01.03.25 ECO-OPERATIONS: BOOK LAUNCH AND EXHIBITION OPENING

The climate change crisis has become part of aesthetic discourse and critical research in culture and the arts. Future-oriented, ecologically conceived possibilities for action are being explored by artists, curators, and scholars alike. ECO-OPERATIONS addresses these emerging aesthetic ecologies and new technologies of cooperation that both challenge and shape a sustainable future, foregrounding disruptions, ruptures, dis­connections, dissonances, exclusions, and allochronism. Moving beyond the concepts of 'flow' and 'network' as a single, coherent (ecological or technological) system, ECO-OPERATIONS instead emphasizes the frictions within asynchronously running systems. The infrastructures and formats of artistic production and exhibition play a central role here, as they them­selves constitute ecosystems that invite and regulate processes of sharing and exchange. Artists and activists are embedded in these ecosystems, into which they simultaneously intervene in search of alternative forms of collaborative  practice. Bringing together scholars, artists, writers, and curators, and working across a range of disciplines, ECO-OPERATIONS explo­res this field of tension between global and local ecologies and aims to speculate on where dissonances imply both creative potential and politi­cal challenges.

ECO-OPERATIONS is a cooperation between the documenta Institut, the University of Kassel, and the Centre for Arts and Cultural Theory (ZKK) at the University of Zurich and the Zurich University of the Arts.

With contributions by Dalida María Benfield, Ursula Biemann, Lisa Blackmore, T. J. Demos, Laura Flórez & Lorena García Cely, Sandra Frimmel, Alexandra Gelis, Liliana Gómez, Fabienne Liptay, Ana María Lozano, Uriel Orlow, Dorota Sajewska.

A limited artist's edition of the book, signed by the artist Alexandra Gelis, will be available at the launch event. The launch event will be accompanied by an exhibition of AGUA: Encuentros para 600 Movimientos with an installation of the plant fiber works and the film (agua.alexandragelis.com) for the book and a sound performance by the artist Alexandra Gelis.