Speech by curator Felicitas Thun-Hohenstein, Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and head of research project THE DISSIDENT GODDESSES’ NETWORK, for the opening at the Museum of Natural History Vienna:

in the exhibition When the museum reopens on Wednesday, May 20th, you will also be able to visit Löss – Eine Frau in der Landschaft. In the wake of the outbreak of COVID-19, this exhibition brings to our minds the utopia of a post-Anthropocene, in which tomorrow could be different from today – and must be different from today.

Like tightrope walkers, here we are, poised over the abyss of what is possible. We must pace out the extremes. In Elisabeth Samsonow’s artistic practice, this grammar of walking is transformed by a continuous, radical experimental method of going too far, of overstepping, to become a form of resistance, a direct method of developing history. In Frau in der Landschaft, as a performative complex of works, Samsonow assigns a creative status to this walking, the observant treading and pacing out of the Loess landscape in Lower Austria as a chronological archive of geology, archaeology and ecology, so opening up a gap between worlds for us, a notion of being that Deborah Bird Rose would call an “ecological humanity”. In Frau in der Landschaft, as a performative complex of works, Samsonow assigns a creative status to this walking, the observant treading and pacing out of the Loess landscape in Lower Austria as a chronological archive of geology, archaeology and ecology, so opening up a gap between worlds for us, a notion of being that Deborah Bird Rose would call an “ecological humanity”. The walker mutates into an “apparatus” scanning the landscape, exploring co-presences with the earth and entering into spherical, long overdue symbioses, somewhere “between” alliances and ties. The narrative of this seemingly unbridled longing, which seeks to broaden the doors of perception, presents itself as an intervention – sometimes with a grounded seriousness, sometimes with ambulatory humour.

Elisabeth Samsonow’s alternative thought path through the landscape follows an ecological interest, and does not try to change the landscape along the way – the only intervention made is walking, taking photographs, mapping. The peripatetic process happening here strengthens the awakening, and prepares a way of thinking that evolves in a slow, careful advance: step by step, wherever possible discerning everything, not missing anything, since the most important thing – as becomes evident – could be found in the smallest detail of information.

The awakening is followed by a remembering, pacing through and letting go as a necessary condition for renewal, for reaching the utopia of hope. The COVID-19 crisis is showing us what is no longer sustainable, what must change. For it to bring about a change – as is revealed in the Frau in der Landschaft – we need a way of thinking that goes beyond, that stretches and pulls across the ages.