to slip, to slide, to glitch

Larisa Crunţeanu and Sonja Hornung’s artistic research takes as its starting-point (post-) mining landscapes in East Germany and Romania. Together, they investigate how the desire for an ecological and just transformation collides with ongoing, profi t-driven extraction processes. Who benefits from the desire for change and restoration, and how does this repeatedly
negatively impact people and ecosystems?

 
A series of large-scale textile cyanotypes and hyper-coloured fake plants – species used to recultivate former mining landscapes – transform the gallery space into an imitation of a forest. In a video work embedded in the installation, two exploratory protagonists move through (post-)industrial coal mining landscapes in Lusatia and the copper mining region in the Apuseni Mountains, searching, marvelling, and observing. Transformed into skeletons, the artists refer to the toxicity of the scenarios and processes at play, while simultaneously destabilising their own physicality in relation to “artificial nature”. These elements are contextualised by text-based works.

 
to slip, to slide, to glitch blurs notions of nature and artifi ciality, because landscape is always partly produced by humans: here, either through the projected imaginary of full restoration, or through actual neglect. Hyper-coloured algal blooms and orange waters infused with ferric sulfates become the spectacular symptoms of enduring ecological disaster. At the same time, the project is dedicated to the productive power that arises when we do not see “natural” and “artificial”conditions as two separate entities, pointing towards the need to recognise practices that might embrace the wounds of the world, and take responsibility to care for the world as it is.