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Contribution short abstract

Bodies of Water is a site-specific installation exploring ecofeminism and the interplay between human and natural bodies. Through fabric, sound, and scent, it blurs boundaries, reflecting shared vulnerabilities and interdependencies while critiquing societal norms, water commodification, and exclusi

Contribution long abstract

Bodies of Water is a site-specific installation that investigates the interconnections between human and natural bodies through an ecofeminist lens. Presented in April 2018 at StudioRCA Riverlight in London the work critiques the commodification of water and its role in enforcing social divisions. Situated in a corridor flanked by glass walls overlooking a private swimming pool, the installation explored the exclusivity of water as a privileged commodity, juxtaposing urban luxury with broader hydrosocial interdependencies. The project combined ethnographic and artistic methods. I conducted fieldwork at the Ladies Pond, photographing organic textures like tree bark and water ripples, and collaborated with a participant to capture close-up imagery of human skin. This process revealed striking visual parallels: stretch marks resembling rivers, wrinkles mimicking tree textures, and hair echoing roots. These patterns were digitally merged and printed on translucent chiffon fabric, chosen for its fluidity and responsiveness to light and movement. The installation invited participants to navigate through hanging fabric panels, evoking the protective yet isolating qualities of the natural sanctuary. Sensory elements enriched the experience, including ambient sounds of flowing water, earthy smells, and shifts in temperature, creating a layered and immersive environment. The work highlighted the dualities inherent in such spaces—tranquility for some, discomfort for others—reflecting societal norms and exclusions. Inspired by ecofeminist and hydrofeminist thinkers and artists, the installation blurred boundaries between human and natural, challenging binaries such as body versus environment, nature versus culture. By fostering reflection on shared vulnerabilities and interdependencies, Bodies of Water invites participants to consider the fluid relationships between self, society, and the environment, creating a space for dialogue on belonging, identity, and ecological interconnectedness.

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As Students of Mediation in Dance we would like to draw attention to different forms and characteristics of relationships that we are moving through, also as a way to acknowledge them, and notice them, and maybe inquire their varying dimensions from the un/communing lens.

Contribution long abstract

The shaping of relationships lies at the core of processes of commoning and uncommoning. Commoning is at its core a process of shaping relationships. As Students of Mediation in Dance we would like to draw attention to different forms and characteristics of relationships that we are moving through, also as a way to acknowledge them, and notice them, and maybe inquire their varying dimensions from the un/communing lens. We aim to invite a critical sensing of all the often unnoticed relationships that we are taking part of - from the most natural dimension of relating, such as breathing, to more social realities of relating, like relating in power-structures of, for instance, spatial planning.

How do bodies relate to different urban spaces, let it be a museum, a neighborhood street, a queer bar, or a busy transportation hub? How do these spaces relate to and interact with our bodies? How do spaces embrace some and exclude others? How are relationships negotiated and transformed in spaces? How do people negotiate belonging over a public space? How do we negotiate with untold histories of the common that define whom a space belongs to? How do bodies relate to each other in those spaces of assumed public encounters? How do bodies –their presence, movements, interconnections, sensorial impulse—complicate our narratives about the public commons?

With these questions in mind, we create a way to move individually and collectively in and around the exhibition centralizing the museum space. We will provide tools of dance mediation to develop a collective sensibility towards sensing and perceiving relationships surrounding the museum space. This is an invitation to bring awareness to one’s own situatedness and relationships with present and non-present bodies, palimpsest of the space, pieces of thoughts and critiques, and resonances of the outside world of the museum.

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This poster is the materialization of a digital exhibition which (https://fabrics-of-dependency.uni-bonn.de), was created collaboratively by researchers of the BCDSS (Uni Bonn) of different carreer stages and is still growing. It is made of different materials and combines different modalities.

