Shifting Skies
9:37 min, H265, stereo sound.
Nikolaus Gansterer, Mariella Greil, Victor Jaschke, Peter Kozek, Werner Moebius and Lucie Strecker.
2025.
The Shaken Grounds project brings together artists, scientists, and curators to explore how the Earth’s tremors are entangled with culture and technology. Not only natural but also anthropogenic forces amplify seismic processes: climate change is altering the global water cycle in ways whose consequences remain unforeseeable. Profound effects can be observed in soils and groundwater, in ocean currents and rising sea levels, and in tectonic processes deep within the Earth.
Working across geological as well as historical and social layers, the project understands seismography as a form of artistic research. Disciplines such as geology, performance art, and filmmaking meet with somatic practices to perceive, and relate bodies, technologies, and the Earth itself. Rather than functioning as measurement alone, seismography becomes a situated and embodied practice of sensing and witnessing human-induced tremors in the ground on which we stand today.
The film Shaken Grounds, Shifting Skies traverses the volatile terrains of Campi Flegrei, Mount Vesuvius, Vulcano Island, and the retreating Pasterze Glacier in Austria, interwoven with studio scenes and reflective questions. Built on a dialogical principle, each scene opens with a question, not as rhetoric, but as an aperture, asking where and how we find ground when the crust beneath us is trembling. The artists weave vignettes and micro-narratives into a non-linear fabric in which scenes pose questions and questions become scenes. On view is a ten-minute excerpt from an ongoing feature-length work tracing connections between precarity, ecology, geology, time, and life in shaken times.
Shaken Grounds Collective (AT)
Nikolaus Gansterer
He studied art at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna and completed his studies at the Jan van Eyck Academy at Maastricht, The Netherlands. He is co-founder of the Institute for Transacoustic Research. He has been teaching at the University of Applied Arts Vienna since 2007, where he was the professor for the artistic research doctoral program, and is currently a senior lecturer and member of the Applied Performance Lab.
As an artist, performer and researcher Gansterer is deeply interested in the relational field between drawing, thinking and action. Across forms of installation and performance, he focuses on diagramming emergent processes to unfold their immanent structures of entanglement, questioning the imaginary threshold between nature and culture, art and philosophy.
Gansterer published the book Drawing a Hypothesis (Springer, 2011) on the ontology of diagrammatic forms of visualization as well as Playing with Ludwig, (Éditions Dilecta, 2023) together with Klaus Speidel on artistic forms of translating Ludwig Wittgenstein. From 2014 - 2018 Gansterer was leading the artistic research PEEK-project Choreo-graphic Figures (published by de Gruyter, 2017) developing innovative systems of notation between drawing, writing and choreography. Till 2024 Gansterer is heading Contingent Agencies a cross-disciplinary research on diagramming fragile atmospheres funded by the Austrian Science Fund.
Gansterer’s work has been presented ao. at the Research Pavilion, 58th Venice Biennial; the 14th Sharjah Biennial; the 12th Havana Biennial; the 4th Athens Biennial; Albertina Museum, Vienna; Kaaitheater, Brussels; Villa Arson, Nice; Drawing Lab, Paris; Siobhan Davies Studios, London; TanzQuartier, Vienna; ICA, London; Berliner Festspiele; Cranbrook Museum, Detroit.
Mariella Greil
She is a performer, dance-maker, artist-researcher and Senior Artist at the Angewandte Performance Laboratory (www.apl.uni-ak.ac.at) leading the working group Antenna Research and Education. She has completed her Practice as Research PhD at the Department of Drama, Theatre and Performance in collaboration with the Department of Dance at Roehampton University, London (2018). Currently, she works on her habilitation project Choreo-ethical Assemblages – Narrations of Bare Bodies (Elise-Richter-PEEK/FWF) at the University of Applied Arts Vienna.
In her longstanding and ongoing artistic research, she focuses on contemporary performance, especially its ramifications into the choreographic and the ethical. She developed a politicized and ethico-aesthetic practice enabling performative encounter, participatory experiments and the crossing of thresholds as she works towards sustained life practices of experimentation.
Jointly with Emma Cocker, Nikolaus Gansterer and Simona Koch she was awarded the SAR RC Prize for Best Exposition 2019 for Choreo-graphic Figures: Scoring Aesthetic EncountersGreil received the Danceweb Europe Scholarship twice (ImPulstanz Festival), and was awarded the Grant for Dance by the Austrian Federal Ministry for Education, Arts and Culture in 2008 and 2011. Currently engaged in teaching and mentoring roles at ArtEZ, Codarts/Fontys, and the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, she performs globally at renowned institutions (Chicago Cultural Center, Links Hall, MQ Vienna, MAK, Vienna Art Week, SoHo in Ottakring, brut, WUK, ImPulsTanz, Tanzquartier, House of World Cultures, Berlin, Nexus, Philadelphia, Fontys, Tilburg, apass, Brussels, Dance Education Biennale, UNAM in Mexico D.F., Shiobhan Davies Studios, London, etc.)
