MKFOTO HFG

Today and tomorrow: INVASIVE PLANTS Workshop and excursion Living Library / Assembly of Resources 2 2-3.06.2025 with Prof. Filipa César & Erik van Schaften Forster Guide: Stephanie Bauer Invasive, weedy, non-native, alien, exotic are all charged names for plants that have somehow been firstly introduced to a land in recent history. In this two-day workshop we will look at artistic positions that have been exploring the complexity of plants with a migratory background, tracing their paths that often challenging concepts and politics of territory, origin, belonging and history, and how they can also become tools of disobedience to notions of land ownership and private property. We will look at Cortaderia selloana, Fallopia japonica, Ricinus communis, Ailanthus altissima (Tree of Heaven) and the seeds in the balast of colonial trade cargo ships and their germinations. After an introductory journey, we will engage in a field trip through Karlsruhe, looking for these naugthy species, their talent to spread and how they are framed and fought in our surrounding forests. In the second part of the workshop we will use these species as raw materials and tools for artistic and object production. At the heart of the bio-material workshops is the process of crafting your own personalized materials. Like a cook in the kitchen, you‘ll be mixing, grinding, stirring, pressing, and drying raw ingredients to create your own solid material samples. These attempts don’t need to be perfect or directly suitable for industrial use, but they offer a hands-on, playful way to understand how composite materials are made.

All that is Solid, 2014 15’40” in conversation with Louis Henderson Thursday, 22 May 2025, 9:00 Room 103 “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.” — Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 1848 A technographic study of e-recycling and neo-colonial mining filmed in the Agbogbloshie electronic waste ground in Accra and illegal gold mines of Ghana. The video constructs a mise-en-abyme as critique in order to dispel the capitalist myth of the immateriality of new technology — thus revealing the mineral weight with which the Cloud is grounded to its earthly origins. "As technological progress pushes forward in the West, enormous piles of obsolete computers are thrown away and recycled. Pushed out of sight and sent to the coast of West Africa, these computers are thrown into waste grounds such as Agbogbloshie in Accra, Ghana. On arrival the e-waste is recuperated by young men, who break and burn the plastic casings in order to extract the precious metals contained within. Eventually the metals are sold, melted and reformed into new objects to be sold; it is a strange system of recycling, a kind of reverse neocolonial mining, whereby the African is searching for mineral resources in the materials of Europe. Through showing these heavy processes, the video highlights the importance of dispelling the capitalist myth of the immateriality of new technology to reveal the mineral weight with which the Cloud is grounded to its earthly origins.” — Louis Henderson