Contribution long abstract

Präsentiert wird ein Poster mit den Maßen H: 2,80, B: 3,20 m und T: 0,15 m, welches multimodal diverse Medien, Materialien und Bedeutungsebenen vereint. Als hands-on Ausstellungsobjekt lädt das Poster zur visuellen und taktilen Erkundung ein und schafft so eine temporäre Vergemeinschaftung seiner Betrachter. Zugleich präsentiert sich das Poster als Materialisierung einer digitalen Ausstellung mit dem Titel: „Verstrickt und Verwoben: Texturen der Abhängigkeit / Enmeshed and Entwined: Fabrics of Dependency“, in welche die Betrachter über applizierte QR-Codes gelangen. Anhand der Herstellung, Nutzung und Verbreitung von Textilien erläutert diese digitale Ausstellung „starke asymmetrischen Abhängigkeitsbeziehungen“. Es handelt sich dabei um das „key concept“ des Exzellenzclusters „Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies“ (BCDSS), welches auf diese Weise einem breiten Publikum erläutert werden soll. Damit soll Neugier auf die Fragen und Forschungsergebnisse des Exzellenzclusters geweckt werden.

Die narrative Struktur der Ausstellung ist als Quilterzählung angelegt, welche immer wieder neu einzelne Themen aufgreift, sie aus unterschiedlichen Perspektiven beleuchtet und neu kontextualisiert. Dies geschieht durch sogenannte „story patches“, welche die Ausstellung konstituieren und ihr sukzessive weiter hinzugefügt werden. Mit den story patches geben die jeweiligen Autoren, Wissenschaftler und Studierende des Exzellenzclusters, zugleich Einblick in ihre individuelle Forschung. Durch diese kollaborative Zusammenarbeit der BCDSS-Forscher werden alle Beitragenden unabhängig von ihrer akademischen Position und ihrem Forschungsfeld zu einem kreativen Kollektiv auf gleicher Augenhöhe vergemeinschaftet. Die beschriebene Erzählstruktur greift das ausgestellte Poster auf und präsentiert sich als multimodaler, mehrdimensionaler Quilt.

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Contribution short abstract

Drawing on ethnographic research on olfactory belonging and contested scents in urban publics, our exhibition intervention seeks to create a scentful, reflective space for audiences to contemplate the social life of smells and their capacity to engender politics.

Contribution long abstract

Odours and scents are fleeting and ephemeral, which poses methodological challenges in terms of articulation and representation. And yet, they are also material, effective, and, most importantly, constitutive of relationships, which require scholarly attention. By focusing on olfactory media, inherently out of focus, our contribution highlights an often-neglected sensory impression, while also recognising its entanglement with other senses.

Our main aim with this intervention is to create a scentful, reflective space for audiences to contemplate the social life of smells and their capacity to engender politics. Whether evoking memories, inspiring a field poem as a pathway to other worlds, embodying the precarious labor of migrants in the global perfume market, or manifesting hygiene in pandemic times, scents and smells, we argue, are important to think with in sensory ethnography, but also for the critique of contemporary power structures.

Our respective case studies investigate different dimensions of this: Mayıs Tokel’s ethnographic research in Berlin investigates scents and smell in relation to memory, migration and questions of belonging and othering. Ilke Imer’s research in Turkey follows the (im)materiality of rosely scents and their widespread use for affective governing by opposing socio-political actors. Claudia Liebelt’s multi-sited research on the perfume industry traces the transforming meanings and consumption of scented products, such as kolonya – Turkish for Eau de Cologne – in Turkey and its diaspora. We aim to engage the audience by using a rose-scented oil diffuser and displaying research materials, including one ethnographer’s multisensory field diary, and a selection of fragrances. We also wish to raise methodological questions: How to sense and articulate our own and our research partners’ olfactory affects and memories, often overlooked in everyday life? How to make sense of olfactory affect as the invisible resonance of unruly odours?

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Contribution short abstract

This curatorial collaboration is a call for a dialogue between symbolic representations of ancient foreign cultures and the way it is perceived nowadays, to develop a critical work upon the occidental postcolonial point of view by working on time and space, as a form of critique of power structures.

Contribution long abstract

This curatorial collaboration between a social scientist and a multidisciplinary artist, is a call for a multimodal intervention questioning the physical museum interface by confronting ethnographic reflection modes with contemporary reflexive approaches to art. As an inquiry on the limits of artistic creation towards a philosophical contemplation at the boundaries of “Being” and “Emptiness”, it suggests to work on time, space, life and its fragility as a form of critique of power structures such as commodification of life-forms within the modern consumer society.

The artistic production proposes to exhibit the unbounded creation simultaneously in public spaces and within the museum, directly engaging with the collections in dialogue with the urban environment and the museum's curatorial practices, by distorting or reassembling the materials from the research field. This includes displaying posters inside and outside and sculptures created for the occasion, displayed in showcases, incorporating museum scenographic codes, and offering a conceptual critique.

