On 29 March 2025, I’ll present a performative reading titled “These Endless—and Endlessly Necessary—Fantasies of the Library” as part of this year’s It’s a Book symposium at the Academy of Fine Arts (HGB) in Leipzig. The event marks the tenth anniversary of “Fantasies of the Library,” the first volume in the “intercalations: paginated exhibitions” series I co-edited.
This year’s symposium—titled, it’s fragmentary, together, it’s a library—explores the library as a dynamic space of speculation, memory, and transformation. Alongside contributions by Evelyn Wüthrich, Katrin Mayer, Maria L. Felixmüller, Philipp Neumann, and Raimar Oestreich, I’ll revisit and expand on ideas from my visual annotated montage “Reading Rooms Reading Machines,” reflecting on the evolving relevance of libraries in times of epistemic instability.
Come join us in Leipzig to imagine the futures of publishing, collecting, and world-making through books!

In November, I traveled to Venice with twenty-one Transformation Design MA students from HBK Braunschweig for a one-week field study exploring algae and seaweed as catalysts for ecological imagination. The lagoon served as a living case study to examine shifting coastlines, climate adaptation, and more-than-human futures. In dialogue with scientists, designers, artists, and activists, we investigated the cultural and atmospheric roles of marine organisms—once overlooked, now vital in the fight for climate justice. The excursion was part of my studio course “Imaginationen des Lebendigen,” which centered algae as a medium of speculative design and socio-ecological transformation.

My essay “Palimpsests of Imperial Desire” has just been published in the peer-reviewed volume “Dark Botany: The Herbarium Tales,” edited by Sigi Jöttkandt, Prudence Gibson et al. (Open Humanities Press, 2024). The text draws from my PhD research and critically revisits my work with herbarium and agrobotany collections at the Indonesian Institute of Science and the Herbarium Hamburgense, developed through “Reassembling the Natural.”
Built from two excerpted sections of my thesis, the essay examines extractivist imaginaries and archival absence, foregrounding both a forgotten set of Dutch-colonial glass plate negatives documenting plantation transformation in Java, and a curatorial collaboration with the Herbarium Hamburgense’s collection head. Our resulting installation addressed the intertwined scientific and economic agendas of German botanical collectors working in the Global South during the imperial era.
“Palimpsest of Imperial Desire” appears alongside contributions that challenge dominant botanical epistemologies and expand the field of critical plant studies.
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With contributions by Giovanni Aloi, Matthew Beach, Tamryn Bennett, Edward Colless, Prudence Gibson, Ryan Gordon, Lisa Gorton, Sigi Jöttkandt, Nick Koenig, Verena Kuni, Anna M. Lawrence, Vanessa Lemm, Rebecca Mayo, Aunty Deirdre Martin, Arina Melkozernova, Elaine Miller, Jacob Morris, Anna Perdibon, Anna Madeleine Raupach, Georgina Reid, Heather Rogers, Betty Russ, Erica Seccombe, Marie Sierra, Christina Stadlbauer, Anna-Sophie Springer, Bart Vandeput, Juliann Vitullo, Anna Westbrook, and Maya Martin-Westheimer.

This special Carte Blanche invitation offered the opportunity to design an intensive study week focused on rhizomatic and ecocritical approaches to vegetal materialities in and on paper. Together with participants from the HKB MFA program and other Swiss art schools— as well as my invited guests, K. Verlag designer Katharina Tauer and Vida Rucli from the Robida Collective—we explored material entanglements and conceptual networks within (book-)artistic research and its ecological conditions—through lectures, readings, screenings, and excursions, for instance to Herbarium Bernense, the city’s stunning botanical dry collection. A truly generative week of shared thinking, sensing, and reimagining the politics of publishing and the agencies of plants. Thank you to Caroline Bourrit for the flawless organization!

