Presuming that some of Austria’s natural entities have gained the status of a legal person, this project – a practical thought experiment – tries to establish new intercourse with the non-human world.
| location | Vienna |
| year | 2016 |
| filed as | research, film |
| project by | Felix Lenz, Florian Semlitsch, Julia Brandl |
| initiated at | Design Investigations (ID2), University of Applied Arts Vienna |
Description
This project was the conceptual foundation for »Restitution of a Glacier« , an installation presented as part of the London Design Biennale 2018.
»The very fact that we have a word for ‘nature’ is evidence that we do not regard ourselves as part of it.«
Dark Mountain Manifesto
The personification of nature, an idea already put into practice in some parts of the world, lead us to assume that natural entities can represent their interests in political discourse and thus co-shape the world we are all living in. Therefore, entities like forests and rivers not only experience a legal change but also a social shift.
Evolving our research from B. Latour’s „Theatre of Negotiations“ and P. Kingsnorth’s and D. Hine’s „Dark Mountain Manifesto“ our society, and therefore we as individuals, must try to step outside the human bubble and act as an integral part of nature instead of imagining ourselves isolated from the source of our existence. In respect to this paradigmatic shift, we attempt to incorporate non-human agency by establishing a new emphatic relationship to nature.