As a dialogue between symbolic representations of ancient foreign cultures and the way it is perceived nowadays, it develops a critical work upon the occidental post-colonial point of view, working among some specific pieces from Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum, confronting our modern and contemporary idols through the ancient form and ancient exotic idols through contemporary modes and imagery submerged with plastic trashes and digital pollution.

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Contribution short abstract

Hot Coals is a participatory and research based artwork, in which a collective approach of reshaping the Scold’s Bridle is practiced.

Contribution long abstract

The Scold’s Bridle was a punishing device used primarily in Europe during the medieval and early modern periods. It consisted of a metal mask or headpiece with a bridle bit inserted into the mouth, that could be forced into the mouth to prevent the wearer from speaking.Originally it was designed as a means to publicly humiliate and punish individuals, often women and marginalised people, accused of being "scolds"—a term used to describe someone who was outspoken, quarrelsome, and did not obey the emerging patriarchal and capitalistic systems.

The design of the Scold’s Bridle, or Schandmaske, normally included animal features and plant ornaments representing the misdoings of its wearer. Those multi-species features carried symbolic significance, depending on the context and cultural beliefs of the time. For example, a long nose might symbolise nosiness or gossip, while a protruding tongue could represent insolence or impertinence.

Therefore, the Scold’s Bridle is an artifact of the criminalisation not only of the female but also of the nonhuman kin. A deep listening and raising of voices to establish multi-species communities is more needed than ever. Hot Coals attempts to offer a space with which to reclaim the Scold’s Bridle and transform it from a symbol of oppression and silencing into one of entanglement, resilience, and collective voices, challenging historical narratives.

––– Unfortunately, the document here did not allow me to enter the full 500 words. Therefore I continued on a Google Drive Document, which hopefully will not cause problems for you. ––-

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1FN6hyOIp9tJanYc5zM4MNlX39BjwQA5SoIPi0Ng8ul8/edit?usp=sharing

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Contribution short abstract

Through the lens of VHS home movies, the film delves into childhood memories, showcasing dance not only as a tool of expression but also as a manifestation of existence. By blending imagination and fiction, it seeks to reclaim agency and power for seven-year-old Sadaf and her classmates.

Contribution long abstract

A Guide to Dance for Adult Children deeply aligns with the spirit of “Un/Commoning Anthropology” by examining the dynamic relationship between resistance and solidarity within both personal and shared histories. Drawing on digitized VHS home movies, the film challenges dominant narratives surrounding cultural repression and gendered norms, offering a fresh perspective on how shared experiences can be reclaimed as acts of empowerment and imagination.

The film critiques entrenched power structures, such as enforced hijab and gender segregation, while celebrating the resilience of women who channel creativity and self-expression through dance and art. It reclaims personal and collective experiences, fostering a sense of solidarity among women and children in navigating restrictive environments. At the same time, it resists reducing these struggles to simplistic victimhood, instead reimagining them with humor, agency, and an inventive narrative approach.

By integrating memory, imagination, and multimodal storytelling, the project pushes the boundaries of traditional anthropology. Its blend of archival footage and animation becomes both a critique of systemic oppression and a testament to self-determined identity. The film encourages audiences to consider how cultural and personal archives can inspire resistance, foster connections, and envision transformative possibilities for the future.

*Please find the link to the film below:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1f6BAQJe9h2p8YzgLyrwe9xG_3OJ_9M8T/view?usp=sharing

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Contribution short abstract

The We:Design project explored digital inequalities in job market access among Viennese youth and co-created an open-source app for job applications. The exhibition thematises the imperfections, the detours and the afterlife of a project out of funding, in an environment that focuses on novelty.

Contribution long abstract

The We:Design project (2022–2023) was a collaboration between anthropology and computer science, based on previous ethnographic fieldwork. It pursued two main goals: a) to explore digital inequalities in labour market access among Viennese youth and b) to co-create a low-threshold, open-source smartphone app for writing job applications. The project partnered with two Viennese institutions: a school and a government-funded program supporting young people transitioning from school to work or apprenticeships.

Central to the project was embracing collaboration, but also detours, subversive practices and non-participation. The multi-modal, multi-paced approach emphasized diverse preferences and abilities. We aimed to demystify academic processes, invite participants into university spaces, and reveal the behind-the-scenes workings. The outcomes intentionally extended beyond a functioning app or academic outputs, highlighting the detours and imperfections that end products often exclude. The closing ceremony exemplified this by exhibiting interactive stations instead of a presentation and emphasizing open-endedness over polished conclusions.

Despite the lack of further funding, the project lives on through further events and interventions. It is constantly changing through its afterlife – also in the curatorial space of “Out of Focus”. Here, the main question raised is can we transform not only artifacts such as an app into commons, but also the “by-products” that lie in between. This is particularly relevant in a (third party) funding context that emphasizes constant (inevitably short-lived) innovation and novelty, thus encouraging the discarding of “old” projects and materials.

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Contribution short abstract

This paper discusses a collaborative arts-based research project that revisits and ‘redescribes’ a collection of rocks at the Gothenburg Museum of World Culture. Upending conventional processes of artefact documentation and classification, the work interrogates the institution's colonial legacies.

Contribution long abstract

This presentation outlines a cross-disciplinary arts-based research project involving a collaboration between myself, a visual anthropologist, and Selena Kimball, a visual artist. The work centres around an unassuming collection of stones found in the archives of the Gothenburg Museum of World Culture. The rocks were gathered in the early 1900s by Erland Nordenskiöld, a Swedish anthropologist who specialised in South American material culture and history. Kept alongside many other indigenous artefacts (baskets, pottery, tools, carvings), they have been sitting undisturbed in the museum’s storage drawers for over a century.

My paper describes our process of re-engaging with this overlooked collection of rocks. While there is scant information in the museum's archives about their provenance or cultural significance, their history is clearly connected to the larger institutional narratives of so many existing ethnographic collections linking anthropology to colonialism, the organisation and management of archives to the administration of order in the world.

This project (also submitted as an installation proposal for the Out of Focus exhibition) calls attention to such practices through upending traditional ethnographic approaches to object labelling and classification. Our collaboration mobilises intimate, personalised, ‘storied’ exchanges of writing and images that reveal the rocks’ significance not through conventional taxonomies, but through embracing their shifting and entangled relationships and encounters over time. We employ exploratory methods of archival research, use Surrealist-inspired practices of collage, automatic writing and ‘involuntary sculpture’, and playfully experiment with the multi-modal practice of ‘redescription’ to theorise and operationalise decolonising, un/commoning methods within the ethnographic museum.

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Contribution short abstract

This audiotextual performance centers around filesharing and digitalization. “Is sharing caring?” is a session based on mixing, field recordings, thoughts, and musical snippets. The stories of Muslim women in Chad forward the cultural understanding of sharing.

Contribution long abstract

Sharing is central to how humans distribute resources. Sound filesharing knows many formats which, due to digitalization, has become seemingly more accessible and egalitarian, yet imbued in social implications and physical lifeworlds.

The sound piece and performance is about listening to networks of students and Muslim scholars. Based on examples of eight months of ethnographic research conducted in N'Djaména, I reflect on the joint wish that exists to share and the digital and physical specifications that encourage why and where Chadians share. Muslim women of the Niassene branch use applications like WhatsApp, TikTok and Xender to distribute files. The objects of attention are panegyrical poems. The filesharing is part of women’s activities in religious spaces. In between field recordings, I relate stories of N’Djamenoise women and blend these with droney ambient that I collected, as a DJ. By mixing music into a subtle dialogue with empirical contemplations and ethnographic data, I explore a sonic, artistic mode of ethnographic telling.

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Contribution short abstract

As part of a collaborative research project on the medialization of Apulian tarantism we developed the 2-channel-video-installation »Santu Paulu meu falla guarire« as multimodal intervention for museums and exhibition spaces.

Contribution long abstract

For the exhibition OUT OF FOCUS we propose a video installation we developed as part of our collaborative research project on the medialization of Apulian tarantism, a cultural phenomenon that was also referred to by medieval doctors as ‘dance mania’ or ‘choreomania’. It mostly affected women, whose seizures and ecstasies were attributed to the bite of a venomous spider. Pizzica (from pizzicare, to pinch someone), originally a therapeutic tarantella dance, promised a cure, with sufferers reacting to certain melodies, rhythms and colours and often having to dance for days on end until they were completely exhausted. Today, tarantism has become an important cultural and economic resource as part of the local folklore of Apulia: as a tourist spectacle, as intangible cultural heritage and not least as a strategy for overcoming individual and collective crises. SANTU PAULU FALLA GUARIRE juxtaposes the extensive archival material on tarantism with audiovisual research materials of current forms of its appropriation in a 2-channel-video-installation.

The installation is based on several years of ethnographic field research by Anja Dreschke and Michaela Schäuble, who travelled through southern Italy and researched archives tracing tarantism. It is part of the multimodal collaborative research project TARANTISM REVISITED [www.tarantism-revisited.net]

Installation

SANTU PAULU MEU FALLA GUARIRE

by Anja Dreschke and Michaela Schäuble

2-channel-video installation with sound, colour, b/w, HD, length 14:05 min.

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Contribution short abstract

The VR film explores the fluid boundaries between researcher and researched, forming an assemblage of co-produced memories and affective encounters. It invites viewers to navigate fluid storytelling while challenging traditional hierarchies in ethnographic storytelling by decentralizing power.

Contribution long abstract

The film serves as both an ethnographic and autoethnographic exploration of the lived experiences of two women: Cigdem, who lost her sight at a young age, and myself, who experienced partial vision loss due to a retinal artery occlusion. Beginning with my narrative as a storyteller/researcher—it gradually weaves Cigdem’s story together with my own, blurring the lines between perspectives. It invites viewers to explore fluid storytelling while challenging traditional hierarchies in ethnographic research by decentralizing power and engaging with critical questions of memory.

The project integrates digital media practices into ethnographic research, using VR to reconfigure traditional fieldwork methods. By layering, distorting, and juxtaposing visual and auditory elements, the film aims to reshape our shared experiences into a dynamic narrative disrupting the linearity of knowledge transfer and seeks to reimagine ethnography as a collaborative and participatory process. The immersive and participatory nature of the project aims to decentralize curatorial authority, offering dialogic engagement while aiming to explore the potential of digital media to reimagine curatorial practices.

Note: There will be two experiences—one in VR and another with a 360-degree sound experience specifically designed for blind people. Technical Requirements: A Windows PC capable of running VR applications.

Meta Quest 2 ( Quest 3 would also work) Either Wi-Fi or a Quest-PC connection cable (Meta Quest Link Cable) to connect to the PC. 360-degree sound experience: Headphones with binaural audio capabilities for a more personalized experience.

Trailer:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WLFSYr4LM134I2qMRPt3Tk6RgVZe95CL/view?usp=sharing

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Contribution short abstract

Living Room is a multimodal, interactive online documentary featuring the residents of a modernist London public housing estate under demolition who refuse the dispossession and social cleansing wrought by the regeneration programme.

Contribution long abstract

Living Room is a multimodal, interactive online documentary (I-doc) which was created as part of my anthropological doctoral research into the demolition of a modernist public housing estate in London. The I-doc foregrounds the analyses, experiences and activism of those working-class, racialised residents who refuse the demolition assemblage. It asks: how is everyday life made and re-made within and despite the structural violence of demolition, and the attendant dispossession, social cleansing and gentrification it engenders? How do residents assert their rights to home, community and the city, and refuse any predetermined outcomes? Living Room offers the user the choice to experience any of the 5 main thematic strands in the order they wish. Each strand represents one instantiations of the demolition assemblage, understood as a bundle of processes, materials, temporalities, and discourses. Legal proceedings, housing occupations, modernist architectural forms, the media, and everyday practices of homemaking are all options presented in an iterative, non-linear fashion via videos, collage, and audio. The form of the i-doc reflects both the open-ended and uncertain nature of the demolition and gives space to residents’ refusal of the un-commoning of their homes.

Living Room requires a computer, screen (minimum size: 14 inch laptop), a mouse, headphones and a stable internet connection. It is designed to be experienced individually. The full experience can take up to 1 hour, but this is at the discretion of the user.

www.livingroomidoc.com

username: livingroom password: Building80

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Contribution short abstract

This exhibition, based on my 2023 MA thesis, explores the identities of migrant women navigating neoliberalism, consumerism, and postfeminism. Using photography as a tool for collaboration and trust, it reimagines representation, celebrating the complexity and agency of their lived experiences.

Contribution long abstract

This exhibition is an outcome of my MA thesis, completed in 2023, based on ethnographic research conducted in Siena, Italy. It explores the complex experiences of migrant women from diverse cultural backgrounds navigating the intersections of neoliberalism, consumerism and postfeminism. The research explores how these women construct their identities within a Western context that promotes constant self-monitoring and transformation, often influenced by media portrayals.

Drawing on my experience as a fashion photographer, I have re-imagined visual practices to unpack power structures and promote a new form of collaborative storytelling. Migrant women, often portrayed as an unrepresented or marginalised group, are presented here as active participants in shaping their own visual narratives.

By integrating photography into informal and conversational ethnographic processes, this project moves beyond static representation. It positions photography as a tool for commoning - creating shared spaces of trust and dialogue where identities are collaboratively visualised rather than objectified. The work highlights the transformative potential of photography as a 'new way of knowing', where the medium becomes a site of solidarity, resistance and critique.

The exhibition invites viewers to reflect on the ways in which media practices can critique power structures while promoting new commons. It offers a nuanced portrayal of migrant women, challenging dominant narratives and celebrating the complexity of their lived experiences within shifting cultural landscapes.

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Contribution short abstract

An abstract, animated film on socialist panel-block housing exhibited in the space of an ethnographic museum brings certain questions into focus, and leaves others out. It is presented with a series of watercolour paintings: still frames that point to anthropology's often competing attachments.

Contribution long abstract

The proposed multimodal installation will exhibit twelve original watercolour paintings that served as still-frames for the film, Empathy for Concrete Things, as well as the film itself. The proposed multimodal installation will engage with the exhibition’s theme by drawing attention to anthropology’s competing attachments, bringing focus to-, and away from, research participants, the ethnographer, the viewing audience, visual framing devices, ethnographic narratives, and wider discourses of power. If paintings are textured, sensory objects, they invite a different type of engagement when animated and projected as stop-motion sequences onto a screen. A film on socialist panel-block housing exhibited in an ethnographic museum interrogates what we consider worthy of display as aesthetic-, political-, or social objects, beckoning the viewer to engage with competing visualities and materialities. Similarly, while the paintings are the ethnographer’s own creative effort, the film is part of creative commons, leaving it open to interpretation, modification, and remix. 



Installation created by Gregory Gan and Stephanie Loose

Link to the film: https://vimeo.com/gregorygan/empathy

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Contribution short abstract

This graphic novel in the format of a zine uses certain aspects of narrative interviews with Ibraimo Alberto, who migrated to the GDR as a contract worker, and condenses them into an illustrated narrative in combination with visual material from his personal as well as public photo archives.

Contribution long abstract

As a contribution to the exhibition I am proposing my anthropological-artistic work “Löwen, Götter” in the form of a zine.

This work is the product of narrative interviews with Ibraimo Alberto, who migrated to the GDR as a contract worker, as well as the viewing of his personal and public photo archives. The product is a graphic novel in the format of a zine, which uses certain aspects of the interviews and condenses them into an illustrated narrative in combination with the visual material viewed.

While the thematic complexes of memory, (post-)colonization, enslavement, migration, GDR, contract workers and post-migrant East Germany are touched upon, this zine offers a medium of biographical narrative and anthropological knowledge production, in which the relationship of the interviewed person and their social environment in Mozambique, to the colonial powers is illuminated. Furthermore, the work refers to the protagonist's self-image and its transformation against the background of colonization and migration. By this means it opens up the opportunity of questioning power structures in the context of postcolonial narrative building.

Presenting illustration and the production of graphic novels and other similar formats as an anthropological method, sheds light upon possibilities to use creative practices as tools to share oral history and make them accessible.

The zine in A6 format, consisting of 3 double pages and two single pages, contains an A3-sized poster when unfolded.

This work has been part of the exhibition “Echoes of the brothercountries” in Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin in March-May 2024.

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This installation centers on the Rhine River, contrasting eDNA analysis with visitor reflections to explore what’s left out of both ecological data and ethnographic display. Evolving with each new contribution, it invites a more layered view of the river and its many entangled histories.