I’m excited to share the release of “Robert Zhao Renhui: Seeing Forest,” the official publication accompanying the artist‘s exhibition for the Singapore Pavilion at the 60th Venice Biennale. Curated by Haeju Kim and commissioned by the Singapore Art Museum, “Seeing Forest” offers a deep, sensorial exploration of multispecies entanglements within Singapore’s secondary forests.
As co-editor of the book, together with Etienne Turpin, it was a pleasure to shape this richly layered volume featuring essays by Jeffrey Kastner, Marcus Yee, and Yong Ding Li, alongside an expansive reader with contributions from Matthew Gandy, Jamaica Kincaid, Max Ernst, Farish A. Noor, and many others.
“Robert Zhao Renhui: Seeing Forest, Vol. 1 of 2” is available in both print and open-access formats at the links below.
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P.S. Our publishing atelier also produced to “The pleasures we choose,” the book for the Finland Pavilion—another beautiful project at this year’s Biennale.

I’m thrilled to share that I successfully defended my practice-led doctoral thesis, “Species of Accumulation and the Necromass of Natural History,” at the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London.
It was an inspiring conversation with my two brilliant external examiners: Dr. Lindsay Bremner (Professor of Architecture and Director of Research and Knowledge Exchange in the School of Architecture + Cities at the University of Westminster) and Dr. Ros Gray (Reader in Fine Art, Critical Studies and Programme Director of the MA Art & Ecology at Goldsmiths).
Deep thanks to both of them—and to my supervisor Prof. Susan Schuppli—for the rigor, care, and generosity of their engagement.
*****
Keywords: Environmental humanities; Postcolonial ecologies; Decolonial museum praxis; Environmental justice; Decolonizing nature; Critical natural history; Necroaesthetics; Ecofeminism; Ecopoetics; Ecological collapse; Natureculture; Anthropocene; Plantationocene; Capitalist ruins; Alfred Russel Wallace; Lynn Margulis; Evolutionary theory; Symbiogenesis; Multispecies ethnography; Intersectional exhibition making; Experimental collaboration; Intersectionality in curatorial practice; Interdisciplinary writing; Narrative experimentation; Planetary architecture

I’m pleased to announce the release of “Inter folia, aves,” now published in Spanish. This monographic essay, originally released in English as part of “intercalations 6: These Birds of Temptation,” explores the ways scientific, artistic, curatorial, and editorial practices shape our understanding of birds—and how these practices are embedded in longer histories of representation, classification, and colonization.
Translated by Blanca Gago, the Spanish edition extends the reach of this work as a paginated exhibition, offering new audiences a reflection on the bird book as both a site of entangled knowledge production and a colonial format. The essay proposes an epistemological shift toward forms of interrelation and reciprocity—toward seeing the world not as static facts, but as constellated, metabolic circumstances and layered temporalities.
This perspective—attuned to impact, affect, and becoming—grounds an ecologically and decolonially informed curatorial and publishing practice.

In October, I’ll begin a new professorship in Transformation Design at the Institute for Design Research, University of the Arts, Braunschweig. I’m looking forward to meeting new colleagues, students, and collaborators—for an adventure in the classroom and beyond! Below is the official course description (more information under “Teaching” in the menu at the top):
“The transformation towards greater sustainability, global justice and a ’good life’ is the central social issue of our time. Design in particular must rise to this challenge and use innovative products, services, and systems to help develop suitable alternatives to seemingly no-alternative development. But, transformation design doesn’t just want to offer new solutions to problems. It wants to stimulate social debates and rethink things and circumstances. In other words: Transformation Design consistently understands design from the perspective of human, social, and cultural needs and attempts to make a sustainable contribution to the future viability of society without neglecting the economic [and as I would emphasize, ecological] framework. The Master’s program in Transformation Design at HBK Braunschweig teaches project-based skills to reflect, initiate, and help shape change processes. Questions of sustainability and future viability of society play a central role and are viewed from a design method and theory perspective. At the same time, design itself is being reinvented as processes, connections, and interactions with other disciplines, institutions, and civil society are taken into account in the design process.”

