Guest speakers: Alice Cannavà and Karolina Żyniewicz

Alice Cannavà is an independent cultural worker, designer, and publisher. She studied visual arts in Milan and Vienna and currently attends courses in the history of science and technology at the TU Berlin. As publisher, she co-edits and produces Occulto Magazine – an independent journal that brings together sciences, humanities, and the arts – and, more recently, the Occulto Editions – a diverse and evolving landscape of zines, artist books and special editions. As designer, she’s active in the cultural scene, recent and ongoing collaborations include the art and research platform Art Laboratory Berlin, the feminist experimental music festival Heroines of Sound (Berlin), the center for art and media technology V2_, Lab for the Unstable Media (Rotterdam), and the artist and researcher Martin Howse (Berlin/London). As cultural worker, she curates and performs at cultural events and workshops in Berlin and beyond. Since 2020, she’s part of the extended team of Art Laboratory Berlin as designer/coder for print and digital media. In 2023 she joined the Matter of Flux festival and network. In 2024 she designed and produced the book MATTER OF FLUX. Art, Biopolitics, and Networks with Care, edited by Regine Rapp.

In the colloquium Alice will discuss recent developments and offshoots of the Occulto project culminating in the current residency at Art Laboratory Berlin (May-June 2024): The collective discussions on publishing as ongoing practice started with the Open Occulto gatherings (2022-ongoing); the transition to small publishing house with the release of the poetry zine Radio, Alos’s artist book Embrace the Darkness and Martina della Valle’s edition Moonflower; and the long, troubled making of the upcoming issue Occulto 8: Photographic (forthcoming in summer 2024). The residency at ALB offers the opportunity to open up and make visible the editorial work behind the birth of a magazine, uncovering its performative potential and the richness of its byproducts and side-effects.

Karolina Żyniewicz is a Berlin-based artist&researcher&educator, a liminal being, existing and performing between various contexts and disciplines. She is a graduate of the Faculty of Visual Arts of the Strzemiński Academy of Fine Arts in Łódź, and holds PhD in cultural sciences (title obtained in the transdisciplinary Nature – Culture doctoral program at the Faculty of Artes Liberales of the University of Warsaw). While executing art&research projects, mostly based on biotechnology and medicine, she also conducts ethnographic and autoethnographic observations, which constitute the basis for her reflections on the role of non-human actors in creating contemporary culture. In her work, she underlines the epistemic and didactic dimensions of art. In 2016–2018, she cooperated with the education departments of the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw and the Zachęta National Gallery of Art, running workshops and museum lessons for regular audiences and with accessibility for visually impaired and deaf visitors. She uses these educational experiences in her own liminal practice. She is a member of The Eco-and Bioart Lab (hosted by Linköping University), a collaborator of Art Laboratory Berlin, and an associated editor of the Technoetic Arts journal.

Karolina Żyniewicz will present her work in progress Word’s Matter a project that run in collaboration with UBMD - Internal Medicine Center for Clinical Care and Research in Liver Diseases (PCORI) in Buffalo NY. Its realization started during a 2-month art&research residency organized by Coalesce: Center for Biological Art existing at the University of Buffalo. During the residency, Karolina joined the PCORI’s team observing their work with patients, and focussing on different forms of communication shaping the medical discourse related to hepatitis C and other liver diseases, different languages, such as spoken and written language, visual language, the language of metaphors, and language of stigma (very influential in the case of hepatitis C prophylactic and treatment). The next step of the research is to create an interactive installation stressing the fact that what we say and how has a real influence on someone else’s health. Three kinds of imaging showing liver destruction (fibrosis development) will be animated by using stigmatizing or healing words.