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Forest Mind | 2022
On the Interconnection of All Life
In the summer of 2018, Ursula Biemann was commissioned to undertake an extended field trip across the South of Colombia. Many surprising developments ensued from this initial journey in the Amazonian rainforest where the histories of colonial conquest and natural science intertwine. Forest Mind is the result of a series of territorial engagements through video-making, photography, academic research, personal narrative, and the co-creation of an Indigenous University with the Inga people of Colombia. The explorations focus on the intelligence in nature from both shamanic and scientific perspectives. In these tropical forests, human and nonhuman territorial projects become entangled, calling for new ways of generating knowledge that spur the imagination.
The Indigenous science of Ayahuasca as it is practiced by the traditional medics in Amazonia, is largely based in visions evoked by the psychoactive plant. Here, knowing does not only occur from a distance by describing, naming, and exploiting, but as an encounter between minds and worlds. The artist’s research brings to light contemporary Western science that has already been practiced by ancestral medics for millennia, allowing them to interact at the molecular level of DNA. Experimenting with new genetic technologies in collaboration with the ETH lab in Zurich, the visual universe of this project partially derives from biological materials and video-images of the rainforest which were encoded in one and the same DNA strand.
In this personal quest, Swiss artist and author Ursula Biemann pursues her long-term inquiry at the intersection of art, ecology and indigenous cosmologies. The artist book presents a biosemiotics project that takes a deep dive into the mechanics of the interconnectedness of all life, and reflects on the active, performative role images play in merging mind and forest.
Design Studio Krispin Heé
Editor Etienne Turpin
156 pp.
91 colour illustrations
threadsewn softcover
Leipzig October, 2022
ISBN: 9783959056816
Edition Number: 1
Width: 18.5 cm
Length: 25 cm
Language : English
https://spectorbooks.com/forest-mind-en
ISBN: 9783959056823
Language : Spanish
https://spectorbooks.com/forest-mind-es
Becoming Earth | 2021
Online Audiovisual Monograph
The monograph covers my ecological and climate related video works from 2011 to 2021 in a bilingual English/Spanish edition. Rather than a printed volume, we felt that a monograph of my video work needed to strongly rely on the audiovisual experience, including video clips and audio recordings about my field trips.
Over the years, I have widely published on these videos. The texts in Becoming Earth are a stringent version of the ideas and research that went into these works. It includes an introduction The Poetics and Politics of Worlding reflecting on my artistic practice.
The monograph becoming earth went online on March 1, 2021.
Etienne Turpin edited the texts –I’ll be forever grateful to him for tackling this daunting task– and Traducciones Lambe & Nieto in Valencia translated them into Spanish. The project is commissioned by Maria Belén Saez de Ibarra and designed by the El Altillo design collective in Bogota.
Becoming Earth Launch Event May 6th, 2021 at 13h00 Bogota / 19h00 Berlin
hosted by the Art Museum at UNAL in Bogota and is designed and moderated by Etienne Turpin.
Speakers : Rosi Braidotti, Kodwo Eschun, Emanuele Coccia, Helene Guenin, Maria Belen Saez and Ursula Biemann, intercut by video contributions by Eduardo Kohn, Elizabeth Povinelli, Marisol de la Cadena and Emmanuel Alloa.
We took the opportunity of the Becoming Earth launch event to introduce the philosophies who have helped shape my political-environmental art practice to a Colombian audience. In the current political climate of Colombia, it is eminently important to connect the current ecological crises with histories and legacies of coloniality, as well as to acknowledge Indigenous efforts for safeguarding the forest and connect these struggles with a generative, eco-centric paradigm for international action. This is why we invited a group of distinguished thinkers who provide a theoretical context for this critical moment and help develop the conceptual necessary tools to continue thinking and practicing in creative, encouraging, and emancipatory ways.
