La fermentation de la terre, Treignac Projet

I’ve just spent a week lacto-fermenting local things underground with Valentina Karga and a host of micro-organisms at Treignac Projet, in the south of France. It happened as part of Entanglements, Embodiments, Positions, curated by Jussi Koitela and continuing his work around Karen Barad’s material-discursive intra-actions. La fermentation de la terre was our…

mushroom days at the end of the world

This (european) autumn & winter I was lucky to be in Finland – where it gets really cold – in the Australia Council residency at HIAP, Suomenlinna, a 19th century fortress island in the central harbour of Helsinki. I arrived in September, just in time for the last weeks of…

Making Time as book

Making Time made a book! It’s a preserving cookbook, collection of notes and correspondences, set of drawings, reflection on the project so far and a few more things in between. We did it all by hand, from producing content to (riso) printing to cutting and stitching, which meant it took…

Micro-economies and self-publishing in Mexico

Some months ago I was invited to join Marjetica Potrč’s ‘Design for the Living World’ social design class in Mexico. I worked with them in Belgrade a few years ago, where I was struck by their total immersion of pedagogy with life and social action (they’ve just been nominated for a…

Sitting around digital fires | (no)action(no)space in Schloss—Post

Last year I took part in the beginnings of (no)action(no)space, a collaborative research platform distributed over time and space, involving a shifting group of about 7 artists and initiated by Laura Bernhardt. We first gathered around a ‘real’ fire at the Bodensee lake in spring; some months later these shared conversations and…

Paris project

In the second half of 2015 I was a resident at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, beginning research for a new project, learning French and helping out at atelier d’architecture autogerée’s R-Urban community resilience project (currently facing down the bulldozers). Here’s the blog for that slowly percolating work, more coming…

Plan Bienen: Sharing (in) the more-than-human city

[Text by Tessa Zettel & Sumugan Sivanesan; originally published 2016 in A Peer Reviewed Journal About_Excessive Research, Vol. 5, Issue 1. DARC (Digital Aesthetics Research Centre), Aarhus University, Denmark, 2016.] o  This text circulates in and around a series of honey trades, conducted by the authors as a form of artistic…

Disappearing Bees

Tessa Zettel & Sumugan Sivanesan [A version of this text was published in un Magazine 9.1, June 2015. It is part of an ongoing research project, Plan Bienen, begun by the authors at ZK/U – Zentrum für Kunst and Urbanistik, Berlin, in 2014.] At the annual beekeepers’ fair in Berlin’s Prinzessinnengarten, one Imkerin…

Plan Bienen in un 9.1

Plan Bienen, a project I’ve been developing since last year with Sumugan Sivanesan in Berlin, has led to a text co-written for the forthcoming edition of un Magazine 9.1 – for those of you South of the border it’s being launched in Melbourne on Thurs 11 June, 6pm at Gertrude Contemporary.

Making Time at Artspace

Last month the NSW Visual Arts Fellowship (Emerging) opened at Artspace. As a finalist in the show – which continues until 12 Dec – I’ve been presenting Making Time in various locations in Woolloomooloo, working with the Reg Murphy Activity Club in October, and this Sunday, with the Woolloomooloo Community Garden just around the corner.…