Claudia Bosse with Claudia Augustat and Douglas Godbold Circular Ecologies: Symbiosis, Transformation! Ritual
Symbiosis, Transformation! Ritual is the third part of a series of talks entitled Circular Ecologies featuring excursive explorations with experts at different places all over Vienna, invited and hosted by choreographer/artist Claudia Bosse. The nomadic talks provide background information on Bosse’s performance ORACLE and SACRIFICE in the woods, which will premiere on May 8th, 2022, in Vienna’s Prater woods. In part three of the series, anthropologist/curator Claudia Augustat will meet Douglas Godbold, professor of forest ecology.
Hiking through the Prater meadows, Douglas Godbold will speak about the million-year-old symbiosis between trees and mushrooms forming mycorrhizae on the tree roots. This co-operation is the basis for the transformation of the vegetation from primordial ocean to land. Today, mycorrhizae form a communal network that interconnects trees to share resources and foster regeneration. Claudia Augustat explains the forest as a place for non-humans according to the teachings of Amazon societies – because that is where the villages of the jaguars and boars are – and reports transitory rituals, in which young women and men learn to form a relationship with the forest and its dwellers. Mind you: The forest can be dangerous to humans if they fail to act respectfully.
INFO: Please bring flashlights and weather-appropriate shoes!
Claudia Bosse lives in Vienna and Berlin and works as a director, choreographer, artist, and head of theatercombinat. Her works negotiate forms of violence, history, and concrete utopias. She describes her space-consuming choreographies, in which she interweaves myths, rituals, texts, and documents with bodies, language, objects, and choruses to create her pieces, as ‘art in a temporary community’. Inside and outside of Europe, in museums, architectures, theatres, landscapes, and urban spaces, Claudia Bosse devises site-specific works and interventions. She is currently working on commune 1-73 with 73 fragments on the Paris Commune of 1871 and on her four-year project ORGAN/ismus poetiken der relation. Her most recent works include ORACLE and SACRIFICE 1 oder die evakuierung der gegenwart at Tanzquartier Wien and FFT Düsseldorf, and the last IDEAL PARADISE in Jakarta, which also featured at Deutsche Tanzplattform in Essen. www.theatercombinat.com
Claudia Augustat is a graduated cultural anthropologist, who has headed the Weltmuseum Wien’s South America collection since 2004. From 2015 to 2017, she was the head curator in charge of restructuring the museum’s public collection. She also heads the project Taking Care that started in October 2019 and is co-financed by the EU. Her research focuses on material culture and cultural memory, colonialism in museums, collaborative curatorship, and the decolonisation of museum practices.
Douglas Godbold is a professor of forest ecology at the Vienna University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences. His main research interest is to understand how biodiversity supports processes in eco-systems. This work includes in particular the relationships between trees and symbiotic soil fungi.