Hello, world. Welcome to my site.
My name is Anna-Sophie Springer and I am a cultural theorist, exhibition maker, writer, editor, and publisher. Since 2011, I direct and manage the small press and publishing atelier K. Verlag in Berlin, advancing new forms of the book-as-exhibition. In my research-driven practice as an exhibition maker, I work internationally with artists, cultural and scientific archives and collections to produce complex ecologies of attention with a focus on difficult conversations about geopolitical economies and the epistemological image of nature. With Etienne Turpin, I am principal co-investigator and co-curator of the international exhibition-led inquiry Reassembling the Natural, which opened its most recent iteration, ponds among ponds, at Shanghai’s Institute for Contemporary Arts in March 2021. With support from Germany’s Stiftung Kunstfonds, we are presently consolidating a decade of field work and archival research on the colonial histories and possible futures of natural history collections in the forthcoming publication, Productions of Nature.
My projects are usually very collaborative and would be impossible without the exchange and alliances with myriad others; early exhibitions include the series EX LIBRIS (exploring relationships between the book, the library, and the exhibition, DE/2013) and Ha Ha Road (a touring group exhibition on the subversive power of humor, UK/2011). 125,660 Specimens of Natural History (2015) investigated the role of the natural history exhibition in the contemporary context of transformed, postnatural, even ruined ecologies; this exhibition involved 13 emerging artists from Indonesia and was realized in cooperation with the Indonesian Institute of Science, the Schering Stiftung, and the art space Komunitas Salihara in Jakarta. The project was an early episode of Reassembling the Natural. It took place in Indonesia to revisit and rethink the contemporary legacy of Alfred Russel Wallace, the British specimen collector and co-discoverer of evolution, in the Plantationocene—by focusing on the geographies and geopolitics of his mid-nineteenth-century specimen collection. From 2016 to 2018, funding from the German Federal Cultural Foundation then enabled RN to realize the three-part exhibition cycle Verschwindende Vermächtnisse: Die Welt als Wald [Disappearing Legacies: The Word as Forest], on view at the Zoological Museum, CeNak, University of Hamburg (2017–18); the Tieranatomisches Theater (TA T), Humboldt-University Berlin (2018); and the Natural History Collections at Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg in Halle/Saale (2018). This extensive research-led exhibition further opened the investigation of Wallace’s collecting journeys by engaging realities and participants from Brazil in addition to perspectives from Southeast Asia and beyond. Ultimately, we invited more then 15 international artists, many of who with new commissions, that were installed alongside a number of curatorial assemblages. The result were multiperspectival, temporary exhibitions built partly into, and against, the existing museum scenarios of our hosting institutions. A follow-up exhibition entitled Naturecolony was planned to take place at The Blackwood Gallery, University of Toronto/Mississauga, in the fall of 2020. This project again addressed ecocritical concerns, but focused on histories of colonial transactions in the Northwestern hemisphere. Sadly, its final realization was cancelled due to Covid-19; however, one position by Martina Pozzan emerged as a solo installation. The aforementioned experimental group exhibition ponds among ponds at the Instititute for Contemporary Art (ICA) at NYU Shanghai engaged alternative views of evolutionary co-becoming and sympoeisis, for instance by studying the work of Lynn Margulis.
In parallel to Reassembling the Natural, the published volumes of the intercalations: paginated exhibition series have provided an intimate space for discourse, stories, and other reflections. I have co-edited this series together with Etienne Turpin since 2015; it was commissioned as part of “Das Anthropozän Projekt” at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt and is realized by K. Verlag. At the beginning of 2024, my essay “Inter Folia, Aves,” previously published as a contribution in intercalations 06—These Birds of Temptation, was released by greylock editorial in Barcelona as a stand-alone book in Spanish translation (by Blanca Gago). Departing from a history of bird books as both a type of paginated exhibition as well as a space of capture and coloniality, Inter Folia, Aves culminates in a decolonial inquiry about more radical possibilities of interrelation, reciprocity, and ecological thinking in this time of mass extinction.
Although my practice is emphatically an ongoing process of disciplined undiscipline, I did complete two M.A.s—one in Contemporary Art Theory from Goldsmiths, University of London (2007), and one in Curatorial Studies from the Academy of Visual Arts, Leipzig (2013)—and successfully completed my doctorate at the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, with a thesis entitled “Species of Accumultation & the Necromass of Natural History.” In this practice-led Ph.D. I revisit the diverse interventions of the Reassembling the Natural initiative and expand this work with an investigation into natural history collections as an under-illuminated planetary architecture of coloniality and ecocidal investment, whose principles are still very much in operation today in financially-driven schemes of so-called “green” and “sustainability” capitalism. Asking, what is kinship in a world of toxic inheritances, I mobilize the pluriversal imaginaries of ecofeminism, decolonial praxis, and science fiction to develop reparative tools and ecocentric vocabularies that repurpose the necromass of zoological and botanical specimens as an amendatory site for the sensitive re-assembly of natural futures based on multispecies justice and biospheric solidarity. The thesis was supervised by Susan Schuppli and examined by Ros Gray and Lindsay Bremner.
Over the years, I have given numerous seminars, workshops, and public lectures at art & design schools and museums & galleries worldwide. The four most notable academic invitations so far: Back in 2014, I was invited as the Craig-Kade Visiting Scholar-in-Residence at Rutgers University, New Jersey. From 2016–19, I was a Visiting Lecturer at the Institut Kunst in Basel where I regularly taught intensive seminars on ecology, feminism, and artistic research to the BA and MA students of art and design. In 2022, I was invited to join the MA Artists’ Film & Moving Image at Goldsmiths as a dissertation tutor. In October 2023, I began a new professorship in Transformation Design at the Institute for Design Research at the Academy of Fine Arts Braunscheig (HBK). In May 2024, I will convene the three-day Sommerakademie Zentrum Paul Klee Akademie springtime workshop on the invitation of the Bern University of the Arts.
In addition to the intercalations series and other written work, my scholarly research libraries and books as curatorial constellations is published in books such as Art Writing in Crisis (B. Haylock & M. Patty, eds., Sternberg Press, 2021), Fantasies of the Library (A.-S. Springer & E. Turpin, eds., The MIT Press, 2016), and Publishing as Artistic Practice (A. Gilbert, ed., Sternberg Press, 2016), among others. An essay based on the first chapter of my Ph.D. thesis is included in Prudence Gibson, Sigi Jöttkandt et al., eds., Dark Botany: Herbarium Tales (Open Humanities Press, forthcoming 2024). In 2023 and 2020, I received, for my work with K. Verlag, one of the prestigious Deutscher Verlagspreis [National Publishing Prize], which is awarded annually to honor outstanding publishers by the Federal Ministry of Culture.
For open-access publications, as well as selected public talks and selected exhibitions, see the summaries on this site; for a complete Curriculum Vitae, a portfolio of previous artistic and curatorial work, or for individual publications, please contact me via email.
Contact:
mail[at]annasophiespringer[dot]net