Angewandte Interdisciplinary Lab Understanding the world as a
holobiont reminds us: Life is other!
The exhibition presents bodies, environments, texts, media, machines
and biological organisms condensed into pictorial spaces.
Lucie Strecker works across
media and performance on experimental systems in art and science. Until 2022 she worked for the Angewandte Performance Laboratory
and since 2021 she is a lecturer at the Department of Art and Communicative Practice at the University of Applied Arts Vienna.
In 2019-2020 she taught Experience Design at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano. 2016- 2020 she directed the Elise-Richter
PEEK project on the performativity of the biofact. Works, among others in cooperation with Klaus Spiess were shown nationally
and internationally. Together they received the ZIM Performing Science Prize and a Prix Ars Electronica Honorary Mention.
Lucie Strecker has published in Performance Research, The Lancet, Leonardo and with Diaphanes Verlag. Together with Jens Hauser,
she published the special issue ‘On Microperformativity’, Performance Research 25(3) in 2020.
About
the exhibition:
We humans are colonized by bacteria, fungi and viruses, just as we colonize homes,
cities and environments. We also serve as hosts to ideologies, media and technologies.
The concept of the
holobiont, introduced in 1991 by biologist Lynn Margulis, describes us humans as a total living being permeated by the biosphere.
It
explores the self-conception of individual life, links us symbiotically with other organisms via our microbiome, disturbs
the division into subject and object and offends our usual concept of ego. Understanding the world as a holobiont reminds
us: Life is other!
The social and psychological transformations of the pandemic and the consequences of the
climate and energy crises have brought to the forefront that life is first and foremost that of agencies other than human.
Simple demarcations no longer stand up to this dynamic.
‘We’ experience ‘us’ as transitory beings drifting between
digital and molecular worlds and sense the twisting of boundaries within us as the possibility of a new language beyond a
symbolic distance from the world. With the exhibition Holobiont. Life is Other, the Angewandte Interdisciplinary Lab presents
bodies, environments, texts, media, machines and biological organisms condensed into pictorial spaces – each of which represents
a narrative about another life and about the lives of others.
Curated by Judith Reichart,
Lucie Strecker, Thomas Feuerstein, Jens Hauser
With contributions by
Art Orienté
Objet, Irini Athanassakis, David Berry, Julia Borovaya, Adam Brown, Juan M. Castro & Akihiro Kubota, Tagny Duff, Thomas
Feuerstein, Karmen Franinovic, Ana Maria Gomez Lopez, Luis Hernan/Pei-Ying Lin/Carolina Ramirez-Figueroa, Hideo Iwasaki, Henrik
Plenge Jakobsen, Eduardo Kac, Roman Kirschner, Lynn Margulis/Dorion Sagan/Bruce Clarke/David McConville, Yann Marussich, Agnes
Meyer-Brandis, ORLAN, Špela Petrič, Chris Salter, Maja Smrekar, Klaus Spiess/Ulla Rauter/Emanuel Gollob, Lucie Strecker/KT
Zakravsky, Tina Tarpgaard, Paul Vanouse, M R Vishnuprasad, Peter Weibel, and authors of the special issue On Micorperformativity,
Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts, 2020, 25 (3).
Scenography: Wolfgang Fiel, Institute for
cultural policy
The exhibition was curated originally for the Magazin 4 exhibition space in Bregenz.
The content was adapted and expanded for display at Angewandte Interdisciplinary Lab (AIL)
