The annual transdisciplinary symposium IMPACT invites practitioners and theorists from the arts and sciences to engage with changing, overarching, and complex themes, linking their diverse perspectives and formulating common concerns.

›IMPACT23‹ explores the interrelationships between humans, animals, plants, and objects – in ecosystems and in the technosphere – and how these shape our patterns of perception through assumptions, projection, and selection. ›Ecologies of Attention‹ questions what powerful phenomena, forces, connections and exchange relations remain hidden or obscured as a result. What methods, tools, strategies, or systems are required to reevaluate these connections and foster productive relationships? Which ingrained patterns need to be disrupted? 

The starting point and vital forum of the four-day symposium are the so-called Assemblies – a series of concise presentations where participants introduce themselves and their work to one another. The first assembly ran under the topic: Ecologies of Attention – from co-existence towards multispecies cohabitation.  

• Selenia Marinelli's research is focused on the question how architecture can transform and actively impact forms of coexistence. By rethinking production methods and materials towards a more sustainable architecture Selenia wants to redefine architecture to create beneficial living-spaces for human and nonhuman co-existence.

• Dan Xu’s work focusses on multi-species interactive art in which animals, microbiome and plants actively participate in alongside humans. Through this form of art she explores the possibilities and limits of interspecies communication.

• Constanza Javiera Ruiz is a choreographer and performer. In her current research she is dealing with the separation and connection between body and landscape, in order to dimension what a sacrifice zone means for the bodies of nature and for human bodies.

• Ekaterina Golovko is a researcher and photographer. Her work focusses on the interwoven workings of the Northern Senegal bush uncovering the human, non-human, animate and non-animate elements and their impact on each other and their surroundings.

A project within the framework of The Alliance of International Production Houses, funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media.