for the opening of Verschwindende Vermächtnisse: Die Welt als Wald [Disappearing Legacies: The World as Forest] in the Natural History Collections of Martin Luther University in Halle/Saale, which will be installed throughout the entire building—that is normally not open to the public in this way. With artworks by Maria Thereza Alves, Ari Bayuaji, Bik Van der Pol, Ursula Biemann, Shannon Lee Castleman/Migrant Ecologies, Revital Cohen & Tuur van Balen, Mark Dion, Radjawali Irendra / Akademi Drone Indonesia, Armin Linke with Giulia Bruno and Giuseppe Ielasi, Barbara Marcel, Julian Oliver & Crystelle Vu, PetaBencana.id, SHIMURAbros, Paulo Tavares / autonoma, Robert Zhao Renhui / The Institute of Critical Zoologists

As part of a dense program of the contemporary arts festival "The Work of Wind: Air, Land, Sea," organized by The Blackwood Gallery at University of Toronto/Mississauga, we are launching the first volume in the attendant three-volume book series with a conversation on “this land of forces.” The event is hosted by editors Christine Shaw, Anna-Sophie Springer, and Etienne Turpin. Seven contributors will speak about their work in the book: performance scholar Allen Weiss on the history of art as an itinerant, speculative exhibition; artist duo Pejvak on the border work of Armenian political economic realities; artist Tania Willard on Indigenous land practices born out of a lived connection to the land; and activist Tom Keefer and lawyer Adrienne Telford with D.T. Cochrane on Indigenous solidarity work and the struggle for justice.
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"The Work of Wind: Land." With contributions by Rouzbeh Akhbari & Felix Kalmenson, d’bi.young anitafrika, Amy Balkin, Jesse Birch, D.T. Cochrane, Revital Cohen & Tuur Van Balen, Anna Feigenbaum, Macarena Gómez-Barris, Ilana Halperin, Tom Keefer, Barbara Marcel, Mimi Onuoha, Tomás Saraceno, Christine Shaw, Juliana Spahr, Adrienne Telford, Etienne Turpin, Allen S. Weiss, Tania Willard, and Eva Wilson. Design by Katharina Tauer.
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Edited by Christine Shaw & Etienne Turpin
English
336 pages
18.5 x 24 cm
62 Color images
Hardcover, thread-bound
ISBN 978-3-9818635-8-1
28.00 Euros

During the final week of the exhibition, we have the privilege to host Anna Tsing for an evening lecture inside "The World as Forest" in Hamburg! Inspired by her recent travels to the Raja Ampat islands of West Papua in Indonesia, Prof. Tsing has proposed to share new reflections animated by the birdwatching she did together with foreign ornithologists and locals in "the land of the birds of paradise" as Wallace described the area. In the abstract of her talk she asks, "How might quite different kinds of people appreciate birds? And in what ways do birds appreciate (or refuse the attentions of) people?" Responding to anthropologists' worries whether studying nonhuman socialities might fall in line with Western imperial mindsets, she rejoins that "to ignore nonhumans as social beings blithely ignores Anthropocene destruction, which haunts our species too." Thus exploring "overlapping—but non-identical—forms of curiosity" and various economies at play in these birdwatching constellations, Anna Tsing will discuss the potential of "new forms of collaboration across the humanities, arts, and natural sciences: collaborations we may need to survive the Anthropocene." She suggests that "[t]o recognize the dance of more-than-human sociality requires attention both to varied agendas people have with birds and to those birds have with people." Coincidentally, in February we also just returned from a trip to these islands, with many (very) early morning hikes to special spots under special trees in thick forests. Anna Tsing's lecture "The Sociality of Birds: Reflections on Ontological Edge Effects" promises to be a memorable evening and no doubt a highlight of this first iteration of the exhibition before we will take it to Berlin (opening 26 April). [Photo: Red birds-of-paradise, Waigeo Island, Indonesia. By Yulia Bereshpolova, December 2017.]
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The event will be held in English with simultaneous German translation.
Doors of the exhibition open at 17h00.
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Practicing Deep Time is a two-day event focusing on Deep Time in arts and heritage: a one-day multi-disciplinary symposium based at the arts organization Timespan in Helmsdale, Northern Scotland, followed by a “field day,” exploring Deep Time concepts across East Sutherland and Caithness. On Friday, Timespan will host a day of talks and workshops. Here, Anna-Sophie Springer will present a keynote drawing on recent work that aims to create sustained conversations about the future of “natural history” through exhibition-led enquiry bringing together natural history collections and contemporary art. A cross-disciplinary roundtable will consider particular issues associated with the communication and interpretation of Deep Time subjects by asking: What methods can we employ to overcome the perceived unknowability of distant pasts and futures? Other presenters include Gavin McGregor, Nashin Mahtani, and Sam Nightingale; the event program also includes a screening of the film Trace Evidence (2016) by Susan Schuppli.

