A collateral project of the ViennaBiennale 2021 Climate Care – Planet Love
The Dissident Goddesses’ Land In the summer, a group of artists and culture workers founded the four-hectare „Land of the Goddesses“ in the Pulkau Valley. This is biodiverse land covered with vineyards, forests, overgrown scrubland, wasteland and fallow. The land will be used for THE DISSIDENT GODDESSES’ NETWORK – a research project at the Academy of Fine Arts – as a laboratory for an investigation in the sense of contemporary Eco Art and deep ecology practice.
A Mongolian yurt on a Palaeolithic site near Alberndorf, Lower Austria serves as an in-situ parliament for encounters, projects, storytelling and community teaching. The aim is to facilitate measures against climate change: targeted planting, water detection, improvement of humus. The aim is to increase and densify green matter, while at the same time diversifying the flora as much as possible and creating water areas through the wise use of underground water reserves and gentle (re)cultivation or assistance with wild growth, by the propagation of wild varieties, for example. Consulting partners include farmers, hunters, vine nursery owners, hydrologists, geologists, ecologists, philosophers, sociologists and biologists. These events interlink different plateaus of knowledge: situated knowledge becomes the concept for a node connecting knowledge related to the land through practice and observation with scientific and artistic arguments. To the extent that this interlinking takes place, the land is removed from the grasp of non-localised, centralised, purely market- and capital-oriented ‘objectified’ regulations. The land thus becomes a non-environment; it becomes a psycho-physical partner in a sympoetic matrix – a land of goddesses.
For this reason, the programme of the collateral project in the sense of a multidimensional ecology includes storytelling, art and guest meals as well as humus workshops, water searching and well drilling and lectures by experts.
WITH
Das Holundergedicht (performance group Hadres), Bernhard Schmid (Schmid vine nursery) and the Hadres water group, Alberndorf hunters‘ association Robert Diem and Karl Koran, permaculture farmers Heinrich Ledebur and Franz North Hadres, Renate Ganser (herb specialist), Angela Melitopoulos (video artist und activist) and Kerstin Schroedinger (artist), Roman Wittmann (postman und geologist), Elisabeth von Samsonow (artist und activist), among others.