Institute for Inconspicuous Languages: Reading Lips
Špela Petrič
Špela Petrič is a Slovenian-born media artist with a background in science, currently working in a research group at Amsterdam's Vrije University in the field of biophysics and photosynthetics. Her artistic practice combines biomedial practices with performance to depict unknown relationships between bodies, revealing the foundations of our (bio)technological conditionings and suggesting alternatives in dealing with them. For a few years now, there have been measurable signs of interaction between humans and plants, as well as between plants themselves.
With Institute for Inconspicuous Languages: Reading Lips, Špela Petrič stages an experiment. Like all plants a Ficus benjamina controls its energy balance by opening and closing the pores on its leaves. Each leaf has thousands of these openings called stomata. The idea is to read the movements of these greatly enlarged stomata like lips, articulating their need for more or less water.
The experiment reaches into the future, suggesting that over a long period of time, a dialogue between plants and humans could emerge. This speculative experiment plays humorously with our anthropocentric worldview, which imposes our language and thus our will on all living things.
Institute for inconspicuous languages: reading lips, 2018
photo: Anže Sekelj
Events:
Friday August 4, 5 PM
Opening
Sunday August 13, 6 PM
Concert in the woods by the Jodlklub
photo: David Kranzelbinder
Kunstfenster Gnas
The Kunstfenster Gnas is a tiny art space in a shop window, a cube of two by two meters and one meter deep. A clearly defined space in the town center, which can be visited at any time of the day or night and which is reopened every three months. A local revival that opposes the rampant business vacancy with the means of art.
Since August 2019, Michaela Leutzendorff-Pakesch has been curating exhibitions in the market town of Gnas that go far beyond the region in their ambition.