Each edition of the annual Leeds artists book fair takes place under the motto of a specific theme. In 2018, this overarching theme is "The Library." The curatorial program accompanying the book fair at the Tetley Gallery includes exhibitions by Madiha Aijaz and Mahbub Jokhio as well as a new iteration of Nick Thurston's publishing studio "The House that Heals the Soul." Moreover, I was invited to give the keynote lecture on Saturday evening by drawing upon my work in Fantasies of the Library (MIT Press, 2016). Echoing the visual essay "Reading Rooms Reading Machines," I wrote a new performance lecture leading through a selection of “library fantasies” from the real world we'd do well dreaming with in 2018.

“In discussions of technological progress, what are the affected territories, populations and workforces that tend to be forgotten? The embrace of Western Promethean thinking and the belief that “Man” can invent a solution to any problem always seem to leave certain questions unanswered. When different ongoing forms of exploitation—of both humans and resources—are not addressed, dehistoricization and universalism emerge and conceal racialized politics and economic interests. To discuss the long-standing interconnection of colonialism, racism, and capitalism, Françoise Vergès suggests the reading of a different history, that of the “racial capitalocene,” which can challenge Western approaches of knowing. In her keynote at transmediale 2018, Vergès will examine old and new forms of dispossession and colonization, reconnecting past, present, and future. Turning to intersectional, anti-capitalist, anti-racist, and anti-imperialist methodologies, she will highlight the need for a new politics of the possible—and a politics of lives that matter.”
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Françoise Vergès’s lecture “Politics of Forgetfulness” will take place in the Auditorium of Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin, on 1 February 2018 at 18h00. It will be moderated by Anna-Sophie Springer and accompanied by German live translation

On Friday evening, Anna-Sophie will head from CeNak to Kunsthaus Hamburg where she was invited to respond to Tejal Shah’s current solo exhibition Unbecoming by. If you are free and nearby it would be great to see you there at 19h00!

It’s been 160 years since Alfred Russel Wallace understood the principles of species evolution in the course of his travels through Amazonia and the Malay Archipelago. From 10 November 2017 to 29 March 2018, the exhibition Verschwindende Vermächtnisse: Die Welt als Wald confronts the destructions of these tropical ecosystems in the context of the Anthropocene and mass extinction. A hybrid between thematic exhibition and art exhibition, this intervention in the Zoological Museum Hamburg at Centrum für Naturkunde (CeNak), University of Hamburg, Verschwindende Vermächtnisse presents 13 contemporary works of art—including 8 new commissions—alongside a selection of rare zoological and botanical objects. We’re pleased to announce the names of the participating artists with whom it was a great honor and pleasure to work over the past year!
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Maria Thereza Alves
Ursula Biemann
Bik Van der Pol
Shannon Lee Castleman
Revital Cohen & Tuur van Balen
Mark Dion
Radjawali Irendra / Akademi Drone Indonesia
Armin Linke with Giulia Bruno and Giuseppe Ielasi
Barbara Marcel
Julian Oliver & Crystelle Vu
Robert Zhao Renhui / The Institute of Critical Zoologists
SHIMURAbros
autonoma / Paulo Tavares
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With an invitation by anthropologist David Chandler, Anna-Sophie Springer & Etienne Turpin will both be speaking at the AHA! Festival 2017 entitled “Autonomy”