Acoustic Ocean | 2020
Publication
Acoustic Ocean explores the underwater soundscape of the Lofoten Islands in Northern Norway bringing us closer to the acoustic life of this “insomniac territory” for long believed to be silent. In the film’s narrative, the Aquanaut—a semi-fictional marine biologist interpreted by singer and environmental activist Sofia Jannok—performs the ritual placement of hydrophones, parabolic microphones, and recording devices along the shore to sense different sonic expressions of multiform sea creatures. Turning to the land, she also reveals the effects of climatic shifts on the Sami people, a Northern Scandinavian indigenous community she belongs to. The work brings to the surface the density of signs and meaningful vocalizations expressed by the inhabitants of the earth’s liquid universe paving the way for the new relations between human and non-human lifeforms.
The booklet published on the occasion of the exhibitions
URSULA BIEMANN
ACOUSTIC OCEAN
Centre culturel suisse CCS, Paris
23.02-08.07.2020
and
URSULA BIEMANN
SAVOIR INDIGENES_FICTIONS COSMOLOGIQUES
INDIGENOUS KNOWLEGE_COSMOLOGICAL FICTIONS
Solo exhibition at MAMAC, Nice
June 2020-June 2021
World of Matter | 2015
Publication
World of Matter is an international project investigating raw materials and the complex ecologies of which they are a part. In light of the acute problems resulting from human-induced transformation of the earth and its systems, it is tempting to strike a dramatic tone. However, the perspective of crisis also calls upon us to reconsider–at a fundamental level, and in slow, subtle, and unspectacular ways–how we understand and interact with the world of things.
The investigations presented in this book, undertaken in many world regions and post-national spaces, propose a wide range of aesthetic and ethical approaches to the handling of resources, while challenging the capitalistic assumption that the planet’s materials are primarily for human consumption. By drawing connections between works that derive from artistic practice, journalism, philosophy, activism, and other realms of research, World of Matter provides a place of commonality for eco-logical imaginaries.
Contributors: Nabil Ahmed, Inke Arns, Mabe Bethônico, Ursula Biemann, Gavin Bridge, T.J. Demos, Elaine Gan, Uwe H. Martin & Frauke Huber, Peter Mörtenbock & Helge Mooshammer, Timothy Morton, Emily Eliza Scott, Paulo Tavares, Lonnie van Brummelen & Siebren de Haan.
Copublished with Hartware MedienKunstVerein
Design by labor b designbüro
Sternberg Press, Berlin/New York, 2015
Inke Arns, ed.
ISBN 978-3-95679-083-6
190 pages, color, engl, €25
Forest Law | 2014
On the Cosmopolitics of Amazonia
This book navigates across a frontier landscape—the living forests of western Amazonia.
Situated at the transition between the Amazon floodplains and the Andean mountains, this border zone is one of the most biodiverse regions on Earth and fulfills vital functions in global climate regulation. It is also the home of indigenous nations and a land of great ethno-cultural diversity. Underlying this vast territory are immense deposits of oil, gas, and minerals, most of which remain untapped to this day. Recent years have seen the expansion of large-scale extraction activities in western Amazonia, driven by escalating competition between states and multinational corporations over the control of these strategic natural resources.
Forest Law enters in conversation with parts of the tropical forest that are zoned for this sort of impact following a series of landmark legal battles that are unfolding in the Ecuadorian Amazon, where nature has been declared a subject of rights. The book takes a slow road in mapping the historical, political, and ecological dimensions of these trials on behalf of the forest and the people who cultivate the forest, tracing the entanglements and frictions between the ethical and epistemic stakes these conflicts raise.
Among the many interlocutors of Forest Law, a constant partner was Michel Serres’s book The Natural Contract. Serres, in his own essayistic way, provides us with a frame, both philosophical and methodological, for our engagement with a territory that refuses to be represented by a single, hegemonic perspective. The first lines of this plurinational and multispecies contract are being currently drawn in Ecuador. The book reflects upon this new constitutional space wherein both humans and nonhumans gather in a political assembly, the living forests of Amazonia.
