A project in three stages:
Igniting Fantasy – Reading the Earth – Epiphany of the Goddess
THE DISSIDENT GODDESSES’ NETWORK is a project by scientists and artists based at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. It takes as its starting point the Venus figures found in Lower Austria and re-visits them in an interdisciplinary context, as a way of tackling the challenge of future-oriented ecological thinking. In an archaeological, biological and geological sense, the Earth is a deep repository that is today divided up between geochemistry, geophysics and agriculture with a focus on profit. History is tied to the Earth’s capacity and productivity.
THE DISSIDENT GODDESSES’ NETWORK engages the notion of GODDESS in order to articulate an ecological turn that is not envisaged only in terms of technology, but which also combines intellect, society and environment. Opposing a purely technocratic model of energy and climate policy – precisely the problem of the first ecological stage in the 1970s – THE DISSIDENT GODDESSES’ NETWORK introduces new concepts of subjectivity: the Earth subject, the Goddess subject and the Nature subject.
The eco-sophieised discussed and proposed by THE DISSIDENT GODDESSES’ NETWORK is based on the philosophical, historical and artistic figure of the goddess (as dea natura, natura naturans, dea materia, Dea Mater or Demeter, anima mundi). Where they have previously been closely tied to commodities by the industrial and capitalist world, the structures of desire are now reformulated through the goddess, aiming to shift the focus of current politics and economy as if by a magnet. (Elisabeth von Samsonow)