Today, I officially submitted my practice-led PhD thesis at Goldsmiths’ Centre for Research Architecture—marking a significant milestone in my academic journey. Entitled “Species of Accumulation and the Necromass of Natural History,” the thesis revisits the diverse interventions of “Reassembling the Natural,” the curatorial research initiative I co-founded and have cultivated over the past decade. My research interrogates natural history collections as critical planetary architectures of coloniality and ecocidal investment—structures that, far from being relics, continue to shape today’s finance-driven schemes of so-called “green” and “sustainability” capitalism.
*****
This work would not have been possible without the incredible support and inspiration of so many. My heartfelt thanks go to my supervisor Susan Schuppli for her brilliant guidance, and to Ros Gray and Lindsay Bremner for their generous insights as thesis examiners. A special acknowledgment is owed to my long-time collaborator and life companion, Etienne Turpin, whose unwavering support and intellectual (and personal) partnership have been crucial throughout this endeavor. Together, we initiated “Reassembling the Natural” and the “intercalations: paginated exhibitions” series, inter alia, which laid the fertile ground for this research.
******
This thesis is as much a product of theoretical engagement as it is a reflection of countless encounters with people, landscapes, and nonhuman species. The teachings and generosity of activists, scientists, curators, and artists—especially in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Amazonia—have profoundly shaped the ethical, political, and philosophical commitments that inform this work. For this, I am deeply grateful.

K. Verlag has been awarded the 2023 German Publishing Prize! Thank you Claudia Roth, the jury, and the whole team in Bonn for this incredible news!! Our thanks also goes to all of the fantastic people in our orbit: all the amazing artists, authors, editors, and curators, as well as designers, text editors, and translators with whom we have developed publications that aim to make some kind of difference in the world; our distributors and the many faithful colleagues in the field of bookshops and libraries all over the world; and, of course, to our dear readers—so many of you who are following K.’s program actively and who support us with your interest and engagement! 



I’m delighted to share that I have a short piece included in “The Language of Trees: A Rewilding of Literature and Landscape,” edited by Katie Holten and published by Tin House. This stunning volume invites readers to engage with the natural world through new and ancient forms of storytelling—translated, quite literally, into the shapes and signs of a tree alphabet developed by Katie.
The inclusion of my text builds on a conversation Katie and I began nearly a decade ago. While she was first publishing her first edition, “About Trees,” with Broken Dimanche Press, I was coediting “The Word for World is Still Forest”—and we decided to collaborate. We exchanged contributions across both volumes, and I used her open-access tree typeface to literally “translate” the institutional foreword by Haus der Kulturen der Welt of our book into a forest of glyphs.
The “Language of Trees” continues this shared practice of rewilding literature. Alongside my little text, you’ll find an extraordinary lineup of contributors Katie has gathered, including Ursula K. Le Guin, Amitav Ghosh, Zadie Smith, Ada Limón, Robert Macfarlane, Radiohead, Elizabeth Kolbert, Plato, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and many more. Wow!

Co-initiated by Anna-Sophie Springer and Etienne Turpin, ”Processing Process” is a new series by K. Verlag unfolding at the intersection of artist monograph, aesthetic manifesto, and solo exhibition. The series celebrates artists whose research-based practices open singular paths through cultural, historical, ecological, and speculative terrain.
Each volume unpacks processual and site-sensitive methodologies while reflecting on how these intersect with different communities, landscapes, and media. Committed to the book-as-exhibition, the series is a platform for genre-defying creations that expand publishing as an artistic and epistemic practice.
The first volume in the series is Ana Hupe’s ”Footnotes to Triangular Cartography,” a poetic and critical investigation into archives, Afro-diasporic knowledge, and the ghostly legacies of colonial Brazil.

