As a video series and multimedia installation, Notes on Shapeshifters and Formbenders examines invisibly traumatized landscapes. To understand the entanglements of climate, natural and cultural history in parallel, the project creates speculative-fictional scenarios based on analyses of current political and ecological developments, entwined with historical research. Of particular interest is the early modern period during the Little Ice Age, which not only significantly changed the flora and fauna with a climatic shift of 2 degrees, but also had a major impact on the cultural history and hints to what to expect in the near future. The emergence of the shapeshifter in the the video series operates as a consequence of current developments and as a figure for thinking: a model of porous embodiment, of cross-species contamination and destabled binaries that lives in constant adaptation in a close dialogue with its surrounding. 

Chapter#1 THE MUSEUM

In a world where the the glaciers and permafrost have surrendered, Notes on Shapeshifters and Formbenders, Chapter #1 THE MUSEUM envisions a speculative institutional space where mutated, hybrid and gene-edited species are exhibited – not as anomalies but as the inevitable artifacts of a biosphere reconfigured by human intervention. Set in a progressed Capitalocene, where the collapse of Arctic glaciers has unearthed lost genomes and sparked a race for biological dominance, the museum curates the aftermath: a tree storing liquids as crystallized matter for droughts, photosynthetic insects, or synthetic pollen dispersers engineered for a ravaged biosphere.