The book is part of Forest Law, a collaborative multimedia art installation
FOREST LAW | SELVA JURIDICA
Artist book by Ursula Biemann · Paulo Tavares, eds
Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum – Michigan State University, 2014
Book Design Brave New Alpes
Cartographies Paulo Tavares and Samaneh Moafi
146 pages, color, English/Spanish
ISBN 978-1-941789-00-1
To order the books contact Jane Goeddeke at Broad Art Museum, MSU goeddek1@msu.edu
Mission Reports (DT) | 2012
Künstlerische Praxis im Feld
Videoarbeiten 1999-2011
Diese Publikation meiner Videos und Schriften aus den letzten zwölf Jahren zeichnet zwei parallele Prozesse nach: erstens die Ermittlung eines geografischen und politischen Gebiets, das für meine Kunstpraxis von Interesse ist, und zweitens das Abstecken eines Forschungs- gebiets am Schnittpunkt verschiedener Methoden der Wissenserzeugung, das als Ort für diese Praxis infrage kommt. Dass ich mich zugleich den geopolitischen und sozialen Transformationen zuwendete und der Form, in der diese in einem erweiterten ästhetischen Feld erörtert werden können, hängt damit zusammen, dass diese beiden Komplexe konzeptuell verwandt sind. (ub)
Umfassende und reich bebilderte Monographie Ursula Biemanns Videoarbeiten 1999-2011 mit Texten der Künstlerin zur künstlerischen Feldforschung und dem Videoessay, sowie Essays von Jörg Huber, Brian Holmes und T.J. Demos. Einführung von Marius Babias, Simon Maurer & Stella Rollig.
hrg. Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz, Helmhaus Zürich und Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.) 2011
Erschienen im Verlag für Moderne Kunst, Nürnberg 2012
ISBN 978-3-86984-304-9
208 Seiten, farbig, Deutsch
€ 35.00
INHALT
Vorwort
Marius Babias, Simon Maurer & Stella Rollig
Texte zur künstlerische Feldforschung
Ursula Biemann
An die Grenzen Gehen: Ein essayistisches Projekt
Transnationalität begreifbar machen: PERFORMING THE BORDER
Körper in Codes verwandeln: WRITING DESIRE
Frauen im globalen Massstab reorganisieren: REMOTE SENSING
Die Grenze loggen: EUROPLEX
In posthumanistischer Schwebe hängen bleiben: CONTAINED MOBILITY
Ölgeografien verdeckt erkunden: BLACK SEA FILES
Das Netzwerk der Grenzlosen sichtbar machen: SAHARA CHRONICLE
Die Ausnahme artikulieren: X-MISSION
Die Wehrhaften formieren: EMBANKMENT
Hybride Verbindungen erforschen: EGYPTIAN CHEMISTRY
Essays
Dem Sehen auf den Grund gehen. Theorie der Bilder — Bilder der Theorie
Zur Bedeutung von Ursula Biemanns Videoarbeit für eine Kulturtheorie
Jörg Huber
Extradisziplinäre Forschungen. Für eine neue Institutionskritik
Brian Holmes
Sahara Chroncle: Migrantische Geografie in Ursula Biemanns Videoessays
T.J. Demos
Biografie/Bibliografie
Mission Reports (ENG) | 2008
Artistic Practice in the Field
Video Works 1998-2008
This substantial monograph on and around Ursula Biemann’s practice provides an opportunity to engage with more than a decade of her video art production and writing. Through a range of essays by cultural theorists, as well as texts by the artist herself and generous visual documentation, this book surveys the numerous artistic and visual research projects Biemann has conducted throughout the contested trans-national territories of the world. She has consistently developed a unique aesthetic language with which to explore her concerns with the concept of borders and the contemporary forms of migration that they produce.
