“Paranature Research Laboratory”: On the permeation of the nature/culture concept. Insight processes for artistic research in dealing with consumer objects and environmental conditions.

As alluded to and against the background of the current, global ecological situation, the dissertation project Paranature Research Laboratory – On the permeation of the nature/culture concept. Insight processes for artistic research in dealing with consumer objects and environmental conditions examines how newly conceived natures can be represented by creative means and how the image of nature can be questioned using social- anthropological and linguistic-philosophical-oriented methods. By means of artistic de- and recontextualization strategies, everyday plastic objects in a naturally connoted environment become organic-looking entities on the basis of perceptual processes and thus catalysts for developing and questioning imaginations of (im)possible (future) “natures” on a fictional level. In smaller, differently constellated research settings in cultural and natural spaces, exhibition visitors, passers-by, workshop participants or experts are invited to formulate their own images of a “paranature” in dialogical situations or in artistically oriented presentation formats. These, in turn, will be analyzed and interpreted using linguistic and image-theoretical methods, and will be closely linked to theories of the current discourse around newly conceived ontological categories, networks of relationships, and ideas, as currently developed by exponents such as Michel Serres, Bruno Latour, Philippe Descola, Donna Haraway, Anna Tsing, and several other researchers. Moreover, the work is also methodologically guided by Bruno Latour’s actor- network theory. The actor-network theory inspires as a tool for analysis and description: Selected elements of his theory, especially the notion of quasi-objects and quasi-subjects, as well as the notion of the hybrid or the “mediator”, which as an instance of translation already carries transformation possibilities, is productive for my project. Furthermore, with reference to ethnographic research methods, but also oriented towards linguistic- philosophical understanding as first outlined by Ludwig Wittgenstein or elaborated by Jacques Dérrida, the various formulations on “(para-)natures” will be conceptualized. On a conceptual level, the ontological categorization attempts of natures based on relational networks, which the social anthropologist Philippe Descola has developed on the basis of his many years of ethnographic research work, could in selected parts become the inspiration of an analytical toolkit for the “Paranature Research Laboratory”. If one follows the hypothesis that it is precisely by means of artistic strategies that ideas of a newly conceived nature in the context of culture and consumption can be catalyzed and thus subsequently further processed, the assumption is obvious that art or images are especially suited to process the intended theme beyond the purely Western rational logic: Fantasies, own mythologies, ideas captured in language and images regarding “natures” to be redefined, which emerge thanks to artistic effects in the empirical field on the projection surfaces of metaphors, analogies, fictions, new models of representation, narration, play, etc., could be looked at more closely with elements of Descola’s ontological categorization tool in combination or against the background of the actor-network theory and by means of methods oriented towards the philosophy of language and social anthropology. A suitable repertoire of methods will be developed at the interface to the aforementioned disciplines.