-human -not- natural disorders
Armina Pilav
Damir Ugljen
Un-war Space Lab is a transmedia research-based practice on material transformations of rivers, land, architecture, and the interspecies society during and after the war or other destructive processes. It works as a fluid collective of researchers and practitioners across the disciplines of landscape architecture, film, archaeology, multimedia, and environmental humanities, to mention a few. It is led by Armina Pilav, feminist, architect, and indipendend researcher in ecologies of war destruction. Team member Damir Ugljen is archelogist, diver and spatial researcher; Armina and Damir since 2017 are developing long term reserach program Drowned in Neretva and Toxic Lands, researching war destruction of the Neretva river while exposing its consequences. In 2021, they curated and produced a Toxic Lands public programme in Mostar with filmscreening on the river banks, sound performances, public readings and discussions. (https://toxiclands.eu/). In 2022 they expanded their reserach on environemntal toxicity taking Drava river as a case study. Armina also has experience in the digital curatorial practices that accidentaly were developed during the Covid-19 when the exhibition material of the collective reserach process on migration in Croatia, Malta and Serbia could not be displayed in the gallery space. https://noconnection.riskchange.eu/
Jamie Allen - https://www.jamieallen.com - is an artist-researcher and organizer occupied with the resonances between metabolisms, ecologies, technologies, infrastructures, and institutions. He makes experiments and research, writing and media, material artworks and events, encounters and workshops, talks and platforms for publishing and public-making.
In March 2023 UWS Lab joined a non-institutional education program that’s been implemented since 2016 by the Mavena association in Split (Croatia). We proposed a non-curatorial school that explored with 10 participants from different cultural fields a collective creation of accidental, non-curatorial practices relying on the feminist theory, starting from consequences of human destruction of the Earth with wars, excessive exploiting of the resources and toxicity inscribed in it. The spatial ecological conditions on the Earth defined by human exploitation and destruction went too extreme spatially and socially for all, human and other than human species. It is evident that humans are technically late to plan and design how to solve our environmental disasters and life at risk. Instead (and following Vilem Flusser's suggestions), we need to start to re-create our maps as well as toxic lands, in the present ecological timeline, possibly from destroyed landscapes and existing interspecies habitats. We propose to observe the interspecies life through the species that are the material extension of the well-known living species as are the rivers Neretva, Drava or other, human and other than human bodies. Species here are the prosthesis made of pollution and technologies of war, connecting human and non-human bodies with their waste, resulting in hybrids of the living and non-living kinds. Accidental and non-curatorial practices create and destroy at the same time, focusing on the site-specific materials, reality and fiction, movements and emotions of all participants while cultivating an experimental space of inclusion and transformation of violence of any kind. The overall exploration ended with an exhibition -human -not- natural disorders that exposed samples of the environmental issues of the Neretva. We want to expand this practice questioning idea of authorship of naturefacts and how and where humans might expose and represent destruction of the nature, her voice.