Hello, world. Welcome to my site.
My name is Anna-Sophie Springer. I am a cultural theorist, curator, publisher, and educator working at the intersection of artistic practice, environmental humanities, and the histories of culture and science. Through exhibitions, books, and public programs, my work examines the material, political, and affective conditions under which knowledge is produced, collected, and experienced—particularly in contexts shaped by colonial extraction, ecological crisis, and the afterlives of violence.
Since 2011, I have directed K. Verlag, a Berlin-based publishing atelier exploring the book-as-exhibition. My research-driven curatorial and editorial practice unfolds through close collaboration with artists, archives, and scientific collections, developing projects that do not treat knowledge as neutral or reparative by default, but as situated, contested, and ethically demanding. Across formats, I am interested in how practices of attention—what is foregrounded, deferred, or rendered ambient—shape cultural imaginaries and responsibilities toward more-than-human worlds.
Together with Etienne Turpin, I am principal co-investigator and co-curator of Reassembling the Natural, an ongoing, exhibition-led inquiry into the colonial histories and unresolved futures of natural history collections. Developed over more than a decade through fieldwork, archival research, and artistic collaboration, its most recent iteration, ponds among ponds, opened at NYU Shanghai’s Institute for Contemporary Arts in 2021. Drawing explicitly on Lynn Margulis’s work on symbiogenesis and the holobiont, the exhibition approached natural history collections, exhibition architectures, and human bodies as nested ecologies—metabolic, relational, and historically entangled—rather than as discrete or self-contained entities. With support from Germany’s Stiftung Kunstfonds and the University of the Arts Braunschweig (HBK), Reassembling the Natural’s long-term research has been consolidated in the publication Productions of Nature (Open Humanities Press).
My projects are deeply collaborative and emerge through dialogue, alliance, and co-production. Early exhibitions include EX LIBRIS (DE/2013), exploring relations between books, libraries, and exhibitions; Ha Ha Road (UK/2011), on humor as a subversive force; and 125,660 Specimens of Natural History (Jakarta, 2015), an investigation of natural history displays in postnatural and ruined ecologies. The latter—an early episode of Reassembling the Natural—was realized with Komunitas Salihara, the Indonesian Institute of Science, and the Schering Stiftung, working with artists and biologists to revisit Alfred Russel Wallace’s collections in relation to contemporary plantation economies and extractive legacies.
From 2016 to 2018, Reassembling the Natural evolved into a three-part exhibition cycle, Disappearing Legacies: The World as Forest, shown at the Zoological Museum Hamburg, the Tieranatomisches Theater (Humboldt University Berlin), and the Natural History Collections of Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg. These exhibitions were built into—and against—the institutional architectures of their host museums, foregrounding how inherited epistemic frameworks continue to condition what can be seen, known, or refused. A follow-up exhibition, Naturecolony, was planned at The Blackwood Gallery, University of Toronto/Mississauga in 2020 but was ultimately canceled due to COVID-19, though one work—Martina Pozzan’s installation—was independently realized.
In parallel, the intercalations: paginated exhibitions series—co-edited with Etienne Turpin since 2015 and realized by K. Verlag—has provided an intimate, essayistic space for discourse, storytelling, and reflection. Originally commissioned as part of Das Anthropozän Projekt at Haus der Kulturen der Welt, the series explores the book as a curatorial constellation shaped by fragmentation, montage, and temporal disjunction. In early 2024, my essay Inter Folia, Aves was released as a stand-alone book in Spanish translation by Greylock Editions. The work examines bird books as sites of colonial capture and epistemic entanglement, developing a decolonial inquiry into interrelation and ecological thinking in an era of mass extinction. The fifth volume, Decapitated Economies (685 pages), published at the end of 2025, brings together a wide-ranging, international set of contributions addressing extraction, violence, loss, and non-recoverable economies across artistic, political, and ecological registers, marking a pivotal moment in the series’ engagement with inherited and ongoing forms of structural harm.
Although my practice follows a logic of what I think of as disciplined undiscipline, I hold two M.A.s—one in Contemporary Art Theory (Goldsmiths, University of London) and one in Curatorial Studies (Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig)—and completed my practice-led PhD at the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths. My dissertation, Species of Accumulation and the Necromass of Natural History, investigates natural history collections as planetary architectures of coloniality and ecocidal investment, arguing that the logics of accumulation shaping historical specimen collections persist today in financialized forms of “green” capitalism. Rather than proposing restoration or redemption, this research asks how such inherited structures might be reoriented toward less harmful futures through critical, ecopoetic, and decolonial practices of attention.
I have taught, lectured, and led workshops at art and design schools, museums, and cultural institutions internationally. Selected engagements include serving as Craig-Kade Visiting Scholar-in-Residence at Rutgers University (2014), Visiting Lecturer at the Institute Art Gender Nature HGK Basel (2016–19), Dissertation Tutor for the MA Artists’ Film & Moving Image at Goldsmiths (2022), and Acting Professor of Transformation Design at the Academy of Fine Arts Braunschweig (HBK) from 2023 to 2025. In 2024, I convened the three-day Sommerakademie workshop “Publishing Ecologies” at the Bern Academy of the Arts.
My writing on libraries, books, exhibitions, and ecologies as curatorial constellations has appeared in Art Writing in Crisis (Sternberg Press), Fantasies of the Library (MIT Press), Publishing as Artistic Practice (Sternberg Press), Dark Botany: Herbarium Tales (Open Humanities Press), and Exhibition Ecologies (De Gruyter), among others. My publishing work with K. Verlag has been recognized with the German Publishing Prize in 2020, 2023, and 2025.
For open-access publications, selected public talks, and exhibition summaries, see the resources on this site. For a complete CV, portfolio, individual publications, or an interest in collaboration, editorial projects, or consulting, please contact me via email at mail[at]annasophiespringer.net