Planetary Times: Reading the Earth and Starshttps://www.uni-giessen.de/en/faculties/planetarythinking/events/eventseries/planetaryworkshop/planetarytimeswinterworkshophttps://www.uni-giessen.de/@@site-logo/logo.png
The Planetary Workshop Series is an integral part of the Planetary Scholars and Artists in Residence Program. Each semester, the visiting scholars and artists prepare a workshop of one or more days with reference to the Fellowship theme and their own focal points. The thematic orientation as well as the organizational design of the workshop are left entirely to the Fellows, and thus the Planetary Workshop Series features exciting content, creative formats, and unusual perspectives. Here you can find information on all past events of this series.
Please note that the event will be held entirely in English.
Planetary Times Winter Workshop Reading the Earth and Stars: Field methods for Narrating Geological & Cosmic Time by our Planetary Times fellows Aisling O'Carroll & Lukáš Likavčan will explore methods of narrating different modalities of (more than-) planetary time through the interpretation of observations from astronomy, geology and soil studies. Over two days, a series of talks, participatory experiments, and collective discussions will introduce and test approaches for reading histories in the archives of rocks, soil, planets, and stars. The workshop aims to expand our understanding of planetary time through geohistories found below our feet and in surrounding materials, as well as cosmological histories found in the night sky.
Date
28 - 29 November, 2024
Venue
Conference Room, Physikalischer Verein Robert-Mayer-Strasse 2, 60325 Frankfurt am Main
Seminar Room 024, Hermann Hoffmann Academy Senckenbergstrasse 17, 35390 Gießen
Participation
Register by November 20, 2024, as the number of participants is limited.
Friday, November 29 | 09:30 – 17:30 | @ Seminar room 024, Hermann Hoffmann Academy | Senckenbergstrasse 17-21 | 35390 Giessen
09:45 | Introduction by Aisling O'Carroll
10:00 | Soil chromatography workshop - part 1 by Danielle Hewitt (artist & historian; London Metropolitan University) - STEP 1&2 (40-45 minutes)
Step 1 - 20 minutes: The first step of the soil chromatography process entails preparing the soil solution (sieve and grind soil, mix with distilled water and sodium hydroxide solution). The solution then must sit for 1 hour.
Step 2 - 20 minutes: Whilst the solution sits filter papers are prepared with a silver nitrate solution. The solution is left to spread across the paper, this can take up to 40 minutes.
Danielle Hewitt: Soil Chromatography: Producing Images of and with the Soil Marcus Fuchs (geomorphologist; JLU): How to Read Time in Sediments through Light Jan Siemens (soil scientist; JLU): How to Assess the Impact of Time and Humans on Soils
13:00 | Lunch break
14:00 | Soil chromatography workshop - part 2
STEP 3 (1-2 hours): Final step of soil chromatography workshop — this is where the soil solution spreads over the filter paper. This step requires occasional monitoring but not active engagement for a period of 1-2 hours.
14:30 | Lecture & discussion (hybrid): Gaiagraphies: Inside the Critical Zones by Alexandra Arènes (landscape architect, researcher; IPGP Paris)
15:15 | Coffee & tea break
15:30 | Soil chromatography workshop - part 3
STEP 3 (1-2 hours) - Set soil chromatograms out to develop. Results may begin to be visible within an hour and will continue to develop over the next days.
16:30 | Reflections on the two-day workshop & conclusion
Danielle Hewitt
Danielle Hewitt is an artist and historian, trained in both Fine Art Practice (Goldsmiths) and Architectural History (Bartlett). Her research and practice are archivally led and develop creative and critical methods to explore and communicate complex and often contested histories. Her PhD, recently completed at the Bartlett and supported by the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain, developed artistic methods of historical research as means to explore the movements of debris from London’s Second World War bombsites both through the archive, and into the contemporary landscape. This and ongoing research explore how plants, soil, and the things of the earth can be read as historical documents, thus expanding the historians' concept of the archive.
Danielle teaches history and theory of landscape on the MA/MLA Landscape Architecture programme at the Bartlett School of Architecture (UCL). Danielle is also a Senior Lecturer at London Metropolitan University where she teaches across Art, Architecture and Photography. She is a 2024 British Council / Invisible Dust Creative Fellow.
Alexandra Arènes
Alexandra Arènes is a graduate architect (2009) and holds a PhD in Architecture (University of Manchester, 2022). Her research and practice focus on understanding and representing landscapes in the context of climate change, at S.O.C (Société d'Objets cartographiques) and Shaā, studio for architecture and urbanism (www.shaa.io). She is co-author of Terra Forma, a book of speculative maps published by MIT (2019). In collaboration with scientists from the Critical Zone, she is developing maps of the Earth's cycles at the IPGP (Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris).
András Cséfalvay
András Cséfalvay is a visual artist, digital storyteller, and mytho-poet from Bratislava, and is also an Associate Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava. After studying painting and mathematics, he wrote his dissertation on the usefulness and reality of fiction. His work delves into the relationship between culture and technology, and the political and ethical aspects of listening to non-dominant voices in world interpretation. His latest works look at the relationship between astronomers and indigenous peoples in constructing the Mauna Kea telescopes, the flight of dinosaurs as a technology for survival after extinction, and the reclassification of the planet Pluto. He is a recipient of the Oskar Čepan Young Visual Artist Prize, and co-founder of the Digital Arts Platform.
Adriana Knouf
Adriana Knouf, PhD (NL/US) works as an artist, writer, musician, and xenologist. She attunes herself to electromagic frequencies; studies the interferences of temporalities future, past, and present; and experiments with entities bio, silico, litho, cosmic. She is the Founding Facilitator of the tranxxenolab, a nomadic artistic research laboratory that promotes entanglements among entities trans and xeno. Adriana regularly presents her artistic research around the world and beyond, including a work that has flown aboard the International Space Station. Her work has been recognized by a number of awards, including an Award of Distinction at Prix Ars Electronica (2021), an Honorary Mention at Prix Ars Electronica (2005), BCS Futures Award Longlist selection as part of the Lumen Prize (2023), an Honorary Mention from the Science Fiction Research Association’s Innovative Research Award (2021), and as a prize winner in The Lake’s Works for Radio #4 (2020). She additionally performs with her modular synthesizer as Selestra, and designs and sells modular synthesizer modules through her company selestium modular.
Markus Fuchs
Markus Fuchs is Professor of Physical Geography at the Department of Geography at Justus Liebig University in Giessen. As a geomorphologist, he is interested in the processes that shape the Earth and the resulting landforms. As a geoarchaeologist, he deals with questions of human-environment interaction and how humans have actively intervened in their environment since the invention of agriculture. As time is a key issue in the geosciences, Markus Fuchs’ methodological specialty is luminescence dating, a dating technique that can be used to date sediments.
Jan Siemens
Jan Siemens is Professor for Soil Resources at Justus Liebig University Giessen since 2015. He conducts research and teaches on the role of soils as regulators of carbon and nutrient cycling as well as fate and effects of pollutants, particularly pharmaceuticals and disinfectants, in ecosystems. These topics are addressed geographically in Europe, Mexico, China and the Philippines. He has studied geoecology and soil-water-atmosphere at the Universities of Bayreuth and Wageningen. He completed his PhD on leaching of nutrients and carbon from agricultural soils to groundwater at the University of Hohenheim and TU Berlin. He is also a post-doctoral scientist and scientific assistant at TU Berlin and University of Bonn.
