In this interview, reported in the first half of Rai Radio 1 programme POST IT, artist Htein Lin, Sabine Holzknecht, Director Helfen ohne Grenzen EO, Zasha Colah and Francesca Verga, curators of the exhibition Die Fliege is a fly in volo at Ar/Ge Kunst, were in dialogue with Alessandra Tortosa. Htein Lin connected from Yangon, where he was for the opening of his solo exhibition.
POST IT is a programme by Giuliano Tonini and curated by Alessandra Tortosa.

We dedicate this session of Reading Rivers, to the book How to imagine, A narrative on Art, Agriculture and Creativity, about the project Agricola Cornelia S.p.a., a rural utopian commune to the north of Rome, which worked from 1973 to ’81, to bring agriculture and art into synergy. Reading Rivers takes up Baruchello’s rhizomatic way of thinking and visualising place, and juxtaposes the voices of Baruchello and Martin with the texts of artist Emma Smith and anthropologist Anna Tsing, who both describe places as a web of relationships. How can imagination help us visualise a place as an open-ended structure or assemblage?

In parallel to the exhibition programme of ar/ge kunst, the fifth Reading Rivers session lends new depth to the experience of the archive as a living entity. An archive can be considered a system of classification that compiles and orders various forms of knowledge, be these ideas and visions or physical objects. Drawing on text excerpts from the natural sciences and cultural studies, we leave behind the notion of a stable and unchanging archive and allow ourselves to be propelled instead by the thought of an archive constantly expanded by the power of our imaginations, fiction, and interrelation.

After an introduction by the public programme curators, participants take a walk together on the banks of the Talvera, while listening to a 40-minute podcast in English. The texts cover issues such as the role and operation of a geological archive, possible artistic approaches to an archive, and the earth itself as an archive in which soil, sediment, iron and stones serve as major records for climate research. Thus, the archive becomes a place that not only explains the past but also has a transformative political impact on the present day. The walk ends with a brief discussion of the questions raised by the podcast.

Reading Rivers #4 will take a deeper look at the exhibition Plant Plant at ar/ge kunst (27.11.21 – 12.02.22), and at the artistic practice of Vienna based artist Katrin Hornek, who always advocates a more complex conception of nature and culture in her work.

We are located in a drained swamp, upon which a factory was built, due to its proximity to the flowing river. It was fertiliser that flowed through the steel pipes. Until the 1940s, the Montecatini in Sinigo, a suburb of Merano, produced tons of artificial fertiliser. The marshland became an industrial zone and a village grew.

What if we were to understand this landscape as a body and perceive our human body as a fluid organism within it? This relationship between the bodies, the human and the earthly, is investigated by artist Katrin Hornek in her solo exhibition, which opens at ar/ge kunst on 26.11.2021, starting from the local history and the interwoven ammonia production.

The cosmovision of the Mapuche people within which the human is perceived as part of the earth he/she lives on and not its owner is at the centre of the second Reading Rivers session. Inspired by the summer exhibition Silver Rights by Elena Mazzi, which is currently on view at Södertälje Konsthall in Sveden the reading group will investigate this animistic perspective that contrasts with colonial approaches to land and soil. Together we will explore this field of tension and counter-read various excerpts to place them in dialogue with artistic practices and the local context.

Reading Rivers is an ongoing reading group that deepens and expands on the exhibitions and artistic practices shown at ar/ge kunst. The selected texts relate to that by reading them through the lens of soil and its relationship to human life.

Unlike a normal reading group, where participants sit down to discuss a text together, Reading Rivers invites participants to find a spot by a river. Like water in a river, texts have a clear source. Through acts of collective reading they come into contact and combine with new things before flowing together into a greater whole. They cross different landscapes, periods, characters. They come up against obstacles and find paths of least resistance to get around them. The flowing water of a river is comparable to knowledge; it is bound up with solid ground but it remains in a permanent state of flux, allowing new readings of complex contemporary questions. During this one-hour session participants will walk, read, listen, talk and interact with each other on the banks of a river of their own choice.