“Katrin Hornek’s work playfully engages with the strange paradoxes and convergences of living in the age
of the Anthropocene, that is, the new geologic epoch where the effects of capitalism, colonialism, and extractivism are written
into the body of the earth.
Both her artistic and her curatorial practice assert an understanding
of the entwinement of nature and culture, implicitly arguing for more complex formulations, ones that reflect the ways in
which our bodies, cultures, materials, and thoughts are all composed of the other creatures and rocks and air and water that
make up our world. What Hornek highlights are the often uncomfortable juxtapositions between these things, and the ways in
which we are both constituted and restrained by contemporary politics and materiality.“
(Heather Davis)
As a starting point I will present works, which connect a collection of body-stones formed inside of organism, with CO2
stones mineralized into a sculpture and have been informing the interdisciplinary research project “The Anthropocene Surge
— evolution, expansion and depth of Vienna's urban environment“.
This project is based at the department of Site-Specific
Art and the University of Vienna and maps the spatial and temporal development of Vienna’s Anthropocene as a three-dimensional
body. Our team consisting of Michael Wagreich, a member of the Anthropocene Working Group, the archaeologist and geoinformatician
Kira Lappé, the geologist Maria Meszar and myself – we try to visualize the mass, composition, weight, sprawl and accumulation
rates of anthropogenic deposits from the Romans to the present day in different ways. Following this digitalization process
into a geo-referenced landscape modeled in 3D I will develop an essay film over the course of four years. Points of contact
between the analog and digital domains are analyzed in order to trace potential correlations and proliferating networks they
may have formed.
Guest Michael Wagreich
http://www.ortsbezogenekunst.at/notes/view/the-anthropocene-surgewww.katrinhornek.net
