2021-09-16, Volkart Schmidt, Yvonne, Smite, Rasa, Rissanen, Kaisa, Gessler, Arthur

What are volatile particles, how can we measure and feel them? And why do we experience a fragrant forest as a consequence of climate heating? In the 3D installation „Atmospheric Forest“, which is exhibited at „Critical Zones“, the artists Rasa Smite/Raitis Smits focused on the phenomenon of volatile emissions from trees and their visualization. In the course of Rasa Smites collaboration with the Swiss Federal Institute of Forest Snow and Landscape Research WSL she learned that under the threat of climate change, certain trees do not only transform CO2 into oxygen, but also emit various gases into the atmosphere: forests breathe. Taking this artistic work as a point of departure, this issue of the Terrestrial University will handle in-depth the scientific and artistic research of fragrant forests, using the Pfynwald Pine forest of Swiss Alps as a case study. This 10’000 year old forest in the Valais, southwest Switzerland, is unique: As one of the first long term and large outdoor laboratories worldwide, it has been under close surveillance for more than 20 years. The researchers and partners talk about tools, methods and scale of fragrant forests affecting the climate change alongside with the question how art translates the invisible and alarming interactions between the forest and atmospheric ecosystems into a sensible environment affecting people for system change.

2021-03-18, Volkart Schmidt, Yvonne, Spillmann, Peter

Going to the Limits of Your Longing, Research as Another Name for Care, the spring 2021 Master symposium at Art Institute HGK FHNW, in Basel, will be devoted to ideas and forms of artistic research that center art as a practice in service of the social. With this symposium we will revisit certain moments in our recent history and present of researching, producing, and exhibiting art in the name of such beliefs, namely social justice. To that end, this gathering will be dedicated to the memory of Marion von Osten, the artist, curator, researcher, writer, and teacher whose curatorial, theoretical, and altogether empathic approaches to the medium of exhibition-making revolved around artistic research devoted to the collective. In von Osten’s memory, and under her exemplary influence, we will examine the moments when exhibitions became filled with archives, with documents of testimonies and documentaries of testifying moving images. Institutions suddenly saw the need to create collective collections—like the Former West curatorial research project, for example. It was the beginning of a transformation that, since then, has undergone many turns and many faces, but that remains at the core of understanding art as a practice that serves the social and all the forms of justice (and its opposite) that enumerate it.

2019-03-08, Volkart Schmidt, Yvonne, Hoffmann, Claire, Veillat, Aline

La définition de la culture s’est établie avec le travail de la terre et marque un jalon important dans l’histoire des relations des humains avec la nature. Face à la dégradation de la biodiversité, à la privatisation des grains, à la pollution et au changement climatique, diversifier les formes d’agriculture, trouver d’autres manières d’utiliser les ressources, redécouvrir des savoirs oubliés ou utiliser autrement les possibilités de la numérisation sont des exigences urgentes pour la société, la technologie et la politique. Nombre d’artistes, chercheurs, architectes ou designers se penchent sur ces problématiques, utilisant diverses méthodes, subversives et visionnaires.