Text by CLOT Magazine
OTHERWISE — Polymorphic Futures, is a hybrid festival dedicated to the potential of artistic research to contribute to societal and ecological transformations. Over eight months and in 4 on- and offline symposia, artists, designers, and researchers explore and share their practices and urgent questions in various formats. The interdisciplinary format takes place between 10.04 – 30.03.2022 online and at Gessnerallee in Zurich and is organised through internal and external events.
On March 29, 2022, OTHERWISE presents its final event, POLYMORPHIC FUTURES, an interactive exhibition showcasing works by artist-researchers Flurina Gradin, Seraina Dür, Jonas Gillmann, Marit Mihklepp, Karolina Sobecka, Bernadette Köbele, Michail Rybakov and Vanessa Lorenzo Toquero. They took part in a collaborative learning journey over one year.
Reductive doomsday scenarios have gained popularity in the face of intertwined social and ecological crises. In an attempt to provide alternative, more hopeful narratives, we set out to explore the potential of performative practices to imagine new forms of collectivity, of being attentive to environmental processes and aware of our entanglements with them and with one another. POLYMORPHIC FUTURES converges and materialises the collective process in the form of an interactive exhibition.
Divided into two-part, you can join Trainstation Temporalities with participating artist-researchers: Flurina Gradin, Seraina Dür and Jonas Gillmann from 19:00 to 20:15 CET. Then, from 20:30 to 22:00 CET, you can explore the Interactive Exhibition, a polymorphic universe consisting of video works, sound installations and performances and exchange with the artist-researchers Marit Mihklepp Karolina Sobecka, Bernadette Köbele, Michail Rybakov and Vanessa Lorenzo Toquero.
Bernadette Köbele draws our attention to our daily unconscious movements, gestures, and speech patterns. Marit Mihklepp invites you to listen to the troubled histories of fossilised organisms as they shift from shells to fuel to climate threads reminding us that awe and wonder always appear side by side.
Karolina Sobecka’s audio-visual installation will ground the making of micro-climates in a heatmap generated from the surrounding area in Zurich. Michail Rybakov begs whether there is something like vegetal intimacy and if we have the right tools to comprehend it. At the same time, Vanessa Lorenzo Toquero’s performance equips us with a set of prostheses needed to recognise our entanglements with non-human others.
