A Discussion with Oscar Salguero, Institute for Interspecies Art and Relations, and Onomatopee

How does printed matter build worlds?
What is the role of storytelling in an ecological crisis?
How do artistic practices approach the more-than-human?

Join Art Laboratory Berlin during Vorspiel 2024 – a citywide program of events before and during the transmediale and CTM festivals – for a virtual panel on archiving and publishing practices that envision artist books as tools for interspecies understanding, imagining, and kinships.

Speakers: Oscar Salguero, Institute for Interspecies Art and Relations, and Onomatopee. Moderated by Kristina Stallvik.

Oscar Salguero is an archivist, independent curator, researcher based in Brooklyn, NY. Salguero’s first curated show, Interspecies Futures [IF] (2021) at the Center for Book Arts, marked the first survey of artists’ books at the intersection of speculative fiction and new interspecies possibilities. In 2023, he curated NEO MINERALIA at Center for Craft, NC, an exhibition that proposed considering synthetic and digital rocks as new geological specimens. Since 2019, Salguero runs Interspecies Library, the first archive dedicated to the advancement of artists’ books exploring alternative interspecies futures.

Institute for Interspecies Art and Relations (IFIAAR) was founded in 2017 by Aidan Koch to help unify theory, ethics, and creative practice around our ever-changing relationships with other species. Over the past 7 years, IFIAAR has hosted workshops, interdisciplinary art projects, and educational events from Los Angeles, California to Lisbon, Portugal; as well as published material in collaboration with both artists and animal specialists.

Onomatopee is a curating and editorially led public gallery and publisher known for its self-initiated and transdisciplinary projects. Onomatopee also hosts the projects of individuals as well as artist-run and institutional organizations. Inspired by a DIY attitude and desire for critical elevation, Onomatopee discusses and mediates pop culture, power, and other environments of visual consciousnesses.