Voices in the digital animations of "Amazonian Flesh - now it's us!" demand from the viewer to give up wage labour forever. These voices are bots, computer programmes that are responsible for automating work. Humans are supposed to hand over the work completely to the technologies and enjoy being idle. Are bots capable of solidarity?

GOLD—Mining the Unconscious 11.2.2022 till 10.4.2022 Barbara Diethelm, Heinrich Eichmann, knowbotiq Helmhaus Zürich Soft vernissage: Friday 11th February, 11h to 18h dialog between knowbotiq and curator Daniel Morgenthaler: 17h

Around 50% of the gold mined worldwide is processed in discrete refineries in Switzerland. The work complex "The Psychotropic Refinary", manifests itself in this new exhibition as an immersive video projection and a psychoactive spatial setting with psychotropic essences (to activate the Golden Amnesia concerning its violent hostories) and small does of mud, residues from a Swiss Gold refinery. knowbotiq fabulate about the incorporation of gold into all of our raw metabolism. The video Swiss Psychotropic Gold uses digital found footage in a critical fabulation to bring together the worlds in which precariously mined gold is secretly transformed into derivative stock market products, components of high-tech technologies, or libidinous wellness products. The work delves into gold and mercury amalgams—mercury is used to wash gold out of the earth—and emerges into a fictional psychotropic refinery for healing the collective subconscious of gold.

Meshes of bots, cables and digital artefacts, digital animations, voices. knowbotiq in collaboration with Pablo Alarcon and Ira Wilhelm (cable-gems), Nina Bandi (research, scripts), Pablo Torres and Nicolas Buzzi (sound), Anna Bromley, Joerg Franzbecker, Leila Peacock, Sally Schoenfeldt, Ian Wooldrige, Christian Huebler (voices) Amazonian Flesh is a project by knowbotiq commissioned by Interkultur Ruhr and the research project "Reconfiguring Anonymity", funded by Pro Helvetia, the Federal Chancellery, Austria / Arts and Culture and the Kulturbüro Dortmund.

A critical cartography on remote sensing -

What would it mean to look at satellite images of a section of the Atrato River with the sensibilities and afflictions of the manifolded mercurybodies to reveal what they cannot depict? Would it be possible to undertake a kind of contamination of the cartography through aesthetic ornamentation, a reverse forensic, as it were? Is it possible to deal with such artistic strategies with such planetary non-computabilities? What does it mean to offer the technologically unconscious a space within an work such as this one?

knowbotiq with Pablo Torres and Sally Schonfeldt and the support of Fundaçion Mareia, Más Arte Más Acción, Pro Helvetia and the Federal Ministry for Arts, Culture, the Civil Service Austria.

Digital film, molten laboratory glass, AI Image generator, voices, sound The visual material of this project contextualizes the illegal mining areas along the Rio Atrato in Afro-Colombia and the re-naturalised mining areas in Germany, Lusatia (Lausitz). The text material was produuced in collaborative writing processes by a group of artists and anthropologists from Bogotá, Berlin, Lisbon, Quibdó and Ticino - called Entre Moléculas - who exchange about mining, extractivism, remote technologies, slow violence and dark ecologies. Research images are inserted into an AI image generator that "composts" the "documentary" images with the statistics, imaginations and values, bias inscribed in the software.

knowbotiq in collaboration with Entre Moléculas (Sound: Pablo Torres, Voices: Elizabeth Gallón Droste, Claudia Howald, Yvonne Wilhelm, Christian Huebler) and the support of Más Arte Más Acción and Fundaçion Mareia.

Composting Slow Violence - when disruptive contaminating factors in the molecular composting process such as chemicals, plastic composites, mineral salts, moulds, etc. take over the organic processes supposed to form humus - the decomposition and transformation processes slip out of balance - Is Compost an utopia of progress by the Uncontaminated?

We collect the stories of misguided decay, of spilling over of heat, of absent ghosts in the water, of pollutants waiting for repair. We intervene locally and remotely with carrier bags of sand and glass in the composting process that forms the translocal stories of neocolonial extractivism, dark ecologies and molecular slow violence. Different contributions on the fiction of Mercurybodies, sand, alchemistic corals and murky glass beads - forming techno-political conglomerates through language, sound, touch, heat, patience, silence and slow transformation.

nGbK Berlin 11.9.-15.12.2022

Enaj63 addresses the urban layers from the future. The omnipresent digitisation actualizes as a dividual manipulation and division that fragments the human body within the financialized urban infrastructure. Enaj63 notes that this virtualisation of the body and its functions, similar as in Z's Metaverse, is incompletely taking place. Many of the metabolic, excretory and psychic processes are not yet fully captured by the grids of valorisation. Their search algorithms, sensors and drone reconnaissance continue to operate within the physical environment of the city, becoming additional actors in its compartimentalised infrastructure, leaving behind indeterminate body-techno-amalgams . Those hybrid corporealities are discreetly nudged to shift their social contacts into the platforms, handing the financialised city completely over to investors and speculators.

