Within the (UN)COMMON SPACES project of IN SITU I have been invited to conduct an extensive series of research residencies focusing on exploring landscapes of rock and water. I have chosen places marked by human intervention in the form of extraction, production, consumption as well as places that are affected by our modern, anthropocentric ways of being in the world. I have visited granite quarries and hydroelectric facilities in Southern Norway, mines in Sardinia and porphyry quarries in Northern Italy. I have explored the watery connections between the Dona river and the human bodies of Budapest, investigated the Parisian suburb of Évry as a geological event, and immersed myself and others in the mudflats and rising waters of Terschelling island in Holland. I have climbed the Dachstein mountain in Austria and witnessed a rapidly melting glacier and the extractive tourism industry formed around it. And I have visited the dried-out river and waterfall of Les Aygalades, cutting through the landscapes of former industrial complexes in Northern Marseille and continuously shifting and shaping the materials - both natural and human-made, that accumulate here. 

On most of these visits I have conducted workshops based on the method of Going Visiting, that has been developed through my collaborations with very diverse landscapes. In each place the workshop has been modified to address the specific dynamics this particular context and to explore it from an embodied, curious and caring perspective.

In each place I have gained insights into and embodied realisations about the ongoing, mutually forming relations and dynamics of entanglement between the human and more-than-human worlds and bodies that exist here. 

I am currently working to unfold some of this research into full, site-specific performance- and installation projects, and at the same time investigating the possibilities of a format that could juxtapose material and thoughts from the different places and map out the larger, interrelated patterns and material choreographies, that link them across time and distance. 

Nana Francisca Schottländer

A look back on video :