Conceptualising Artistic Fieldwork
Texts by Ursula Biemann
Making the Transnational Intelligible: Performing the Border
Turning Bodies into Codes: Writing Desire
Reorganizing Women on a Global Scale: Remote Sensing
Logging the Border: Europlex
Suspended in the Post-humanist Lapse: Contained Mobility
Embedded Fieldwork and Global Oil Circulation: Black Sea Files
Dispersing the Viewpoint: Sahara Chronicle
Articulating the Exception: X-Mission
The Video Essay and Real-World Politics
Essays by:
Angela Dimitrakaki Materialist Feminism for the Twenty-First Century: The Video Essays of Ursula Biemann
Wendy S. Hesford Global Sex Work and Video Advocacy: The Geopolitics of Rhetorical Identification
Uta Staiger Visualizing the citizenship gap: EU borders and migration in cultural productions
Brian Holmes Extradisciplinary Investigations. Towards a New Critique of Institutions,
Jean-Pierre Rehm Political Typographies,
Jörg Huber Getting to the Bottom of Vision: Theory of Images – Images of Theory, The Significance of Ursula Biemann’s Video Work for a Theory of Culture
T.J. Demos Sahara Chronicle: Video’s Migrant Geography.
Edited by Ursula Biemann, Jan-Erik Lundström with an introduction by Jan-Erik Lundström
Published with Bildmuseet Umea/Arnolfini Bristol 2008
208 pages, illustrated, color, English
complete biography and bibliography
Distributed by
Cornerhouse Publications
70 Oxford Road
Manchester M1 5NH, UK
Tel +44 (0) 161 200 1503 Fax +44 (0) 161 200 1504
www.cornerhouse.org/books
£ 23.50 / € 29.00
ISBN 978 0 907738 91 6
The Maghreb Connection | 2006
Movements of Life Across North Africa
The publication accompanies the art and research project on the politics of mobility and containment in the Maghreb. Since the fortification of the European outer rim and the worldwide measures taken against terrorism, the relations between Muslim North Africa and Europe have undergone major transformations. Sub-Saharan transit migration is now the dominant and undoubtedly the most mediated form of movement in the region; it has turned the Maghreb into a transit zone. The Maghreb Connection tracks the current gates, routes and modes of trans-Saharan migration and looks at the elaborate systems of information and social organization that have grown up around it. In this research, the art projects examine the movement of people not as an isolated phenomenon but in relation to the flow of resources, information, images and capital in the Mediterranean region.
Ursula Biemann/Brian Holmes Introduction, Ali Bensaâd The Militarization of Migration Frontiers in the Mediterranean, Ursula Biemann Agadez Chronicles, Mehdi Alioua Silence! People Are Dying on the Southern Borders of Europe, Charles Heller Crossroad at the Edge of Worlds, Armin Linke photographs from Western Sahara and Niger, Keller Easterling Non-Statecraft, Yto Barrada A Life Full of Holes, Observatorio Technologico del Estrecho Madiaq Territory, Doa Aly Chinese Sweet, Chinese Pretty, Hala Elkoussy Rome to Rome, Raphael Cuomo and Maria Iorio Sudeuropa Welcome – Live, Florian Schneider interviewed by Camille Poncet/Mouhamed Caloubay Massassi esba Geneva: Borderlands: migration management and tactical maneuvers, Michel Agier The Chaos and the Camps – Fragments of a Humanitarian Government, and inserts by Brigit Koch, Anuschka Esper, Martinka Kremeckova and Alexandra Stock.
THE MAGHREB CONNECTION
Introduction by Ursula Biemann and Brian Holmes
Published by Actar (Barcelona)
320 pages, illustrated, color, English/Arabic
Published with actar, Barcelona 2006
ISBN 84-96540-56-1
Distribution: office [at] actar-d.com
B-Zone | 2005
Becoming Europe and Beyond
The book B-Zone compiles the territorial research and collaborative art project on what was to become a part of the European Union: the transitory geographies of Southeast Europe, the Balkans, Turkey reaching as far as the Caucasus.
Each of the three core projects unfold as they follow the trajectory and traces of large-scale transnational infrastructures laid down in the territories of former communist states and beyond.
