Panel 2 (Research Day 2023)


Panel Chair | Elke Gaugele


12.45 | Influences of Different Microclimates and Storage Environments on the Biodiversity and Activity of Filamentous Fungi in Austrian Heritage Collections
Katharina Derksen

13.30 | Towards Post-extractive F*utures
Karin Reisinger

14.15 | Utopias and Dystopias: Conviviality as a Possibility? A Field Research Report from Cape Town*
Marina Grzinic, Jovita Pristovšek, Sophie Uitz


Presentations of Artistic Research projects are highlighted with a *.

Influences of Different Microclimates and Storage Environments on the Biodiversity and Activity of Filamentous Fungi in Austrian Heritage Collections | Katharina Derksen


Current models assessing possible effects of Climate Change on the risk of mold growth in collections, a highly problematic factor in the destruction of objects in museums, libraries and depots, are underdeveloped and require a more substantial data basis. This study is part of a larger project seeking to fill in some of these knowledge gaps.


For two years, indoor climate and fungal data are recorded at 20 sites in and around Vienna, from historic buildings without climate control to modern, fully-climatised museum depots. Cultivation samples and metagenomic analyses of dust samples give a comprehensive insight into fungal abundance and diversity. Growth experiments with selected species in the laboratory complement this study of the influence of different storage environments on the fungi. This broad data basis and final models created within the project intend to support museum institutions in developing more targeted and sustainable plans for the preservation of their collections.

about the project
Modelling the Impact of Future Climate Change on Museum Pests – Insects and Fungi


Institute for Natural Sciences and Technology in the Arts | ÖAW Heritage Science Austria, 07/2021 – 06/2025


Katja Sterflinger, Pascal Querner (Natural History Museum Vienna)
Katharina Derksen, Peter Brimblecombe (City University of Hong Kong, School of Energy and Environment), Bill Landsberger (Rathgen Research Laboratory Berlin), Johanna Leissner (Fraunhofer Institute Brussels)

In the European early and high medieval ages, wood sculptures used in ecclesiastic spaces have been vividly painted with colors and adorned with precious metals. Today, we know how these sculptures have been painted regarding technique and what types of pigments, colorants and metals have been used. However, the aesthetic and artistic effects and meanings of these sculptures and their colorful coats have rarely been studied.


By assessing systematically art technological results from available conservation research and material analysis it will be analyzed in detail how the different visual and aesthetic effects are created. These findings will then put into relation within the larger context of relevant patristic and theological writings, of encyclopedic and cosmological knowledge, and also of medieval art technological treatises – ultimately to better understand the reasons for painting and adorning wood sculpture with colors and metals, in the early and high medieval period.


Project partners
Fraunhofer Institute (IBP), Many Cultural Heritage Institutions participating in data acquisition


 

Towards Post-extractive F*utures | Karin Reisinger


Via strategies of making visible, bringing together, and anticipating and activating futures, and with the help of artistic tools of knowledge production, this project aims to show practices as constant reparative counter-practices amid extraction. Local voices and the openness of an ethical, intersectional framework of feminist citizen science revive the margins of how we know about fields of environmental exploitation.


These voices relentlessly criticise (academic) centres of knowledge production with their local and situated knowledges, which challenge – and in the best case improve – abstract project plans and theoretical concept tools. Complex onto-epistemologies unfold with the help of the citizens’ critique and resistance, but also through their shared interests. Thus, I will discuss subsequent adjustments and reconsidered strategies, arising from concrete onsite learning, surprising experiences, as well as ethical considerations and challenges.

about the project
Stories of Post-extractive Feminist Futures


Institute for Education in the Arts | FWF Top Citizen Science (TCS128), 03/2023 – 02/2024


Karin Reisinger
Roswitha Weingrill


The shrinking town of Eisenerz lies at the foot of the Erzberg mountain, Austria’s largest, best-known site of iron-ore extraction. The post-industrial town is experiencing a rural exodus, affecting women in particular. Mining is predominantly narrated in male, heroic narratives; counter-narratives of repair, care, reproduction and maintenance are often neglected.


