Open Studio: Karina Fernández and Lena Michalik

Karina Fernández develops installative, process-based works involving biological materials and discarded matter to address environmental questions. Her practice explores the sensory clash between organic and synthetic elements through assemblage and time-based operations, that she describe as “neo-conglomerates” — a term rooted in classical geology and oriented toward contemporary sedimentation processes in which human-produced materials become part of the environment. Karina Fernandez previously earned degrees in Fine Arts and Visual Arts in Buenos Aires, and completed her diploma in Digital Arts in 2023 in the class of Ruth Schnell at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna.

During the residency at AIL, Karina Fernández develops HOFAB – House of Fiber and Bioplastics as a material-based research lab in which bioplastic mixtures, plant fibers, and light-based setups are systematically tested and translated into spatial prototypes. The project includes the production and comparative arrangement of material samplers, objects, and large-scale bioplastic sheets in back-lit displays, the further development of a large-scale version of her previous work Bon(e)fire, as well as workshops and informal get-togethers focused on knowledge exchange around bioplastic and fiber-based processes.

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. As an alumna of the Master’s program Social Design – Arts as Urban Innovation, the residency is not only a return to the University of Applied Arts Vienna, but also to the AIL. Her collective graduation project RE:SONANZ, developed together with Leah Dorner, Maria Kanzler, and Stella Krausz, was shown in 2022 in the exhibition Sonic Sensibility in the spaces of Postsparkasse. For the project, the group received the graduation award from the federal state of Styria.

In her practice based research project Poetry & Porosity of Snow – Grasping Disappearance in a Heating Data Cloud, she is thinking with, caring for, and saying goodbye to suffering Bodies of Snow, in search of new intersectional feminist perspectives coming from the Alps. 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.