The book, published by MAO and Motto Books, works to explore ways of changing the goals of design culture. By presenting the seven investigative episodes developed within BIO 25 and their interchange with both local archives and broader paradigms, the project aims to turn away from the urgent need to solve problems, and instead open up new frontiers for observation and experimentation. It seeks to consider our inhabited and habitable world for what it is and what it is becoming, and not simply what we think it should, ideally, be.

Come say hi at the new studio on the FAHRBEREITSCHAFT compound in Lichtenberg! Etienne Turpin, Wolfgang Hückel, Katharina Tauer and I will be there working and happy to have a chat about our various projects happening at the moment!

Set in a former US Navy base in Puerto Rico, Ojos para mis Enemigos [Eyes for my enemies] by Beatriz Santiago Muñoz observes how multiple introduced and indigenous species—plants and crops, but also animals, humans and not—share this terrain and together constitute a new space, offering poetic as well as very concrete scenarios of the anthropocene, its devastation but also modes of recuperation. Vdrome asked me to do a short interview with Beatriz to introduce the work. Have a read/look!

Perfectly timed for our book launch-walk in Berlin’s Tiergarten last night—which was so magical thanks to Sandra Bartoli kindly guiding us to some of the oldest trees—Jason Groves also composed a beautiful reading of intercalations 4 which he published on the Feedback Blog of Open Humanities Press. A scholar of German literature, Jason contributed some excerpts by Walter Benjamin and Franz Hessel about the Tiergarten and even the Amazon on Horseback sculpture where we departed from.

Please join me and Etienne for a guided tour of the various natures of the Tiergarten—including its oldest trees—with Berlin-based architect Sandra Bartoli. During the tour, visitors will also encounter special guests Richard Pell, director of the Center for Postnatural History; Jason Groves, co-editor of the open access blog Feedback; and, Katharina Tauer, designer of the intercalations: paginated exhibition series. Dress for a walk in the park!

This international conference by the Kulturstiftung des Bundes pilot project, Art/Nature: Artistic Interventions at the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin convenes a series of presentations and panel discussions to reflect on the collaboration between protagonists from the worlds of contemporary art and natural history museums. The conference addresses the expectations, potentials, values, and possible limitations of such interactions and interventions from the perspective of curators, artists, and researchers. Together with Etienne Turpin, I will present our Reassembling the Natural project in the closing session “Difficult Legacies” on 27 June. Other conference speakers include Tal Adler, Claude d’Anthenaise, Bergit Arends, Ariane Berthoin Antal, Yara Castanheira, Tony Clark, Michael John Gorman, Gaby Hartel, Petra Lange-Berndt, Janet Laurence, Susanne Schmitt, Thomas Schnalke, Barbara Stauffer, Frank Steinheimer, Ulrike Stottrop, D’Arcy Wilson, and Laurie Young.

As I am accompanying Etienne for his keynote lecture at this symposium, I feel quite flattered to have been asked to participate a little, too, by chairing a session in the morning of the second day. Presentations are by Marianna Tsionki, Alexandra Halkias, and Mark Peter Wright and deal with rare earths, toxicity, biopolitics, and infrastructure—apparently from a curatorial perspective. Excited to meet these speakers and look forward to other keynotes by Nigel Clark, Mark Dorrian, Jussi Parikka, Joanna Zylinska as well as my Ph.D. supervisor Susan Schuppli.

