“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
