the research program
The Research Program of AIR InSILo is focused on the work with the local context. It offers a model and seeks for new methodologies of critical work with the concept of non-place which particularly here, in Hollabrunn, manifests itself as an average European agricultural settlement without special historical, cultural and political features. The uniqueness of such places is their invisibility. Economic, political and cultural life doesn't reveal itself explicitly; it can become challenging to open up hidden conflicts and struggles concealed under the familiar surface of everyday life. The goal of the program is to create a research platform (in form of a physical residency as well as a digital magazine) that can function as a template of methodologies of artistic research to be further applied to other realms, conditions, and territories. The research process focuses on the principles of localism and aims to create a critical map bearing in mind topography, ecology, economic division, layers of history, groups of interest, population, anthropology, cultural influences, etc. This approach appears to be important since the urban Umwelt is not representative of the exhaustive understanding of social dynamics. The city areas contain headquarters, but representative outlets of actual processes are embedded in featureless non-places called periphery where underprivileged and deprived of cultural and political subjectivity are trapped in affirmative, conservative and populist cogitation. To decolonize the own thinking, artistic endeavours aim to recontextualize the obsolete hierarchical concept and make a proposition a decentralized local hub, existing in a horizontal plane towards alike entities of the network.
2021-2022
This is Not-a-Game
The kick-off of the new round 2022/23 is made by David Sypniewski and Magda ‘Bronka‘ Braniewska, who, during the short-term residence slot, will start to work on their project ‘This is Not-a-Game,’ a comment on incremental games and their symbolism.
Incremental games make a perfect illustration of how modern marketing works. Based on deep knowledge of human atavisms, those games use our biological mechanisms that were designed by evolution to help us survive to a different, rather cynical cause – maximising income by increasing players’ impulsive consumption. Modern marketing also uses neuroscience to explore customer buying decisions and paths. The artists want to go back to the roots of the first clicker game, and go deeper into deconstruction, uncover how the market developed the original idea into a money-making machine. In other words: they want to create an honest version of an incremental game.
Incremental games make a perfect illustration of how modern marketing works. Based on deep knowledge of human atavisms, those games use our biological mechanisms that were designed by evolution to help us survive to a different, rather cynical cause – maximising income by increasing players’ impulsive consumption. Modern marketing also uses neuroscience to explore customer buying decisions and paths. The artists want to go back to the roots of the first clicker game, and go deeper into deconstruction, uncover how the market developed the original idea into a money-making machine. In other words: they want to create an honest version of an incremental game.
24-31.08.2022
A new emergency resident, Olga Pylnyk, will spend the upcoming three months working on her project "Festina Lente" – "Hurry Slowly", as translated from Latin. The artist ponders around the fast pace of life and its contemporary consumer model. In particular, in the field of fashion, that pushes a consumer to buy many times more clothes than in the last century and to wear them just a few times. Clothing acquires the status of "disposable". This model has a detrimental effect on the ecology of the planet. In her works, Olga focuses on enlarged textile weaves to demonstrate the beauty of fabrics from the inside and suggests the viewer love their clothes, not the shopping process. The gesture of hyperbolizing aims to raise attention to the problem and to propose a solution in the upcycling process.
1.09.- 30.11.2022
"Festina Lente" by Olga Pylnyk
"ÁNOMOS, or the lawless land"
20.09-1.11.2022
The first long-term resident of the round 2022/23 is starting to work on his proposal for AIR InSILo. "ÁNOMOS, or the lawless land", is a multidisciplinary research project situated in an iconic agricultural area of Central Europe that imagines the environmental implications of the disintegration of the code that orders the land distribution among humans. Parting from an art-sci approach and using different technological tools, the project will imagine the Hollabrunn territory inhabited not by sedentary human collectivities but by nomad ones. This exercise imagines the territory before the establishment of any settlement but also identifies those 'heterotopian spaces' that exemplify in the present time the lawless condition of certain pieces of the land. Also, it reviews local legends that could give an account of the non-human presence and its resistance to the anthropogenic domain. The project aims to question the ethics behind the act of appropriation of the land and to propose a reflection on the conceptual basis that justify the instrumentation of the non-human others and the contemporary forms of collective organization.
boundaries of sustain-ability by Jennetta Petch and Szymon Kula
During the residency, the artists will continue their research around the boundaries of sustainability of artistic production by developing an ongoing project that was started in rural France, in Embrun, over the winter of 2020. It will be carried out by the investigation of how one can use materials to adapt to the chaos of the environmental crisis and what materials can do to help us to exist and even thrive in a chaotic world as well as how making can provide a sense of structure in time and space.
