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.

>>>link: Sand Box Patches, collective compost bin in progress

>>>link: Collective Listening, audio and video

knowbotiq with Pablo Torres and Sally Schonfeldt. 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 reflect in this new work on remote sensing technologies, such as high-resolution satellite images and contamination detectors, which allow "discrete" interventions, for example at the mercury contaminated Rio Atrato, without physically going to the site in question. But what can such images, which usually form the basis for economic and political decisions, actually show us?

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!

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 aetheric essences and mud, residue 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.

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.