IN PROGRESS… | Colloquium & and INSPIRED BY… | Reading Group

With Sybille Neumeyer and Retrospection of 2022
Curated by Regine Rapp & Tuçe Erel

Art Laboratory Berlin is delighted to invite you to take part in a final session of 2022 and bring our both discursive formats together – a Colloquium on research in art, science and humanities, curated by Regine Rapp, and a Reading Club, curated by Tuçe Erel.

The Colloquium & Reading Club session on 6 December will be entirely online and addresses an international interdisciplinary research audience to present and discuss past, present or future projects by artists and scholars, curators or editors from the fields of art, science and the humanities. The topics could refer to an art project, a book, text or chapter, a research or exhibition project, a lab experiment, a lecture series, a conference concept or other. The presentations and exchange will focus on the work-in-progress. Methodological approaches – theoretical or practical – are also of great interest here. While researching, we often tend to shift between practical inquiry and theoretical research, browsing various disciplines. Following the original meaning of colloquium as “speaking together”, we want to provide a platform for exchange and embrace various kinds of work processes which are often not seen or talked about.

The Reading Club Inspired by… is an event series, a hybrid format derived from reading group and artist talk formats. In each session, an invited artist will choose a specific text or excerpt from a book that was inspirational for the artist’s practice and/or a particular project that the artist will introduce. The project follows up Tuçe Erel’s Posthumanism Reading Group, organized between 2018-2020. After co-reading and discussing plenty of seminal texts in two years, the club is transforming into a new discussion, presentation and reading program, an online and offline exchange platform in a non-hierarchical and non-institutional infrastructure in the fields of arts, science and technology.

Structure of the last session of the year 2022: We start with a presentation by our artist guest Sybille Neumeyer and discussion. Then Regine Rapp and Tuçe Erel will look back on the last sessions of Colloquium and Reading Club in 2022 and give a little update about 2023. The event is planned to last around 90 minutes.

Speaker of the 6 December Session

Sybille Neumeyer | Terramancy

Sybille Neumeyer is an interdependent artist with focus on environmental issues and relationships between humans and nonhumans. Her work is informed by post-disciplinary research and collaborations with various institutions, knowledge holders and beings. Through polyphonic (hi)storytelling, installations, walks, performative lectures and video essays she is examining the intersections of bio-cultural diversity loss, environmental issues and climate crisis, searching for transformative narratives, modes of rooting, and collective action towards social, ecological and multispecies justice. Her projects and research were supported by institutions and artist in residencies such as Akademie Schloss Solitude, DESY Hamburg, Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, IASS – Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies Potsdam, Jan van Eyck Academy and, currently, MARKK – Museum am Rothenbaum Hamburg as part of TAKING CARE EU. Her works have been exhibited internationally, such as recently at Technisches Museum Berlin (2022), Onassis Stegi (2022), HKW Berlin (2022), Art Laboratory Berlin (2022), Dokuchaev Soil Museum (2021), Kunsthaus Dresden (2021), ZKM Karlsruhe (2020), among others.

In the Colloquium & Reading Group session Sybille Neumeyer will talk about her ongoing (2020-today) research on soil ecologies and soil care, with insights in Terramancy, a speculative documentary video she is filming since 2021 at the lab of the Rillig Group – Ecology of Plants, Freie Universität Berlin and in Terr(in)forming, an ongoing investigation through artistic means into “soil health“ and metabolic agency in times of multiple crisis.