BOOK LAUNCH ECO-OPERATIONS
with an exhibition and sound performance by Alexandra Gelis
Saturday, March 1, 2025, from 5.30 pm
Espace DIAPHANES Berlin
Dresdener Strasse 118, 10999 Berlin
The climate change crisis has become part of aesthetic discourse and critical research in culture and the arts. Future-oriented, ecologically conceived possibilities for action are being explored by artists, curators, and scholars alike. ECO-OPERATIONS addresses these emerging aesthetic ecologies and new technologies of cooperation that both challenge and shape a sustainable future, foregrounding disruptions, ruptures, disconnections, dissonances, exclusions, and allochronism. Moving beyond the concepts of “flow” and “network” as a single, coherent (ecological or technological) system, ECO-OPERATIONS instead emphasizes the frictions within asynchronously running systems. The infrastructures and formats of artistic production and exhibition play a central role here, as they themselves constitute ecosystems that invite and regulate processes of sharing and exchange. Artists and activists are embedded in these ecosystems, into which they simultaneously intervene in search of alternative forms of collaborative practice. Bringing together scholars, artists, writers, and curators, and working across a range of disciplines, ECO-OPERATIONS explores this field of tension between global and local ecologies and aims to speculate on where dissonances imply both creative potential and political challenges.
The exhibition by Alexandra Gelis is on view at Espace DIAPHANES until April 28, 2025.
ECO-OPERATIONS is a cooperation between the documenta Institut and the University of Kassel, and the Center for Arts and Cultural Theory (ZKK) at the University of Zurich and the Zurich University of the Arts.
With contributions by Dalida María Benfield, Ursula Biemann, Lisa Blackmore, T. J. Demos, Laura Flórez & Lorena García Cely, Sandra Frimmel, Alexandra Gelis, Liliana Gómez, Fabienne Liptay, Ana María Lozano, Uriel Orlow, Dorota Sajewska.