Shaken Grounds
Collettivo artistico - Progetto di ricerca
Shaken Grounds. Seismography of Precarious Presences is a research project initiated in 2023 and conducted by the artists Nikolaus Gansterer, Mariella Greil, Peter Kozek, and Lucie Strecker. The project is funded by the Austrian Science Fund and is affiliated with the University of Applied Arts Vienna at the Angewandte Performance Lab, and aims to explore and extend basic research in the arts. In this research project, a transdisciplinary team re-explores the role of artists as seismographs to train the perception of the interconnectedness between humans and a technologically modified geological environment through artistic-performative methodologies, anthropology, geology, and body awareness through somatic-therapeutic techniques.
Nikolaus Gansterer (AT, artist, performer) is deeply interested in experimental diagramming of fragile atmospheres and environments. By unfolding their immanent structures of entanglement he questions the imaginary threshold between nature and culture, art and philosophy. https://www.gansterer.org/
Mariella Greil (AT, dance-maker, performer) asks through her somatic and therapeutic practices how artistic strategies can support the development of future scenarios of living with the trauma created through environmental damage and actively shape rather than suppress the anxieties surrounding these global urgencies. https://mariellagreil.net
Peter Kozek (AT, artist, performer) is interested in a nuanced yet personal artistic perspective on local conditions, landscapes, their history, present, and future, as well as their economic and social nature. Regions become transfer spaces between myths, realities, and fictional and constructed worlds. https://www.peterkozek.com/, http://kozek-hoerlonski.com/
Lucie Strecker (AT/DE, artist, performer) puts non-human entities at the centre of installations and life art. She considers microperformativity as a way to question human levels of perception (both spatial and temporal), emphasizing biological and technological micro-agencies. http://luciestrecker.com/
Victor Jaschke (AT, filmmaker, interactor) approaches people as animals, with a provoked basic trust in our essentiality. After four decades, he is still amazed by the concentrated images that enter the quiet chamber of his camera: what there is to see when you look back, free from expectations of interaction! A camera makes love easy. https://www.victorja.com
Projects for Volcanic Attitude
The Festival begins by reconnecting with the video research and production of the Shaken Grounds collective, created during the last edition of the Festival. We will attend the screening of the video work resulting from the Austrian collective's research in the Phlegraean Fields and on the La Fossa crater on Vulcano.
SHAKEN GROUNDS, SHIFTING SKIES
A film by Nikolaus Gansterer, Mariella Greil, Victor Jaschke, Peter Kozek, Werner Moebius and Lucie Strecker (2025).
In artistic and scientific dialogue with Valerio Acocella, Arno Böhler, Oscar Fernandez Bellon, Helga Franza, Sabine Folie, Nicolas Freytag, Sylvia Scheidl, Kaloyan Vasev, VestAndPage, Sandro de Vita and Mauro di Vito.
For thousands of years, sacred sites have been built in places where people sensed a connection to the inner forces of the Earth. Volcanoes, tectonic rifts, and deep caves evoke a geological timescale that stretches far beyond the span of human life. Rituals performed in these locations often shaped a different sense of time — one that encouraged a deeper responsibility toward the future.
Today, however, these seismically active zones are shaped by new cultural expressions. Once linked to a multi-layered, sacred view of the world, they now reflect human-made pressures that strain the Earth’s crust — such as global warming, melting glaciers, resource extraction, energy technologies, and waste disposal. Whether and how these forces contribute to earthquakes and eruptions remains debated — but they highlight the unsettling complexity of our ecological crisis.
The artist collective Shaken Grounds traveled to the seismic edges of southern Italy, the Volcanic Attitude Festival and to a melting glacier in the Austrian Alps to explore the overlap between natural seismic activity and human-driven environmental destruction. Their research unfolds through a network of artistic experiments.
This film was developed as part of the project Imagine Climate Dignity, a collaboration between the Austrian Ministry for European and International Affairs, the Volcanic Attitude Festival and Künstlerhaus Vienna. Shaken Grounds is funded by the Austrian Science Fund (Grant-DOI10.55776/AR780) supported by the Italian Cultural Institute Vienna, the Austrian Cultural Forum Rome, Land Tirol Kultur, the University of Applied Arts Vienna, and its Applied Performance Laboratory (APL).
Places CASA Centro Arti Scena e Audivisivo, Via Calata Trinità Maggiore n.53, Napoli
www.casadelleartinapoli.it