What role can publishing play in times when public space for culture is under threat? This symposium explores art writing, editing, and distribution as acts of care, resistance, and collective imagination. Rather than treating books merely as containers, we ask how publishing—across printed, digital, and hybrid forms—can shape non-violent, interdisciplinary spaces of encounter. Organized around the idea of ecologies, the conversation considers publishing as a relational and reparative practice, unfolding across communities, institutions, and platforms.
*****
With: Yvette Mutumba, Sinziana Ravini & Fredrik Svensk, Martí Manen, Paul O’Neill, Eva Weinmayr, Maryam Fanni, Jonatan Habib-Enqvist, Sezgin Boynik, Milena Khomchenko, and Anna-Sophie Springer. Organized on the occasion of the release of the book “Climate: Our Right to Breathe,” edited by Hiuwai Chu, Meagan Down, Nkule Mabaso, Pablo Martínez, and Corina Oprea, and co-published by L’internationale Online and K. Verlag.

How can editorial and design processes be developed synthetically—insisting on the mutuality of content and form—to concurrently rethink and reshape our political, ecological, and theoretical commitments?
In this talk, I’ll share aspects of my collaborative, multidimensional practice as Co-Founder and Publisher of the Berlin-based publishing atelier K. Verlag. Since 2011, my work has been dedicated to exploring the book as a mutable micro-space for exhibition-making and curatorial-editorial inquiry. I’ll reflect on how complex research can be translated into publications whose conceptual rigor and experimental design create radical aesthetic and discursive interventions.

“The New Forest” is a five-year collaboration between the Institute of Critical Zoologists (ICZ) and the Singapore International Photography Festival, unfolding through a series of masterclasses and culminating in an exhibition or publication. Now in its second year, the masterclass invites artists to embark on long-term projects that critically reexamine humankind’s relationship with nature.
Participants will work alongside ICZ Founder Robert Zhao and invited guest instructor Anna-Sophie Springer—researcher, editor, and director of the Berlin-based publishing atelier K. Verlag. This year’s thematic focus centers on the “art of noticing” within everyday environments, particularly in unexpected sites beyond parks, nature reserves, or zoos.
Robert and Anna-Sophie will support participants in developing personal projects that reconsider ecological perspectives and possibilities, while also introducing curatorial and editorial strategies for expanding such inquiries. Topics of discussion include the consequences of the presumed separation between culture and nature, and the persistent privileging of humans over other species.
The program is suitable for artists working in (but not limited to) lens-based media, especially those interested in the entanglements of nature with history, science, and society.

PLATFORM P is a center established by Mapo-gu, one of the 25 autonomous districts in Seoul, in July 2020 with the aim to support small presses and creators in the publishing field. The center has rental spaces for creators and libraries and cultural spaces for the public and supports various experimentations and training programs. Launched last year, the international exchange program is a quarterly event where we invite globally renowned publishing experts, including publishers, editors, and book designers, via ZOOM to meet and form ties with creators in Korea. In our first international exchange program scheduled in June, PLATFORM P has invited Anna-Sophie Springer, to speak about her curatorial-editorial practice. Her two presentations will be introduced and moderated by Seungjoo Lee, publisher of Manilbooks, who recently produced and published the Korean translation of Springer's co-edited book Fantasies of the Library. [The event will be in English with Korean live interpretation.]

A celebratory launch of These Birds of Temptation — intercalations 06
co-published by K. Verlag & Haus der Kulturen der Welt
hosted by Zabriskie Buchladen

... with performances, readings, music, and other avifaunal excitements composed by contributors to the publication, including Anna-Sophie Springer, Etienne Turpin, David Rothenberg, Barbara Marcel alongside other special guests ...

