2024: Uppvaknandet / The awakening

Anna Jurkiewicz


Anna is a transdisciplinary artist from Poland based in Graz, Austria, working with sound, video, voice and writing. Her artistic practice often comes with the intention of developing, strengthening and promoting interspecies empathy. She engages in artistic research around non-human timelines, architectures and interactions in various locations and contexts. Some of her projects focus on karst landscapes created by water through deep-time processes of dissolution and sedimentation. Others are centered on multispecies, emergent relations that produce space and habitats.

In the spring residency the awakening Anna zoomed in to observe the springtails, the very small soft bodies of Åsen. As far as we know springtails are part of the soil mesofauna and are free-living organisms that prefer moist conditions. They live on the surface of soil or just under it. In spring the chances (if ever) for humans to meet them is specially good, because of the humidity in the shifting lifes from hibernation to the awakening.

Anna observes the springtails with the help of a micro objective to come close in relation. Driven by curiosity of their existence, the hidden knowledge of their presence amplifies through her own body and art. Could this embodied experience become a bridge to practice multispecies empathy? Anna says that learning from springtail is openness to kaos – adapting to changes by the consequence of the situation. Easiness of move and living with the tide or shift in a landscape of humidity.

In her work ”Becoming Åsen” she made this score of microwalks where the human body follows pathways of presence and what unfolds (if you want) is reflections of coexistence and wordless language where we enter a state of willingness to becoming more than human. As part of the residency Anna compiled the ”Soft Bodied Atlas of Åsen”, a guide with mapping of some of the springtails habitats found on the site. As the seasons change the springtail habitats move/disappear and the map's guidance function will be dissolved. In this project we (humans) practice the fear of kaos – fluidity, open borders, randomness, having little control and so on. In times of multi-crises caused by human behaviour and anthropocentrism, this posthuman practice want to be a joint to seek empathy, to be flexible and adapt to change.

Anna will continue her work with Åsen and be back for the closing act of her spring residency 2025.

The project was supported by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, www.iam.pl.

Website: annajurkiewicz.bandcamp.com
Instagram: @totaistota


A project initiated by

With support from