Together with Vera Sander, she co-edited the book (per)forming feedback (2016), and with Emma Cocker and Nikolaus Gansterer, Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line (2017). She published the monograph Being in Contact – Encountering a Bare Body (2021) and recently the anthology Bare Bodies – Thresholding Life (2024) with De Gruyter.
Peter Kozek
He works primarily in the fields of performance, installation, video, film, drawing and public space. He studied classical singing with Annet Zaïre from 1995 to 1998 and comprehensive media art with Brigitte Kowanz at the University of Applied Arts Vienna from 1998 to 2002.
Since 2003 a.o. he has been working with Thomas Hörl as an artist duo. He has realised numerous performances, spatial installations and exhibitions in Austria and abroad, both solo and together with T.H., for example at the mumok, Vienna (AT), at the Power Station of Art, Shanghai (CHN), at steirischer herbst, Graz (AT) or at the Nationaltheater Mannheim, (D). In 2017 Peter Kozek realised a memorial for the victims of National Socialism in Baden (AT). Since 2019 he has been involved in the development of APL – Angewandte Performance Lab where he has been a senior artist since 2021 and has held the lectureship for Performance and Space since then.
From 2006 to 2021 he taught as lecturer for Performance in Transmedia Art I Prof. Brigitte Kowanz.
He has brought out various publications, including 2008 Raumzeitpunkte sind Ereignisse, University of Applied Arts, ed. Brigitte Kowanz, Peter Kozek, 2008 I kissed you in the water, monograph, gugler forum M ed. kozek hörlonski, 2013 crisscross …, monograph, SCHLEBRÜGGE.EDITOR, ed. kozek hörlonski, 2020 Transmedia Art: lightness and matter, De Gruyter, ed. Brigitte Kowanz, Peter Kozek.
Solo and together with Thomas Hörl he has received a number of prizes and scholarships, e.g. 2021 Prize of the City of Vienna for Visual Arts (tog. with T.H.), 2014 Culture Prize of the Province of Lower Austria , 2010 outstanding artist award of BMUKK (tog. with T.H.), 2009 H13 Art Award for Performance of Lower Austria (tog. with T.H.), 2002 Prize of Kunsthalle Vienna.
Artistic works by Peter Kozek are represented in public and private collections in Austria and abroad.
Lucie Strecker
She works as an artist and researcher in the fields of performance art and hybrid art. She is a Fellow of the Berlin University of the Arts and a member of the Performance Laboratory (APL) at the University of Applied Arts Vienna where she is teaching performance art at the Department for Art and Communication Practices. From 2016 to 2020 she was conducting the FWF Elise-Richter-PEEK project: “The Performative Biofact”. Her performances and installations have been shown inter alia at Tanzquartier Vienna, the House of World Cultures, Berlin, the Beall Center for Art and Technology, Irvine, the Museum of Natural Science, Vienna, the Onassis Cultural Center, Athens, the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Omaha, the MAK and the 21er Haus, Vienna and have been awarded the ZIM Performing Science Prize and a Prix Ars Electronica Honorary Mention. She published in Performance Research, The Lancet, Leonardo and with Diaphanes publishers. 2019 she performed with the choreographer and artists Ann Liv Young at Arsenic in Lausanne and at her apartment in NYC and further developed showings et al. for the Vienna Biennale, the Vienna Design Week, Vienna Art Week, Ars Electronica, and the Museums Quartier Vienna. Recently she curated two group exhibitions "Holobiont. Live is Other" and "Das Grosse Fressen - La Grande Bouffe" at the Bregenz Cultural Summer and the Angewandte Interdisciplinary Lab. 2020 she published together with the media scholar and curator Jens Hauser the special Issue "On Microperformativity" with Routledge. Since 2015 she has been teaching or giving guest lectures at the Berlin University of the Arts, the Medical University Vienna, Victoria University of Wellington, the Inter-University Center for Dance Berlin and the University of California, Los Angeles, recently also at artEZ University of the Arts Arnhem, Home of Performance Practices, Netherlands. 2019- 2020 she was an appointed lecturer at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano for experience design and interaction.