Shaken Grounds: Art as Seismography

forthcoming

Shaken Grounds: Art as Seismography is a small-scale transdisciplinary project exploring the fragility and resilience of life on unstable terrain. It will combine artistic research and practice to foster dialogue among artists, cultural workers, scientists and institutions from Austria, Italy, Iceland and Croatia, as well as an artist from Ukraine. These geographies will form the basis for examining how seismic conditions – literal and metaphorical – shape human and more-than-human experiences of environmental and social precarity. The project will connect micro-organisations, universities and large-scale institutions: the Centro Itard / Volcanic Attitude Festival, the Iceland University of the Arts, the University of Applied Arts Vienna and, lead partner, the Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb. A think-tank, workshops, on-site research and shared curation will culminate in a collaborative final exhibition and symposium in 2027. Artistic engagement with planetary systems has gained momentum, but human-induced seismicity remains underexplored. Shaken Grounds will expand this field, embracing instability as a state of transformation. It will engage with seismography as a physical and metaphorical method and, by juxtaposing contemporary and historical artworks, it will reveal the evolution of cultural and artistic responses to scientific, philosophical and societal ruptures, and shifting terrestrial and social conditions. At its core will be a process of knowledge-sharing, co-curation and artistic co-production, encouraging transdisciplinary methodological innovation and the cross-border dissemination of research. Shaken Grounds will strengthen international artistic cooperation while fostering the sustainability of cultural institutions and independent practitioners. It will advance exchange, shared responsibility and artistic approaches to resilience – responding critically and imaginatively to the ecological, political and existential uncertainties of our time.