Following the earlier fourth (!) volume, the third volume of the intercalations: paginated exhibitions series has also arrived from the printer! Reflecting and refracting on the role of colonial science in the tropics, Reverse Hallucinations in the Archipelago gathers contributions by Akademi Drone Indonesia, George Beccaloni, Iwank Celenk, Lucy Davis, Fred Langford Edwards, Christina Leigh Geros, Matthias Glaubrecht, Geraldine Juárez, Radjawali Irendra, James Russell, Mark von Schlegell, SLAVE PIANOS, Anna-Sophie Springer, Zenzi Suhadi, Paulo Tavares, Rachel Thompson, Etienne Turpin, and Satrio Wicaksono, with design by Katharina Tauer. intercalations is co-published by K. Verlag and Haus der Kulturen der Welt and was made possible by the Schering Stiftung.

With a current rate of extinction estimated at over one hundred species per day, the anthropogenic extermination of non-human forms-of-life on Earth is rightly a cause of serious alarm. Such a rate of extinction is made even more troubling when one considers that with the disappearance of each species, the planet not only loses one of its constituent actors, but also greatly diminishes the processes of planetary evolution, as the potential for species’ adaptability rapidly decreases with each and every loss. Following several years of commissioned field work in the global biodiversity hotspots of Nusantara and Amazonia, as well as extensive archival research in major natural history collections, this edited volume weaves together voices and narratives, from science and documentary, to philosophy and poetry, to ask how the concept of “nature” might be meaningfully reassembled against the backdrop of mass extinction.

This year's Ph.D. seminar at the Ecole nationale supérieure des Arts décoratifs, Paris, is focused on strategies of “publication.” Here, the main guiding questions are how to make research (in art and design) public? And how can media such as the book, the library, and the exhibition be mobilized as research tools in this process? As guest lecturer in the seminar, I was invited to respond to these questions based on some of my recent projects including Fantasies of the Library, intercalations, and Reassembling the Natural.

As a last-minute addition to the speaker's list of the symposium “On Nature, Race, and Gender: The Politics of the Contemporary Debates around Art, Culture, and Research,” I will present a speed-reading through the third and fourth volumes of intercalations. Looking forward to contribute among other presentations by Chus Martinez, Filipa Ramos, Tejal Shah, Trevor Paglen, Ingo Niermann, and Natascha Sadr Haghighian.

[Excerpt] "Fantasies of the Library is a useful book in adding to the recent art and library projects some well–articulated thoughts. It resonates with the writing done recently by such scholars as Shannon Mattern and offers a particularly artistic take on similar concerns. This comes out well in [Springer's] visual essay 'Reading Rooms Reading Machines' that moves from contemporary arts of the book and its forms of organisation to the situations where it is staged and visible, addressable and usable; from practices and technologies of reading to the imaginaries, the forms and materials of organisation knowledge that are the entry point to contemporary discussions of data and organisation. Indeed, as Springer puts it, this all reveals how the book is to be considered 'a situation and a practice,' just like the library itself."

Using the new intercalations publication, The Word for World is Still Forest, as a starting point, my second seminar at Institut Kunst in Basel will combine readings and discussions with excursions behind the scenes of the city's Tropenhaus of the Botanical Gardens, the Museum der Kulturen, and the Natural History Museum. Traversing through the archives of institutions that collect natural and cultural material—books, artworks, artifacts, and scientific specimens—we will reflect on how these institutions organize what is considered knowledge and explore strategies and practices with which we can activate and connect these spaces in ways in which they are not normally viewed by dominant, colonial cultures. The seminar is an introduction to applied critical thinking with a focus on more-than-human entanglements and ecological urgencies of our times.

in the publication "it's a book..." accompanying the Leipzig Independent Publishing Fair 2017 organized by Peter Cornicius, Anne Dietzsch, Michael Dikta, Markus Dreßen, Albrecht Gäbel, and Jenny Schreiter. With my thanks to Inga Seidler.

In 2017, HKW und K. Verlag continue their collaboration within this six-part publication series with two volumes: "Reverse Hallucinations in the Archipelago" reflects on the changing role of colonial natural history collections in the current ecological crisis; "The Word for World Is Still Forest" is an homage to the forest as a turbulent, interconnected, multinature. The series is made possible by the Schering Stiftung.

in Exercises in Autonomy, ed. Joanna Sokolowska. Lodz: Muzeum Sztuki w Łodzi, 2017. 164–78 (Polish & English).

