knowbotiq

Marta Herford 17/06/2023 - 15/10/2023

Mercurybodies 2: Composting Slow Violence

"How deep is deep, how long does love last?" How does a Riverbed, 1000 years distant from here, respond to the slow violence processes of extractivism in the present? Its sandbanks have dissolved, crabs are hiding in remaining caves. In symbiosis with water, bacteria and algae, they tend to turn sediment into soil. Who cares about sand? Mining sand is found everywhere, in the mega-infrastructures of the present, in the cement of our dwellings, and in the respiratory tracts of inhabitants. Environmental toxins infuse sand, fossilize into micro-islands, nobody dares to touch them. In zones of enormous heat, sand melts into glass. But, how do you turn contamination into compost? The crabs, their love and violence, have developed circuit boards and sensors, working their way through the cables and computing units. River sediments transform into data clouds. The chemical violence of mercury has been augmented by the violence of AI-assisted mining algorithms exploring the Riverbed for minerals. Sand swirls into the mesh of mining data, forming a second skin.

digital film, melted laboratory glass, AI-image generator, voices, sound knowbotiq in collaboration with Entre Moléculas (Sound: Pablo Torres, Voices: Elizabeth Gallón Droste, Claudia Howald, Yvonne Wilhelm, Christian Huebler) and the support of Más Arte Más Acción and Fundaçion Mareia.

The text materials of the video were created by Entre Moléculas, a group of artists and anthropologists from Bogotá, Berlin, Lisbon, Quibdó and Ticino - who exchanged ideas about mining, extractivism, remote technologies and dark ecologies. Parts of these texts, together with research images from illegal gold mining areas in the Rio Atrato in Pacific Colombia and from re-naturalized coal mining areas in Lusatia / Germany were inserted into an AI text-to-image generator (DreamStudio by Stability.ai), which infuses “universal” statistics, imaginations and values (bias) into the documentary images and decomposes them.

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Scottish Highlands, peat bogs

Thulhu Thu Thu before the sun harms you

The project Thulhu thu thu, before the sun harms you explores and delves into past, present and future material narratives of the peat bogs in the Scottish Highlands. It develops performative and sonic acts of 'Collective Sensing' - groups connected by a multiform object made of woven plant fibres (thulhu) to capture the vibrations and asymmetrical violence inscribed in the landscape. The project was developed in collaboration with Lamin Fofana, Ayesha Hameed and Elvin Brandhi, Fundación Mareia, Margarida Mendes, Pedro Neves Marquez and Raw Forest, Odete, Romy Rüegger.

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Rijksmuseum Twenthe, 08.09.23-28.01.24

Swiss Psychotropic Gold

The Psychotropic Refinery, Helmhaus Zurich 2022 ©knowbotiq — The Psychotropic Refinery, 2022 ©knowbotiq

GOLD—Mining the Unconscious 11.2.2022 till 10.4.2022 knowbotiq, Helmhaus Zürich

In THE SWISS PSYCHOTROPIC GOLD REFINERY substances and desires diffuse into our techno-libidinous bodies. Driven by logistical protocols and mediated by shamanistic ghosts, gold turns into a stabilizer and tranquilizer, a security, an energizer, an aesthetic partaking: Simply breathe the air. Feel the elegance, the cleanliness and the technological discretion of gold. Around 50% of the gold mined globally is processed in discrete refineries in Switzerland. The work assembles digital found footage in which gold is mined, refined and transformed into gold bars, derivative stock market products, nano-particles of high-tech technologies, or wellness product.

The Psychotropic Refinery, 2022 ©knowbotiq

psychotropic substance to activate Golden Amnesia (Henbane)

THE SWISS PSYCHOTROPIC GOLD REFINERY traces moments when gold loses its stable form, moments of dissipation and dispersion, when its classical manifestation as bullion or jewelry is transformed into other states which weassume as its derivative, psychotropic and molecular dimensions. In order to go beyond the understanding of gold as a store of value, we follow its derivatives, spilling over as uncontrollable flows in different directions. Derivatives of gold contain bodies, flesh involved in mining and consuming —from exploitative labor in mercury-poisoned mines to gold as object of deep desire. What is the spill-over that is channeled through the refineries where it is mixed, melted, and neutralized to the extent that its material origins are not traceable anymore? Separated from their colonial histories, molecules of gold are transformed from violence into virtuality, into 99,9% clean Swissness. People meditate in a timeless zone naked on their bullion - yet those gold molecules wait of being enacted as part of the historical and the social.

Swiss Psychotropic Gold, the molecular refinery, 2021 ©knowbotiq — Swiss Psychotropic Gold, The Molecular Refinery, 2021 ©knowbotiq

link to video

Clean Room, affect.aliens

voices

figurations

Exhibition views Leipzig

Mercurybodies 2: Composting Slow Violence

Thulhu Thu Thu before the sun harms you

Swiss Psychotropic Gold