Discussion with Markus Gönitzer, Rose-Anne Gush, and Philipp Sattler in the context of the exhibition Denise Ferreira da Silva & Arjuna Neuman. Ancestral Clouds Ancestral Claims.
Free admission.
The discussion will be held in English.
In How Does One Get to Own a Mountain?! we discuss a landscape of memory and property that stretches along the mountain ranges of Carinthia in Southern Austria. This landscape holds the site of a future lithium mine that opens questions concerning neo-colonial modes of extraction on-shored to European soil, NS heritage of agricultural property and fascist concepts of nature, the impact of climate breakdown in the region, and counter-concepts found in Partisan resistance and anti-fascist practices along these borderlands.
Markus Gönitzer is a cultural worker and curator of discourse. Since 2021 he has been a member of the management collective and artistic directorate of Forum Stadtpark in Graz, chairman of Verein/Društvo Peršman, and part of the project coordination of the initiative WerkStattMuseum at the Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky Haus in Klagenfurt/Celovec. His principal fields of work comprise culture(s) of remembrance, theories of utopia and transformation, as well as art and cultural initiatives as vehicles of social change.
Rose-Anne Gush is a writer and educator. She is currently Assistant Professor at the Institute for Contemporary Art at TU Graz. Her postdoctoral research explores the politics of form, hybridity and ecology in Global Contemporary Art and its prehistories. She has a forthcoming article on Melanie Gilligan’s Films Against Capitalism in Backyard Economy, FKW // Zeitschrift für Geschlechterforschung und visuelle Kultur, and her monograph, Artistic Labour of the Body, is forthcoming in the Historical Materialism book series with Brill (2024) and Haymarket. She regularly writes art criticism for various publications, recently including Brand-New-Life Magazine, Camera Austria and Artforum.
Philipp Sattler is a researcher, artist, educator and writer with a background in Architecture, Economics, as well as English and American Studies. He is a PhD student at the Royal College of Art (RCA), School of Architecture, London, and Assistant Professor at IZK – Institute for Contemporary Art, Faculty of Architecture, Graz University of Technology.
His transdisciplinary work concerns the material and conceptual conditions, spatial manifestations and ecological devastations of agriculture, mining, building and property between the rural and the urban. His work currently is focusing on past and present histories of fascism in Austria. He is a founding member of Sans Souci Collective and Das Gesellschaftliche Ding, who operate and curate the exhibiting space Annenstrasse 53 in Graz, Austria.