• ›One Big Green Thought‹. Repair, Regeneration and Rewilding as Artistic Practices in Damaged Environments
Material Form Function | Doctoral Program | Forest | Temporality

›One Big Green Thought‹. Repair, Regeneration and Rewilding as Artistic Practices in Damaged Environments

PhD Project Rahel Kesselring

Tour through the abandoned city of Manheim with artist Silke Schatz and her art project »Manheim calling.« The town has been evacuated and demolished to make way for lignite mining close to »Hambacher Forst« in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. Schatz’ ongoing art project is part of the investigation of Rahel’s PhD project »One Big Green Thought.« Image: Rahel Kesselring, March 2024.

While existing gardens, buildings, and infrastructure are being destroyed, former cultivated plants and ruderal vegetation are thriving in the deserted area. The artist documents and archives these plants using various techniques. Image: Rahel Kesselring, March 2024.

The artist Silke Schatz at work. She uses a ceramic imprint to document an oak tree that will soon be cut down. Image: Rahel Kesselring, March 2024.

In her dissertation, Rahel Kesselring investigates artistic practices, which are set in damaged environments and have plants, trees, and forests as their object of investigation. By analyzing selected case studies from the field of contemporary art and recent art history (by Lara Almarcegui, Maria Thereza Alves, Ursula Biemann, Agnes Denes, Pierre Huyghe, Marcus Maeder, Otobong Nkanga, Silke Schatz, Alan Sonfist), the project aims to discuss arboreal politics, their medial modes of representation, and the epistemologies brought together in them.

From a cultural study’s perspective and against the background of current discourses in plant studies, posthumanism, and queer ecologies and understanding the case studies as artistic explorations of knowledge creation, the PhD project is particularly interested in investigating concepts of repair, regeneration and rewilding and bringing these notions in a dialogue with a wider eco-social context.

Research Project

Active Trees — Knowledge, Technologies and Futures

Hosting University

Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Department of Cultural History and Theory / Exzellenzcluster »Matters of Activity«

Supervision

Robert Stock (Department of Cultural History and Theory, HU Berlin)

Collaborators

Epistemologien ästhetischer Praktiken (Doctoral Program of Zurich University of the Arts ZHdK, Universität Zürich, ETH Zürich and Collegium Helveticum)

Research Period

2022-2025

Private Website

https://www.rahelkesselring.org/

Contact

rahel.kesselring [​at​] hu-berlin.de