[the event is free & all are welcome]

The Goldrausch project for women artists promotes the careers of outstanding, emerging women artists. The offices and headquarters of this independent professional training and one-year postgraduate programme for female visual artists is just next door to the K. Verlag atelier on the Fahrbereitschaft compound. It was a pleasure to welcome Goldrausch for the second time and meet the 2022 cohort to share some insights of my own personal development and career and talk about publications and curatorial-editorial methodologies.

How do we build a synthetic editorial-design process that insists on the mutuality of content and form, allowing us to concurrently rethink and reshape contemporary political, ecological, and theoretical ambitions and expectations? In this workshop, Anna-Sophie Springer will share aspects of her collaborative and multidimensional practice as co-founder and publisher of the Berlin-based publishing atelier K. Verlag Since 2011, she has been committed to working with the book as a space of exhibition. During our meeting, we will discuss ways of relaying complex research into publications whose conceptual rigor and experimental design create radical aesthetic and discursive interventions.

The Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, London is one of the oldest and largest institutions of colonial science in the world. During this daylong excursion led and organized by Christina Leigh Geros and Anna-Sophie Springer, students will be introduced to the complex history of the site and its infrastructures. "While," as one panel in the palm house states, "motivations for plant hunters have changed over the years, from collecting status symbols to economic botany to conservation," we will aim to think beyond these proud frameworks and confront the role of logistics, extraction, industrialization, appropriation, denaturalization, and exoticization at play in the constructs of nature-as-commodity and the gaze-as-spectacle that is this garden.

How do we build a synthetic editorial-design process that insists on the mutuality of content and form, allowing us to concurrently rethink and reshape contemporary political, ecological, and theoretical ambitions and expectations? In this workshop, Anna-Sophie Springer will share aspects of her collaborative and multidimensional practice as co-founder and publisher of the Berlin-based publishing atelier K. Verlag Since 2011, she has been committed to working with the book as a space of exhibition. During our meeting, we will discuss ways of relaying complex research into publications whose conceptual rigor and experimental design create radical aesthetic and discursive interventions.

Join us for a series of digital lectures via Zoom on what we have called relative time/little time. The lectures concentrate on the different granularity of current time relative to the period beginning in 1989, which marked a decisive acceleration of economy, growth, extraction, globalism, movement, population, transportation, etc., and ending in 2020, when over a few weeks the world came to a halt under the influence of the pandemic that spread as rapidly and widely as people, commodities, and capital once moved. With lectures by Frédéric Neyrat, Erin Manning, Jonas Staal, Dominic Pettman, Paul Huebener, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Andrea Robbins & Max Becher, Arthur Anyaduba, Melanie Braith, Sean Matharoo & Melanie Unrau, as well as Anna-Sophie Springer & Etienne Turpin.

THE BOOKS MADE IT !!! 📘📖 Paper shortages and general turmoil have delayed this beauty of a book to flutter out into the world. After sending it to print in mid-November 😱it was finally delivered 🕊🕊🕊 When we first began to plan this volume back in 2013, we hadn’t expected that it would become a collection so deeply concerned with extinction. Looking at it now, in 2022, this of course makes utmost sense. The diverse contributions in “These Birds of Temptation” interrogate the role of art and poetry in times of ecological collapse and offer reflections on how birds matter in our making sense of worlds and the earth. Birds, then, are not treated as passive objects but are considered as multi-dimensional beings with inherited and unfolding “life ways,” a concept from environmental philosopher and fellow bird friend, Thom van Dooren.

Closed workshop convened by Steve Rowell & Priyanka Basu with individual sessions by scholars, researchers, and curators, Sandra Jasper, Anna-Sophie Springer, and Florian Wüst: It is complex to think of landscapes as and with the concept of archives, as we set out to do when conceiving of the workshop “Un-/Learning Archives in the Age of the Sixth Extinction” for the Whole Life Academy Berlin. We were combining our interests as an art historian working on archival practices of contemporary artists and filmmakers and an artist who deals with landscape and makes use of archival concepts and forms in proposing a workshop on archives as related to overlapping sites of nature/culture, climate change, deep time, and the built environment.