BLACK SEA FILES by Ursula Biemann
TIMESCAPES by Angela Melitopulous with partners
POSTWAR FOOTPRINTS by Lisa Parks
B-Zone is a research project initiated by Ursula Biemann, funded by the German Bundeskulturstiftung. The research project is based at the Institute for Art and Design Theory, HGKZ Zurich. B-Zone was exhibited at Kunstwerke Berlin December 2005 – Feburary 2006 and at the Tapies Foundation, Barcelona in March 2007.
B-zone
Edited by Anselm Franke
Besides the 3 major research essays, the publication includes texts by James Marriott, Nermin Saybasili, Anna Barseghian, Maurizio Lazzarato, VideA, Ege Berensel, Oktay Ince, Dragana Zarevac, Freddy Vianellis, Boris Despodov, Ulus Baker, Dick Hebdige, Andaluna Borcila, Melita Zajc and Ginette Verstraete. With an introduction by Anselm Franke.
420 pages, profusely illustrated, color, english
Published with actar, Barcelona 2005
29 €
ISBN 84-96540-05-7
DL 47573
Distribution: office@actar-d.com
Stuff It | 2003
The Video Essay in the Digital Age
Stuff It is an illustrated collection of texts by video artists and cultural theorists who illuminate the video essay in its role as crossover and communicator between art, theory and critical practice in all its variations: from monologues of disembodyment to cartographies of diaspora experiences and transnational conditions, from the essay as the organisation of complex social shifts to its technological mutation and increasing digitalisation. Much has happened since Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil, which had marked, in the beginning of the 80s, the emergence of a post-structuralist cinematographic practice defined as film essays.
Content
Jörg Huber: Video Essayism. On the Theory-Practice of the Transitional
Jan Vorwoert: Double Viewing. The significance of the “pictorial turn” to an ideological critique of the use of visual media – in the medium of video art.
Walid Ra’ad: Civilisationally, we do not dig holes to bury ourselves
Hito Steyerl: The Empty Center
Rinaldo Walcott: “butI don’t want to talk about that”. Postcolonial and Black Diaspora Histories in Video Art
Steve Fagin: En la calle. From an interview on Tropicola.
Tran T. Kim-Trang: The Blindness Series. A Decade’s Endeavor
Ursula Biemann: Performing Borders. The Transnational Video
Christina Blümlinger: Harun Farocki. The Art of the Possible
Allan James Thomas: Harun Farocki’s Bilder der Welt und Inschrift des Krieges
Nora Alter: Memory Essays
Maurizio Lazzarato and Angela Melitopoulos. An Ecology of the Brain for Machine Subjectivities
Paul Willemsen: Monologues of Disembodiment. Figures of Discourse in Steve Reinke’s Video Work
Edited by Ursula Biemann
Publisher Edition Voldemeer Zurich/Spring Wien/New York, 2003
168 pages, color ill.,
ISBN 3-211-20318-4
The publication is out of print –feel free to download the pdf of the full publication.
Geography and the Politics of Mobility | 2003
Publication
The publication accompanying the exhibition with the same title at the Generali Foundation in Vienna, documents projects of five international art collectives, which pursue questions of global miration, changing work environments, and worldwide information systems, and outline alternative models for a new geographic praxis.
The exhibition and this book pursue questions around the transformative quality of locations and geographies at a time when subjects are no longer bound to one particular place. Rather than focussing on the formation of dislocated subjectivities due to global migration or the participation in virtual world-wide activities, Geography and the Politics of Mobility looks at the way places are being constituted through them.
Art scholars Irit Rogoff, Brian Holmes and media theorist Lisa Parks critically explore in their theoretical essays the metaphor of Geography towards a new level of knowledge.
With art projects by Bureau d’étude, Frontera Sur RRVT, Macrolab, multiplicity and Raqs Media Collective.
Edited by Ursula Biemann in German and English
212 pages with many images in b/w and in color, 16,5×23 cm
Published by Generali Foundation Wien/Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Köln, 2003
order at: found.shop [at] generali.at
International distribution: www.springer.at
Generali Foundation, Wien ISBN 3-901107-38-x
Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Köln
ISBN 3-88375-673-3