Contemporaryearth

Reading, lecture and discussion with Aouefa Amoussouvi & Saskia Köbschall, Daniel Falb and Gilly Karjevsky

The event is being organised as part of the GegenwartsErde network. The network is the idea of a collaborative focus of cultural institutions on the current changes of the earth in the context of climate change, extractivism and digitalisation, on our (unequal) entanglements in them. The network aims to identify and develop existing and potential future capacities of cultural institutions and actors to inhabit and shape the associated crises.
The GegenwartsErde network knows that the presence of the contemporary arts bears a signature that is just as complex as the planet, and wants to give artistic and activist positions a space that deal with this planetary complexity, which they play with, problematise, decolonise and make more habitable.

Aouefa Amoussouvi is a French-Beninese multidisciplinary scholar and curator based in Berlin. She holds a PhD in Theoretical Molecular Biophysics from the Humboldt University of Berlin and is co-director of the Institute of Endotic Research. From 2014 to 2017 she worked as a project management assistant and scientific advisor at SAVVY Contemporary - Laboratory of Form- Ideas in Berlin.

Saskia Köbschall is a curator, researcher and editor. She completed her MA studies at the New School for Social Research in New York as a Fulbright Scholar, where she also taught at the Parsons School of Design. From 2011 to 2017 she was manager and part of the curatorial team of SAVVY Contemporary.

Aouefa Amoussouvi and Saskia Köbschall worked together on the project The Roots of Our Hands Deep as Revolt: Entangled Colonialities of the Green. The project explored the history of these marginalisations, questioned the colonial narrative of the duality of man/nature and linked environmental discourses with anti-colonial struggles. Through exhibitions, performances, discursive programmes and a publication, the project explored how this discrepancy has profoundly shaped environmental discourses, policies and practices to this day. It also sheds light on the ways in which anti-colonial and decolonial struggles have challenged the human/nature binary and the associated notion of the relationship between the human body, nature and 'civilisation'.

Daniel Falb is a poet and theorist. In 2024/25 Falb is a fellow of the Berlin Artistic Research Programme with the project Earth Spirits: AI Animism and Non-Human Poetry. Prior to this, his work focussed on the theory of the Anthropocene, naturalistic metaphysics, aesthetics and poetology. His most recent publication, co-authored with Armen Avanessian, Planeten Denken. Hyper-Antizipation und Biografische Tiefenzeit.

Gilly Karjevsky is a curator of critical site practice (Rendell). Her current research projects focus on urban curation and collective auto-theory. She is co-founder of Floating Berlin, where she curates Climate Care, the residency programme Urban Practice and a participatory lexicon process. She is co-founder of Soft Agency and co-director of 72 Hour Urban Action. She is currently a visiting professor for Social Design at the HFBK in Hamburg.

with
Aouefa Amoussouvi,
Saskia Köbschall,
Daniel Falb and
Gilly Karjevsk