9.11-20.12.2021
<Biotope- Metamorphic Symbiosis> by Jungeun Lee
The first long-term resident of 2022 is Jungeun Lee, who is working on her Biotope- Metamorphic Symbiosis installation that visualizes and sonifies the relations between microorganisms and humans. In AIR InSILo, the artist plans to research various types of water sources such as lakes, rivers, swamps and build ecospheres, to convert the movement of microorganisms into sound and amplify them. Movements and vitality of snails scratching moss on the wall, hydra hanging upside down on the plants using long tentacles, and stone leech hunting for food larger than their bodies, all is going to be collected by using motion tracking and transferred to the audience through an amplifier. The project takes a challenge to give a voice to many of those unheard and invisible. In a time when our planet is threatened, the ecosphere represents a contemporary oasis. These ecosystems are like time-capsules. The ecosphere contains dormant resources and myriad other species with whom we share life on this planet. They contain enormous biodiversity and are inhabited by numerous plant and animal species and various communities of living microorganisms.
9-31.01.2022
TIST Collective - new artists-in-residence
05.-13.03.2022
In March 2022, AIR InSILo hosts a collective of two artists/ curators Yulia Tikhomirova and Michele Liparesi - TIST (This Is So Temporary) from Bologna, Italy. TIST manifests the necessity to build a creative, open and inclusive artistic process outside of traditional, institutional and alas! capitalistic system of production.
The artist run space TIST is situated in an old fabric shed in an industrial peripheral zone of the city and offers studios for young artists, exposition space, community garden, workshop facilities and a leisure zone. The project grew up out of disagreement with continuous and growing concentration of art production in the hands of few institutions financed both by public and private money, where the same small group of people, in practice, decide what contemporary art should be and exclude any possibility to differentiate the discourse, the content and the politics of art.
The artist run space TIST is situated in an old fabric shed in an industrial peripheral zone of the city and offers studios for young artists, exposition space, community garden, workshop facilities and a leisure zone. The project grew up out of disagreement with continuous and growing concentration of art production in the hands of few institutions financed both by public and private money, where the same small group of people, in practice, decide what contemporary art should be and exclude any possibility to differentiate the discourse, the content and the politics of art.
How the
world works
world works
04.10.2021
How the World Works by Maria Safronova Wahlström and Johannes Wahlström intends to describe the rapidly changing world that we and our societies are surrounded by; and that became more visible in connection with the pandemic. How the World Works is based on the UN Sustainability Goals 2030 and interviews of the people active in the fields affected by the proposed changes. The answers will form the basis for a series of graphic works that playfully highlight the topics that we all too often resign ourselves to considering too complicated to understand. The project aims to connect the research on current political and economic issues with a simple and playful graphic form, which can be exhibited and distributed in art contexts as well as in schools.
All Nonsense Cancels Itself
09.10.2021
In AIR InSILo, the invited artist and writer Bernhard Kathan will work on his sound piece All Nonsense Cancels Itself, which will be presented during the Open Studio Days on 16-17 October. The piece is dedicated to Daniel Paul Schreber (1842 - 1911) who is considered the most prominent case in the history of psychiatry thanks to his book Memoirs of My Nervous Illness. Among many others, Sigmund Freud, C.G. Jung, Elias Canetti, Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari occupied themselves with his bizarre imagery.
It is commonly thought that doctors are trying to understand the patients. Kathan reveals, that Schreber's story teaches us the opposite: in fact, the patients are required to understand the doctors who are treating them.
Kathan recontextualizes the Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, and by the means of sound and graphic art, reveals meaning in the chaotic. By refusing to see Schreber as a "case", just a madman, he points that the patient to facilitate his doctors was by purpose producing all the signs he was expected to.
It is commonly thought that doctors are trying to understand the patients. Kathan reveals, that Schreber's story teaches us the opposite: in fact, the patients are required to understand the doctors who are treating them.
Kathan recontextualizes the Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, and by the means of sound and graphic art, reveals meaning in the chaotic. By refusing to see Schreber as a "case", just a madman, he points that the patient to facilitate his doctors was by purpose producing all the signs he was expected to.
Scoby Spin Cycle
The first OPEN CALL artist of AIR InSILo is Mary Maggic who during the last week in October will work on the SCOBY SPIN CYCLE. It is a post-anthropocentric performative art installation and absurd machine object that optimizes the industrial production of SCOBY (symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast) made from a kombucha bioreactor that is kept in constant rotation by the physical and demanding labor of a human subject on a gym exercise machine. The project reflects on the role of technology in human and non-human relationships of resource extraction and exploitation, as well as human technological desires for fitness, perfection and optimization. Can feminist practices of care and kinship re-insert the necessary intimacy within multi species relationships that have been largely and historically driven by capitalism?
23-31.10.2021