Repository of a Yearning Hybrid or How to Evoke a Symbiont
Villa Merkel, Esslingen, DE
02 March – 02 June 2024
Repository of a Yearning Hybrid or How to Evoke a Symbiont materializes a story of Peá, the pea-human hybrid, developing her own ways of evoking relationships via organs of touch, tools for care and greenhouse for listening to symbiotic flux.
Repository of a Yearning Hybrid or How to Evoke a Symbiont is a work about the way of symbiotic connection to biological entangled networks via examination of human knowledge production and organization. By employing storytelling the work forms an imaginary world of Pȇa, a pea-human hybrid, who yearns for a symbiont and positions it into an artwork that combines repository and greenhouse features.
Yearning in the context of this work serves as invocation of practice of experimenting to find other ways of connecting, which may go beyond extraction economies for which most of hybrids are grown. Most of current knowledge production and its tools serve individualistic capitalistic and anthropocentric agenda, however Pȇa as the Other, as the hybrid, with her symbiotic experiments speculates and yearns for networks, entanglements and community to be part of. As psychological phenomena it is precisely the yearning that makes Pȇa explore and open up to new ways of being.
Exhibitions:
The Senses of Plants / Die Sinne der Pflanzen, artistic direction: Julia Katharina Thiemann, Villa Merkel, Esslingen, Germany [March – June 2024]
Krater, Trajna Collective, Ljubljana, Slovenia [September – March 2022]
Brno Art Open, curators Milan Mikulaštík and Milan Kreuzzieger, House of Arts Brno / Dům umění města Brna, Brno, Czechia [June – August 2022]
Colophon
Repository of a Yearning Hybrid or How to Evoke a Symbiont, 2022
Avtorica: Saša Spačal
Scientific consultant: Primož Turenšek
Technical and scientific support: Mirjan Švagelj
Sound collaboration: Pim Boreel
Illustration: Trina Čuček Meršol
3D modeling: Lovrenc Košenina
Membrane production: Urša Štrukelj
Artwork production: Dům umění města Brna
Special thanks: Jitka Pernesová
Support for the show at Villa Merkel: Zavod Projekt Atol
Bio
Mag. Saša Spačal, postmedijska umetnica, združuje raziskovanje živih sistemov s sodobno umetnostjo, pri čemer poudarja prepletenost kontinuuma okolja in kulture znotraj planetarnih metabolizmov. Njena umetniška prizadevanja vključujejo razvoj skrbnih biotehnoloških metodologij, vmesnikov in infrastruktur, ki se ukvarjajo tako z organskimi kot tudi z mineralnimi zemeljskimi agenti v času globalnih sprememb. Vzporedno raziskuje krhkost posthumanih scenarijev, prepletajoč mehanske, digitalne in organske logike znotraj pogojev sodobne biopolitike in nekropolitike.
Njena dela so bila predstavljena na prizoriščih, kot so ZKM | Center za umetnost in medije Karlsruhe [DE], Ars Electronica [AT], Centre de Cultura Contemporània Barcelona – CCCB [ES], Laboratoria Art & Science Foundation / New Tretyakov Gallery [RUS], Nacionalni umetnostni muzej Kitajske [CHN], Muzej sodobne umetnosti Metelkova [SI], Onassisov kulturni center Atene [GR], Festival Transmediale [DE], Mestna galerija Praga GHMP [CZ], Muzej in galerije Ljubljane [SI], Museo Extremeño e Iberoamericano de Arte Contemporáneo [ES], Perm muzej sodobne umetnosti [RUS], Chronos Art Centre [CHN], Muzej sodobne umetnosti Zagreb [CRO], Muzej sodobne umetnosti Vojvodina [SRB]. Prejela je nagrade in nominacije Ars Electronica Starts Prize [2021], Japonska nagrada za medijsko umetnost [2020], Nova nagrada za tehnološko umetnost [2019], New Aesthetica Prize [2020], Prix Cube [2015] in Prix Ars Electronica [2015].
Saša Spačal