WORKLAB – WORKSHOPS & PRODUCTION RESIDENCIES
Dates (Period): 01/05/2020 – 31/09/2021
Location: Ljubljana / Slovenia
Organiser: Zavod Projekt Atol
Projekt Atol will organise and facilitate the Sensing the Invisible [Non-Green] (SING) artist/scientist residency. The selected international team’s task will be to enable, deploy and use a bio/chemical/media lab on wheels with a focus on monitoring “acute events” in biosphere. Projekt Atol will organise a mobile residency for a tight artist-maker-scientist team (2 or 3 members). Their task will be to enable, deploy and use a bio/chemical/media lab on wheels with a focus on monitoring acute or chronic events in biosphere. These could be acts of natural forces (like floods, fires, landslides) or human caused events (like industrial accidents, spills, buildup of toxic emissions) that involve the invisible pollutants, elements in nature that cannot be monitored or detected without the use of technology, events that avoid the human sensory apparatus and are easy to evoke phantasmatic projections, fear; events that often trigger an emotionally charged situation of control lost and cracks at the edges of what can be sensed as real and of what we were taught to be real; events that shape our risk society (Beck); events that invoke in us an inherently reactionary situation, an emotional need to prevent radical changes in our environment, trigger events that might change small portions of the way we operate since we want to protect the way we live. What is sought is a situation in nature, possibly outside of densely populated areas, which is often characterised by sensationalist tone in media reporting, bordering on moral panic, with media teams on “day trip” reporting from the affected area.
The team’s task are two-fold, and should always be considering the nature of the event in question: a) In the most acute situation the team will avoid or work against against overheated media pornification of such events. It would perhaps choose to turn media’s skewed mirror in and use its own biopolitical power against the media; In this case it could monitor the creation of on media panic and moralistic sensationalism, characterised by reporting vans rolling in for some cheap disaster reporting in order to show us “the invisible”, just to escape back home in a matter of hours.
Within the first stage the team will gather data and explore the situation on site in order to be able to prepare for the second stage of their mobile and remote residency. The time between the (media) event start will be used to research and equip the team and the mobile lab with affordable sensors, tests and procedures.
b) In the post-traumatic phase , which will follow within 12 months of the initial (media) event, the team’s task shall be to work against the cold technocratic deployment of experts and scientist that mostly come to collect samples, read the data just to disappear back to their desks and labs in the urban centres. The team will stay within the affected area for a longer period (at least a few weeks) in order to be able to work and engage with affected environments, creating art through and by use their own monitoring of the invisible. They will also facilitate on-site workshop programmes both with local communities and non-locals.
Participants: 3 participants in residency (artists and scientists), 20 people involved in participatory activities
More information at: https://www.projekt-atol.si/