1. AM ENDE LANDSCHAFT (Lausitz)

The planned end of coal mining brings with it not only socio-structural change but also the reshaping of the landscapes that have been formed by open cut mining. This tour to Lausitz / Lusatia traces ongoing devastation caused when entire villages are engulfed by mines, confronts state-led attempts at re-naturalisation and reflects embodied experiences with extraction and its consequences.

Entre Moléculas: knowbotiq/Elizabeth Gallón Droste/Pablo Torres

listening session on the molecular processes of the renatured coal mining landscape of Lake Grosssräschen. Buoys, underwater speakers, hydrophones, sound and performative texts address the dead water, the aesthetic rhetoric of rescue and the volatile mercury bodies of the coal industry.

link to script: Talking to You, Dead Water!

Helmhaus Zürich, Kunst für die Stadt, 2.12.2022–22.1.2023

knowbotiq investigates with Genesis Machines, indigo farming a new form of agriculture provided by the US company Indigo. The company appropriates and capitalizes the Gaia thinking of the biologist Lynn Margulis. Instead of using pesticides, chemicals or genetic engineering they use micro biomes to improve the quality and skills of plants. Microbiomes form symbiosis and, in Indigo words, kind of “reprogram” them. Furthermore, such plants should thus be enabled to sequester more carbon and support methods to stop the climate change. The concept of Indigo includes geo-satellites and drones to surveil the agricultural fields and tries to install deep socialities between the company and the farmers. In a “pompous” setting knowbotiq assembles customary laboratory utensils and critically fabulates the creationism of such life science companies as a monstrous figuration. Genesis Machines over affirms the almost religious belief in the abstraction and fungibility of life.

A space of resonance and remote encounters in relation to affections for the with Mercury polluted Rio Atrato in Afro-Colombia... Poems, texts, fragments of interviews, conversations, compositions, music and memories are being intertwined by fiction and afro-utopian perspectives, which invite to immerse into these sonic evocations.

By

Elizabeth Gallón Droste, Ana Garzón Sabogal, Claudia Howald, Fundación Mareia, invited by knowbotiq in the framework of the Atrato Studies, Afro-Colombia commissioned by Más Arte Más Acción.

With the voices of

Ana Garzón Sabogal, Elizabeth Gallón Droste, Claudia Howald Fundación Mareia: Carmenza Rojas Potes—Bambazú & Gyzelle García—Afro-American-Latina Artist Leonidas Valencia, Juana Paola Palacios, Tarsila Beita, Marco Palacios Mosquera Nepono Werara Dance Group: Ebema Caizamo Domico, Aliana Caizamo Chami, Ana Mariela Dumaza, Dionisia Caizamo Forastero, Usy Caizamo Domico

Recording and field production

Fundación Mareia: Paula Orozco Gutierrez Music production: Yei Moreno Assembled by: Pablo Torres

The project Thulhu thu thu, before the sun harms you explores and delves into past, present and future material narratives of the peat bogs in the Scottish Highlands. It develops performative and sonic acts of 'Collective Sensing' - groups connected by a multiform object made of woven plant fibres (thulhu) to capture the vibrations and asymmetrical violence inscribed in the landscape. The project was developed in collaboration with Lamin Fofana, Ayesha Hameed and Elvin Brandhi, Fundación Mareia, Margarida Mendes, Pedro Neves Marquez and Raw Forest, Odete, Romy Rüegger.

The fluid nature of metal, its mutability, its capacity to morph from solid to liquid as it flows through earth, just as it flows through markets and exchanges. All metal exists in a proto-material manifestation of desire—this is its alchemical state. The alchemic desire enables a metallurgic comprehension of the forces and flows of capitalism and power, through which we can understand the ongoing processes on which metal, as themost powerful catalyst in the world, operates. Metal is, in fact, the conductor of all matter. (Füsun Türetken, Alchemic Desire)