The Goldrausch project for women artists promotes the careers of outstanding, emerging women artists. The offices and headquarters of this independent professional training and one-year postgraduate programme for female visual artists is just next door to the K. Verlag atelier on the Fahrbereitschaft compound. It was a pleasure to welcome director Hannah Kruse and the 2021 cohort to share some insights of my own personal development and career and talk about publications and curatorial-editorial methodologies. Don't miss the upcoming group exhibition "Mutual Matters – Goldrausch 2021," 20 November to 5 December 2021 at Fahrbereitschaft, Große Halle, Herzbergstraße 40–43 in 10365 Berlin-Lichtenberg. If you go: drop a line and come say hi at K. as well!

책을 선택하고 연결하면서 뜻밖의 교류가 일어나고, 무한한 도서학적 상상의 세계가 열린다. 지식의 견고한 조직체로 여겨지는 도서관을 어떻게 새로운 연결·배치가 일어나는 공간으로 재구성할 수 있을지 말한다. 큐레이토리얼 사고와 실천의 핵심이 선택하고 연결 짓는 행위라고 한다면, 도서관은 무한히 탐험 가능한 큐레이토리얼 영역이다. As books are selected and connected, unexpected exchanges occur, and an infinite world of bibliological imagination opens up. This book by Anna-Sophie Springer & Etienne Turpin is about the library as both a form of knowledge organization by categories anda space where new connections and arrangements occur. If the core of curatorial thinking and practice is the act of selecting and connecting, the library is a curatorial realm that can be explored indefinitely.

This new book includes a long discussion between Anna-Sophie Springer and artist and Triple Canopy co-founder Caleb Waldorf about their respective experiences in small-scale independent publishing. It was created between summer of 2019 and 2020, which means that the experience of the global pandemic changed the perspectives to a certain extent mid-way through. In summer 2021, the effects of the pandemic on publishing as practice can be felt even more strongly because so many bookshops worldwide were closed and cultural production experienced a kind of digital overload—which made book distribution very difficult. So, this new book is timely! The description by the editors reads as follows: "Fires burn around the world. Systemic discrimination persists, precarity is increasing, and the modern democratic project faces challenges from all sides. Art writing helps us to understand art which in turn helps us to understand such crises. But art writing itself is in crisis. Newspapers and magazines offer fewer channels than ever for independent art criticism, persistent institutional biases exclude the positions of many, and a proliferation of platforms presents opportunities and challenges in equal measure. This volume presents contributions from a broad range of authors who address the social and political dimensions of art and art writing in the contemporary context, and the ways in which new writing and publishing practices promote critical engagement among readerships as never before." With contributions by: Contributions by Taylor Renee Aldridge & Jessica Lynne, Kalia Brooks Nelson, Maddee Clark, Justin Clemens, Ben Eltham, Fayen d’Evie & Lizzie Boon, Dan Fox, Maria Fusco, Sarah Gory, Boris Groys, Paul James & Brad Haylock, Flavin Judd, Sara Kaaman, Jessica Gysel & Katja Mater, Bella Li & Justin Clemens, Freek Lomme, Rachel Marsden, Nikos Papastergiadis & Hou Hanru, Megan Patty, Barry Schwabsky, Anna-Sophie Springer & Caleb Waldorf, and Astrid Vorstermans.

On invitation of Profs. Yvonne Wilhelm and Christian Huebler, Anna-Sophie Springer will share some recent projects by K. Verlag that convey the publishing atelier's research approach and conceptual methodologies with regards to ecological thinking and resistant publishing cultures.

This year began with a seemingly never-ending pandemic lockdown, but I was also blessed with the ongoing correspondence with Vida Rucli, a founding editor of the magazine Robida. We exchanged a lot of thoughts about forests and exhibition making as she asked many questions about my collaborative work, especially with regards to producing the "intercalations" series and the exhibition cycle "Disappearing Legacies: The World as Forest." The new publication of the collective that Vida is a part of grew to 336 pages and contains pieces by dozens of contributors; they are published in their respective languages. Below you can access a pdf of our conversation. Enjoy!

