Open Lab: Touch Point Snow
Lena
Michalik is alumna of the department of Social Design and will work at AIL from 2 Mar till 28 Mar 2026
During her residency,
Lena Michalik will open her temporary studio at AIL for an open practice of remembering and sharing across two afternoons.
If we consider the body as an archive, there must be a pulsating,
all-encompassing network of knowledge, carried within and amongst us, moving along the ground, passing through the weather,
and traversing time.
The artist is interested in how this concept unfolds from lived encounters with snow. What stays
in our bodies, and what becomes visible when memories are shared and placed alongside one another. As snow is an ephemeral
body, and its future presence is uncertain relatively to humanity, this raises the question of how to (re)gain access to these
embodied knowledge networks before snow might be gone.
With the open lab format, Touch Point Snow Lena Michalik
invites to an open practice of remembering and sharing. Together with the artist, visitors explore ways of entering the bodily
archive, revisiting the snowy sites within, and leaving something behind, a gesture, a word, an object, or an action. Through
sharing and juxtapositions, imprints become traces that might allow access to that profound network.
Lena
Michalik (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and researcher working between Vienna and Bolzano. In
her work, she connects spatial practice with performance and poetry.
During her residency at the AIL, by thinking
with snow, Michalik will inhabit the fluid and porous terrains between apparent dualisms such as urban and rural, tradition
and progress, distance and proximity, up and down. She will attend to the embeddedness of her own body in the local water
cycles by sensing and tracing upstream the currents to the porous Alpine Bodies of Snow. In doing so, she will critically
confront technologies often used in snow hydrology, such as remote sensing and GIS, with the artistic means of figuration,
poetry, and embodiment, testing whether such high-end technologies can contribute to one’s own abilities of situatedness and
knowing place.Open Studio:
Karina Fernández and Lena Michalik 
