Agronauts* Collective

Agronauts*Collective

Agronauts*Collective is a collaborative working group at the intersection of aesthetic practice, artistic research and environmental activism since 2019.

The core team consists of Otto Kauppinen, Hana Magdoňová, and Lea Spahn who connect the fields of performance art, dramaturgy, relational aesthetics, arts education, (post-) phenomenology, and political ecologies. As a collective, they organize an annual symposium “crossing borders” that invites for collaborative and transdisciplinary work.

Zobrazit více...

The Agronaut* was conceived as fictional character that emerges from the challenges of living in the Anthropocene – but over the past years, the imagination of a character transformed into process-oriented practices of agronauting:

_noticing_

_observing_looking_listening_

_perceiving_

_sharing_mirroring_whispering_

_following_sneaking_walking_

_embodying_

_exploring_finding_altering_transfering_

_emerging_connecting_wishing_

_imagining_

In this sense, our work is an open-ended inquiry into the question of how to co-create livable futures by using body-based practices in a more-than-human world.

The principle of agronauting is connected to imaginative story-telling that evokes ways of collective caring and posthuman ways of ‘being in the world’ for bodies of all kinds – human and non-human. We want to apply the power of creating forms of expression and alternative narratives that create sensory-affective experience-scapes.

With our focus on the creation of platforms for research and collaboration, of immersive encounters and sensibilization for naturecultures the Agronauts*Collective envisions multi-species collectives that emerge for rhizomatic co-teaching and co-learning in an era of planetary politics.

Based on experiencing and experimenting, we want to challenge hegemonic norms of cohabitation to spark new imaginaries of/and possible futures. Agronauting is not an optimization of ourselves and our bodies. Agronauting is a sensibilization of our bodies in becoming.

Rather than finding answers, we want to propose questions:

How do we connect to our environments as bodies?

How are we part of our environments as sensing bodies?

How can we shift conceptions of bodies towards becoming multi-species collectives?

In what ways are we bound to socio-historical, biological, geopolitical and local conditions?

Where can we go from here?

How exactly does the performativity of our artistic practice create transformations of perceptions and (social) norms?

What traces do we leave? What traces do we create in the future?

Who is this ‘we’?

And what keeps us together as collectives?

BECOMING POST_HUMAN (2022)

exhibition, laboratory

Works presented by the transdisciplinary collective which positions itself at the intersection of performative research and environmental activism. With the focus on the creation of platforms for practices of posthuman research and collaboration, the Agronauts* collective envisions multispecies Collectives that emerge for rhizomatic co-teaching and co-learning in an era of planetary politics. Based on experiencing and experimenting, they want to challenge hegemonic norms of cohabitation to spark new imaginaries and possible futures. During 21 days the gallery will show works of the participants and share their reflections on powerknowledge, magic and materialities that constitute our experience of 'being of the world'. Visitors are invited to find their own embodied way through the gallery space in site-specific encounters but also to immerse themselves in collective experiences in the near city environment during performative lectures, workshops and city-walks. Those will focus on the topic of meeting more-than-human bodies, sensations of im/materialities, processes of de/composing and place/making. Becoming POST_HUMAN invites to experiment with posthuman embodiment in multispecies worlds through sense-based encounters.

CROSSING BORDERS: POST_HUMAN INTIMACY (2022)

transmedial artivistic symposium

The framing for this symposium is the notion of intimacy. Rather than associating it with sexuality, we want to foster an understanding of intimacy as a process of care, of healing, and body-based encounters for an experience of the many different ways of being connected in a more-than-human world. This symposium is a space to explore and imagine possible futures together. These futures can take form co-inhabited (performative) spaces or micro-utopias (Bourriaud), through exploring the intertwining of planetary ecosystem and human life in forms in naturecultures (Haraway), through developing artistic approaches to dive into the ecological and historical specificities of environments.

CROSSING BORDERS: BUILDING THE COLLECTIVES AND THE ART OF PLACEMAKING (2021)

transmedial artivistic symposium

A creation of a lively and supportive atmosphere for meeting as co-researchers within complex and multilayered environments. Creation of meeting space for diverse and daring processes: As a cross-disciplinary and process-based dialogue over the course of a 20-day residency in the "Za Břehem" community in the Czech countryside, we are interested in "the art of place making" – the question of how we can co-create liveable places and shared futurities that emerge from a sensibility for the challenges of the Anthropocene. This means that we are engaged in our own projects as well as engaging in community life – sharing some day-to-day responsibilities, including the aspect of care to disrupt the artificial border between (artistic) research practices and organizational activities of the community. Perceive collaborative cooperation from a more-than-human perspective of collective.

CROSSING BORDERS: AGRONAUTS* JOURNEY (2020)

transmedial artivistic symposium

This project invites the participants to involve themselves holistically as material beings among other materialities into this journey. With this post-human interest, we are engaging collectively through our being-in-the-world. With the notion of the "Agronaut", we will probe into human's influence on landscapes but also research in the organization of ecosystems. With this 10-day artistic research as Agronauts, we want to create a collaborative and interdisciplinary "micro-utopia" (Bourriaud) - an experience of transformative immersion for the co-creation of sustainable futures. We want to address sustainability through an aesthetic-performative research approach. Particularly in considering different time spans of organisms and their intra-active becoming.

CROSSING BORDERS: PERFORMING IN BETWEEN (2019)

transmedial artivistic symposium

The aim of the symposium was to create conditions not only for mutual inspiration, but mainly for cooperation. and dialogue. The starting point for this collaboration was reduction/limitation which let to a creative solution and the simplest possible communication. A different background (whether art-media or cultural) will gave artists an opportunity for creative insight into the issues of individual media, leading to their unconventional development and deeper research and communication. The previous inherent inexperience in a different medias is not a restriction here, but it serves as a creative bridge between one and the other art, the curious and natural response (dialogue) of each individual present. Thus, the symposium created a platform for theoretical discussions across disciplines, but hand in hand with immediate practical application. This "limited" conditions encouraged the artist to use the simplest form of expression. These conditions helped not only artists, but also the disciplines themselves to find their way back to themselves. Instead of developing individual media in a specific way, artists strived to cross borders and fill the spaces.