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

How to present and disseminate [...] knowledge as a way of co-producing it? Exhibition is thus a philosophical problem that travels along with the thematic or conceptual research we do; what, when, and how to exhibit a given set of concerns or ways of working, of various epistemological trajectories or commitments, of intersecting or interfering versions of a given narrative? All of this provokes a persistent rhythm that drives and animates research; not that we only work through exhibition, of course we make books and workshops and lectures too. And, because of that, we are able to be quite precise about the composition of elements of a given work, although there is never an a priori formula for which aspect of research goes into which format of dissemination. We approach exhibitions, like any other philosophical problem, as a way of interfacing with what we don’t yet know how to present, but that we nevertheless feel requires a form for exposition.

“One of the most important features of contemporary art making is its being public [Öffentlichsein],” wrote the curator Harald Szeemann in 1969 in a short essay about an exhibition he had organized for the display windows of the department store Warenhaus Gebrüder Loeb AG in Bern, Switzerland. Beginning in the 1950s, Szeemann (1933–2005) spent five decades developing large-scale, highly theatrical group exhibitions whose themes were often based on extensive research. [...] This essay focuses on Szeemann’s work through an unusual set of engagements involving a refashioning of the role of the department store and its window. His long-standing but sparsely addressed relationship with the department store Warenhaus Gebrüder Loeb AG, Bern, Switzerland serves as a prism through which to discuss the idiosyncratic function of spectacle in Szeemann’s seminal thematic exhibitions—first by discussing two group exhibitions staged in the store’s display windows, and then by examining the complex role of an installation Szeemann custom-ordered from Loeb AG’s props workshop when preparing his famous "Bachelor Machines" exhibition. Since 1938, the store’s director, Victor Loeb (1910–1974), an art collector and board member of Kunsthalle Bern, had been an important patron during Szeemann’s progressive years at the institution (1961–69). Their mutual encounter is reflected in the inclusion of artworks by the contemporary avant-garde in Loeb’s collection, whose purchases Szeemann often encouraged. Besides curating two exhibitions in the windows of Loeb’s department store in 1969 and 1971, an even more interesting connection exists to Szeemann’s unique role as commissioning designer of individual pieces. In 1975, Szeemann used the workshops of the Gebrüder Loeb AG to order the fabrication of a three-dimensional rendering of the execution machine from Kafka’s "Penal Colony" for his touring exhibition "Junggesellenmaschinen" [Bachelor Machines]. Fabricated by the facilities that normally built the props for commercial retail displays, this "non-original" artwork makes tangible the tension between art, theatricality, and creative authorship so crucial to Szeemann’s pathbreaking curatorial oeuvre. While the two display window exhibitions serve as case studies for Szeemann’s broad approach to possible exhibition spaces and experimental understanding of the public role of art, the discussion of the so-called "Harrow" in the second part of the essay uniquely illustrates the intricacies and development of his curatorial methodology as an intellectual project.

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.

Excerpt: "A question we asked was: How can we highlight the visual component as one more voice and available apparatus in the collaborative and multiple process of writing-reading-making our (or any) presentation? The slide sequence, therefore, was composed while listening to other group members as they spent around one hour preparing their contributions based on pseudo-researching and collating found scientific information. Operating as two methodologically compositional poles, the recited (but in this instantiation, here, henceforth scripted) and the visual articulations of our presentation aimed to open up a conceptual field of tension: a transversal space for creative reflection, association, wonder, confusion, and debate—literally, a filter to both enhance and question the processes of knowledge production and their mediation."

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).

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.

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.

“Colonizing the Exhibition Space,” in Fillip, No. 18, Summer 2013: 34–40.

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