Text for Istanbul Design Biennale Installation at ARTER ART SPACE:

What if humans abandoned the modern dream of controlling the environment?

In this multimedia installation for the Istanbul Design Biennale Thomas Pausz destabilizes interspecies hierarchies.The fragmented films and artefacts stage our ´troubled´ position towards other species today. The work samples and remixes existing iconography, borrowing from romantic painting and b-movies with killer plants.

Since the 19th century, Natural sciences thriving to understand and categorise nature have also separated us from the rest of the species, leaving us alone in the ivory tower of the ´nature observatory´. How can we un-learn what we know about ´nature´ and non-human forms of life? Our experience of other species is always already mediated and formatted by media and representations. To quote Oscar Wilde, ´Nature imitates Art´: insect-phobia is fed by disaster movies, perfect ´wilderness´ exists as a hash-tag on Instagram. Species Without Spaces uses humour to deconstruct Speciesism and fear of others. Re-inventing interspecies relations asks for a new symbiotic imaginary, and designers are at the forefront of creating and manipulating images and myths.Thomas Pausz´s practice and teaching experiments aim at ´re-wilding´ of our perceptions of nature and creating new interspecies dialogues.
Digital Invasives operates in this liminal space.

“the natural world is a dynamic system, so choosing which past to return to is entirely subjective and fraught with difficulties.”
Chris D Thomas, Inheritors of The Earth

Exhibited at the 4th Istanbul Design Biennale, 2018.
Exhibition curated by Jan Boelen, Nadine Botha and Vera Sachetti.