A lovely little review of Fantasties of the Library (MIT Press, 2016), edited by Anna-Sophie Springer and Etienne Turpin, by Gill Partington in the Times Literary Supplement, 18 January 2017: 33.

as part of the workshop "A Year without a Winter: Fictions and Policy." Considering how creative interventions can unlock new ways of thinking about our relationship to the environment and our political agency within it, the workshop interrogates new narratives of climate and climate change emerging in the context of the arts and transdisciplinary scholarship. As an invited speaker in the Roundtable "Curating Environmental Imaginaries," I will introduce some of the core concerns and strategies of "Reassembling the Natural." Also presenting at this Roundtable are Ken Eklund, Jacob Lillemose, and Carolina Sobecka.

where we will critically interrogate books, exhibitions, archives, and collections, attending to how they record and disseminate knowledge, experimenting along the way with traversals, shape-shifting, fact and fiction.

that explores contemporary environmental issues of Amazonia as well as its role for the planet's ecological balance with interlocutors from the arts, humanities, biology, ecology, and natural sciences. My journey to Manaus (as well as thereafter to Sao Paulo) is generously funded by a Goethe-Institut Research Travel Grant for Curators.

in response to Isabell Lorey & David Lyon’s “Anxious to Secure” keynote session at transmediale 2016 for the “Anxious to Organize” blog

L'internationals Online, No. 3 "Ecologising Museums," July 2016.

Stedelijk Studies, No. 04 "Between the Immersive and the Discursive: Curating Research in 21st-Century Art Museums," July 2016.

as part of the series "Library Residencies"

as part of the exhibition "Emergent Ecologies: NYC Edition"
curated by Eben Kirksey and others

—Anna-Sophie Springer & Etienne Turpin in conversation with Daisy Nam

as part of the curatorial lab "Theater, Garden, Bestiary: A Materialist History of Exhibitions" organized by Vincent Normand & Tristan Garcia

as part of the Art, Culture, and Technology program's Spring 2016 Lecture Series, "Agencies & Urgencies"

in Publishing as Artistic Practice, edited by A. Gilbert. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016. 134–52.

for the Anthropocene Curriculum,
Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin

as part of the exhibition "Emergent Ecologies"
curated by Eben Kirksey and others

in response to Dr Paulo Tavares in the Visual Culture Department's 10th-anniversary lecture series, "Permissions: The Way We Work Now"

"I went over this book again and again: It’s such a rich read about the power of the library, in history or contemporary, institutionalized, private or revolutionary (for example Occupy, Gezi Park). This book makes clear that the library’s power lies not only in being a container of knowledge, but in the experiences and connections it creates amongst its users. Drawing on intriguing examples, the authors discuss the implications of spatial arrangements, the politics of collecting and cataloging, as well as accessibility. Most of all, it brings back to mind a revolutionary function of the library today: “it turns marketable goods into public goods.”

As part of the 2015 gathering of the SYNAPSE International Curators' Network of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, together with Etienne Turpin I organized the workshop Little Birds / Little Machines, which included a visit to the Ornithological collection of the Museum für Naturkunde for a presentation by ornithologists Sylke Frahnert and Frank Steinheimer on elements of the collection for further development in the annals of minor ornithology (forthcoming in intercalations 06—These Birds of Temptation).

When we found out that we were both working on books "about trees," Katie Holten and I decided that we must trade pieces: She published an excerpted chapter from Fantasies of the Library in her amazing anthology About Trees while I included her Tree font in The Word for World is Still Forest.

A SYNAPSE member since 2013, I am very excited that the Haus der Kulturen der Welt has invited me to produce a series of blog texts in the months surrounding the upcoming exhibition APE CULTURE and the 2015 SYNAPSE workshop in July.

An older essay on fluid cartographies that I still enjoy very much and which ends with these words: