Rome
Shaken Grounds
Shaken Grounds,
Shifting Skies
An intermedia installation by Nikolaus Gansterer, Mariella Greil, Peter Kozek and Lucie Strecker, in collaboration with Victor Jaschke and Werner Moebius. With further artistic and scientific contributions by Valerio Acocella, Arno Böhler, Oscar Fernandez Bellon, Helga Franza, Sabine Folie, Nicolas Freytag, Nicola Fornoni, Sylvia Scheidl and VestAndPage (Andrea Pagnes / Verena Stenke).
Even before the Anthropocene, geological forces compelled artists to reflect on existence, the origins of their age, and the grounding of reason. Natural disasters such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions have long served as focal points for scientific and artistic inquiry.
Today, areas prone to seismic and volcanic activity are shaping artistic expression in a different way. While these regions once connected people to a polytemporal worldview, they now bear the weight of man-made pressures like global warming, groundwater extraction, resource mining, and waste disposal, leading to human-accelerated earthquakes.
This almost incomprehensible, yet undeniable, phenomenon highlights the complexity of the ecological crisis, revealing disturbing new entanglements between humanity and the environment.
The Shaken Grounds artist collective revisits the continental margins of southern Italy and a melting glacier in the Austrian Alps, exploring the intersections of natural seismic activity and anthropogenic environmental damage through an interwoven mesh of artistic experiments. They recognize that the trembling of the earth, once regarded as one of Gaia’s natural forces, is now being driven by human interference as well.
Shaken Grounds is funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) and supported by the Italian Cultural Institute Vienna, Land Tirol Kultur, the University of Applied Arts Vienna, Support Art and Research, the Angewandte Performance Lab (APL). The research proposal (Grant-DOI 10.55776/ AR780) is co-authored 2022 by Nikolaus Gansterer, Dominika Glogowski, Mariella Greil, Peter Kozek, and Lucie Strecker.
