Was bedeutet es, auf dem Land zu leben? Wo und wie verlaufen die Grenzen zwischen gebauter und gewachsener Natur? Vom Innenleben einer Aussiedlerin erzählt der Film Horse Opera von Moyra Davey. Die kanadische Künstlerin präsentierte ihn auf der diesjährigen Berlinale – 73. Internationale Filmfestspiele Berlin – in der Sektion «Forum». Nach zwei Saisons Winterschlaf mutmasst diese Kolumne, Pick a Piece, warum dieser Film die gesamte Stimmungslage des Festivals repräsentieren könnte: die anhaltende Dringlichkeit neuer Formen von Empathie.
Charging Myths, Framer Framed, 24 February–4 June 2023
I traveled to Amsterdam with a group of students from IZK - Institute for Contemporary Art at Graz University of Technology, my colleague Philipp Sattler and friend, curator, Andrea Popelka, to view the exhibition Charging Myths by the artist collective On-Trade-Off and other configurations of artists and scholars critically investigating the energy transition. In our case, this research relates to an exploratory tunnel, dug 1.6km into the Koralm mountain range in the Austrian Alps, where lithium spodumene was found. European Lithium, a company headquartered in Australia, plans to make this mine (among others in the region) operational by early 2025, extracting the spodumene to send it for processing in Saudi Arabia. This review essay addresses the exhibition Charging Myths and its narrative of lithium extraction in relation to the global energy transition, its histories, social and material relations, and its aesthetic and political potential.