PLANT PLANT
Katrin Hornek

ar/ge kunst and BAU present Plant Plant, a project by artist Katrin Hornek emerging from her research in South Tyrol between 2020 and 2021 within the context of ar/ge kunst’s One Year-Long Research Project/Fifth edition and the BAU Residency.

Katrin Hornek’s Plant Plant consists of her solo exhibition and a choreographed intervention at the former Montecatini factory with performer Sabina Holzer (Factory Walk).

The exhibition presents a new film and a series of sculptures that situate the chemical element of nitrogen as the prism through which to look at the history of fertilizer production with its immediate and planetary entanglements. Hornek roots her research into the site of the former Montecatini factory in Sinigo, Merano, a manufacturing plant established by Benito Mussolini in 1924 to produce ammonia — a basic element in fertilizers and explosives. When built, this factory was the second largest in Europe after Germany’s IG Farben and was part of a stringent program of South Tyrolean industrialization and self-sufficiency for Italy.

Using a speculative approach, Hornek follows the technological developments that led to the invention of synthetically fixed nitrogen in 1911, intertwining it with the chronicles and vicissitudes of the factory workers — both in the 1920s and the 1970s. The choice of assuming both a molecular and earthly perspective to narrate this history makes graspable the otherwise invisible reciprocity and continuity across human-, land-, animal- and techno-bodies. ‘We make these fertilizers travel. From the atmosphere into the factories. From the factories into the fields. From the soil into the plants. From the plants into the human bodies. Into the bodies of livestock…Building all proteins, all hormones, all DNA for the world’s populations’ the voice-over in the film narrates. Accordingly, Plant Plant unfolds along this trajectory to arrive at the present-day use of ammonia and the consequences of its production, which provide fertile ground for the expansion of the chemicals industry.

FACTORY WALK
In response to Katrin Hornek’s invitation, the performer Sabina Holzer will choreograph a public event, Factory Walk to introduce a bodily experience, framed by the architecture and equipment of the Ex-Montecatini Factory in Sinigo, Merano.
Factory Walk expands from the research of Plant Plant and entangles the molecular and earthly perspectives with the physical encounter of the site to open the senses and the imagination. It will trace the resemblances between organic and inorganic matter, between the natural, cultural and industrial as interrelated bodies we share and of which we are a part.

Credits
PLANT PLANT is a project by Katrin Hornek
Curated by: Emanuele Guidi and BAU
In collaboration with:
Sabina Holzer (Text/Video, choreographed Intervention), Bruno Szenk (technical assistance sculpture), TE-R (3D Modeling and Animation, Sound), Rachel Müller (Voice).
A special thanks to: REM-TEC, Sinigo-Merano

This exhibition was produced in collaboration with Phileas – A Fund for Contemporary Art

Katrin Hornek is an artist based in Vienna. She has been addressing the transformation and fracturing of contemporary societies in the Anthropocene epoch for many years. Her research-based installations, videos and curatorial projects promote a more complex understanding of the entanglement of nature and culture — most recently at the Riga Biennial (2020), the exhibition, Hysterical Mining, at Kunsthalle Wien (2019) and, until 2022, in an interdisciplinary research project, ‘The Anthropocene Surge’ (together with Michael Wagreich, member of the Anthropocene Working Group). She is the recipient of the Msgr. Otto Mauer Preis 2021.

Green Pass required.

With the support of:
Phileas – A Fund for Contemporary Art
Bundesministerium für Kunst, Kultur, öffentlichen Dienst und Sport, Österreich
WWTF – Wiener Wissenschafts-, Forschungs- und Technologiefonds
Regione Autonoma Trentino – Alto Adige
Provincia Autonoma di Bolzano, Ripartizione Cultura
Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio, Sudtirolo
Comune di Bolzano, Ripartizione Cultura
Dr Schär