Contribution long abstract

This interactive multimedia installation centers on the Rhine River as both a site of scientific analysis and lived experience. It explores how rivers become knowable through environmental DNA (eDNA) sampling—a method that reveals biological traces invisible to the human eye. While eDNA allows scientists to reconstruct food webs and assess biodiversity, it also abstracts life into genetic code, distancing it from broader ecological and cultural contexts.

Developed through a collaboration between an ecologist and an anthropologist within the University of Oulu’s SAFIRE program for ecosystem restoration, the work asks what gets left out when rivers are reduced to scientific data. As eDNA reveals the biological residues of ecosystem-borne interactions, the installation mirrors methods for detecting the unseen by linking it to the social, historical, and material traces of human–river relations.

Installed at the Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum, the piece also shifts the museum’s ethnographic lens—typically trained on distant cultures and geographies—toward a local landmark: the Rhine. Integrating visitor-collected water samples (and thus changing over time), along with personal reflections, scientific diagrams, and archival materials, the installation invites audiences to participate in scientific and museum-based knowledge-making processes typically closed to them.

It highlights the link between ecological science and the diverse ways people experience the river, seeking to make visible not only the biological abstraction of ecological data, but also the river’s entanglements with human histories and more-than-human life.

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In their multichannel sound installation Queer Sonic Fingerprint, sound artist Adam Pultz and anthropologist Isabel Bredenbröker speculatively imagine non-normative relations around artefacts in ethnological museums and beyond.

Contribution long abstract

For the exhibition 'Out of Focus' at the RJM, we propose an audio work that was created collaboratively during research on queering ethnological museums collections. Queer Sonic Fingerprint was previously shown at Art Laboratory Berlin (2024) and sonically engages with ethnographic collection artefacts, hereby breaking with the visual primary and no-touch policy of museums. The work is based on a collection of 'sonic fingerprints' (also known as impulse responses)—sounds that represent the acoustic properties of items in different collections. These sounds populate a genetic algorithm, an AI tool that simulates kin relations. Through this algorithm, the sonic fingerprints of collection artefacts can reproduce, exchange acoustic properties, mutate and relate to each other. The genetic algorithm we have created, however, does not rely on a Darwinian model of evolution and kinship, but is instead queered, meaning that is inspired by work from the anthropology of kinship, queer kinship, speculative fiction, and alternative biological concepts such as epigenetics and endosymbiosis. Alongside the evolving sounds of new possible artefacts in this sonic ecology, the work features field recordings of museum spaces and depots, conversations with museum practitioners, private 'collectors' and other experts, as well as with people using artefacts that are commonly held in ethnographic museum collections today. Depending on the requirements of the exhibition, the work can be installed as a live-generating four-channel installation or as a fixed-media piece on headphones. If possible, the installation can feature sonic fingerprints of artefacts in the RJM's collection.

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Contribution short abstract

We showcase select pieces from the joint exhibition by artist-weavers and researchers from Iran and Germany "WE ARE NOT CARPETS - I tell you my story." We present two unique personal carpets and their stories, which are experienced in a poetic auditive and cinematic way and a sound installation.

Contribution long abstract

The exhibition and the carpets are the result of the collaborative research project “Weaving Memories” which provides weavers from the North Khorasan region in Iran with a platform to tell their stories by transforming their craft into a medium of storytelling and as works of art. "Weaving Memories" is a collaborative and multimodal project that examines the systemic marginalization and exploitation of carpet weavers who create handmade carpets. The project emphasizes the urgent need for a radical shift in the perception of weavers—from being seen merely as tools of production to being recognized as authors of their craft. The project adopts a co-curatorial research approach, transforming carpets from mere commodities into mediums of expression through storytelling. One of the outcomes of the project is the exhibition WE ARE NOT CARPETS. The exhibition was a collaboration between the Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum (RJM), the Cologne International Forum, the Global South Studies Center at the University of Cologne, and the FWO-funded research project "Weaving Memories" at Ghent University.

For the "Out of Focus" exhibition, we plan to showcase selected pieces from the project, including the carpet "I Want to Be a Gazelle" by weaver-artist Rabe' Rahimi, accompanied by a 3:45-minute video by Tahereh Aboofazeli and Arjang Omrani. Additionally, we will present the unfinished carpet by Masoomeh Mohammadi along with an accompanying audio piece. These two carpets will be complemented by a sound installation featuring nine personal stories from the weaver-artists, creating a rich and immersive experience.