Within this complex field, the project focuses on intersectional feminist perspectives, collecting feminist post-extractive stories to broaden the perception of mining areas and strengthen the focus on feminist narrations for future perspectives. We ask: Which practices contribute to the community’s continuance? We work with local associations to reach diverse groups. Mutual learning takes place in meetings and shared activities, and through the process of transformation into drawings by East Styrian artist Roswitha Weingrill. Based on collaborative science and an affirmative and inclusive approach, citizens co-produce the knowledge.


Weblink
https://www.mountains-of-ore.org/en/pef


Project partners
Kim Trogal, Hélène Frichot, Katarina Bonnevier, Anke Strüver

Utopias and Dystopias: Conviviality as a Possibility? A Field Research Report from Cape Town | Marina Grzinic, Jovita Pristovšek, Sophie Uitz*


From October 9 to 13, 2023, Marina Gržinić and Jovita Pristovšek from the Conviviality as Potentiality research team, visited Cape Town, South Africa, for a week of field research, workshops and encounters. During their visit, a 2-day convivial workshop was held at the University of Cape Town, including the movie premiere of the research project’s experimental-documentary video film ›Insurgent Flows. Trans*Decolonial and Black Marxist Futures‹ (90 min, 2023), and a panel discussion with the South African colleagues Goitsione Mokou, Hannah Mutanda Kadima Kaniki, Darion Adams and Mpho Ndaba on ›Conviviality and What is Just‹. The exchange was realized together with project partner Ass. Prof. Nomusa Makhubu of the University of Cape Town (Michaelis School of Fine Arts), and co-funded by the Erasmus+ Mobility program of the European Union. In this presentation we reflect on the context and the journey to Cape Town and discuss the outcome, the reflection and the aftermath of the trip.


In our previous research project, Genealogy of Amnesia, we started with an earlier investigation on colonialism, antisemitism and turbonationalism within the scope of Europe. In our current research, Conviviality as Potentiality, we expanded this scope into the global world. From Belgium and Congo to South Africa (Cape Town), from the European Union to Australia, where the border regime is a toxic-murderous case, and finally Israel and its lines of regional conflict.


We use the methodology of case studies, to connect to our starting point, which was to examine from Europe the three lines that are ideologically and violently destroying the world: colonialism in the format of contemporary coloniality, antisemitism spreading in the world and the conflicts it provokes, and turbonationalism. Paradoxically, the question arises whether it is not a new situation that borders are not disappearing in neoliberal global capitalism but, on the contrary, are being reinforced and represent new forms of control and deportation.


In South Africa, this toxic-murderous border regime remained most palpable after the Second World War. After Congo’s brutal colonialism, apartheid in South Africa was a sign of the colonialism shamefully extended into modernist times, the colonial relation that lasted for decades in the 20th century.

about the project
Conviviality as Potentiality: From Amnesia and Pandemic towards a Convivial Epistemology


Institute for Fine Arts | FWF PEEK (AR679), 05/2021 – 01/2025


Marina Grzinic
Jovita Pristovšek, Sophie Uitz


The project proposes a new focus on conviviality, expanding the scope to outside of Europe and widening the analysis of conviviality by shifting from amnesia to the notion of pandemic. The 21st century can be described as a pandemic century, where conviviality is marked not only by its relation to amnesia, but to the global narrative of the pandemic and the social order of distance, contagiousness and isolation. This reconfiguration of spatial and temporal dimensions will not only have implications in terms of how we (re)construct memory and history but also for future conviviality as such.


The question of conviviality as potentiality will be researched in connection to relevant predicaments in South Africa, Australia, Lebanon, Israel and Austria. Our aim is to engage in processes of co-establishment with artists in order to share convivial epistemologies. In order to attain convivial practices of living together it is necessary to find a new common epistemological ground.


Weblink
https://convivialityaspotentiality.akbild.ac.at


Project partners
University of Cape Town, Michaelis School of Fine Arts (SA);
Macquarie University, Department of Media, Communications, Creative Arts, Language and Literature (AUS)