Thomas Pausz to Istanbul

Thomas Pausz, a lector at the Design- and architecture department of IUA exhibits a new work called Species Without Spaces at the exhibition School of Earth in Arter Art Space. The curator is Jan Boelen but the exhibition, opening the 22^nd of September, is a part of the Istanbul Biennale, School of Schools. At the biennale, now being helt for the forth time, Thomas has also been asked to talk at the DESIS Philosophy Talk in Istanbul on the 23^d of September. DESIS Philosophy Talks are a travelling series of discussions that tries to create a bridge between philosophy and design theory and practice. In the discussion Pausz has been asked to partake in the discussion will be focus on renegotiate the ideology of linear time and progress through the philosophy of Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt. Trying  to connect some of their ideas with the current discourse on designing in dark times

 

 

 

In this multimedia installation Thomas Pausz destabilizes interspecies hierarchies. The fragmented films and artefacts stage our ´troubled´ position towards other species today. The work samples and remixes existing iconography, borrowing from romantic painting and b-movies with insects. As humans we are abandoning the modern dream of controlling the environment. Since the 19th century, Natural sciences thriving to understand and categorise nature have also separated us from the rest of the species, leaving us alone in the ivory tower of the ´nature observatory´. How can we un-learn what we know about ´nature´ and non-human forms of life? Our experience of other species is always already mediated and formatted by media and representations. To quote Oscar Wilde, ´Nature imitates Art´: insect-phobia is fed by disaster movies, perfect ´wilderness´ exists as a hash-tag on Instagram. Species Without Spaces uses humour to deconstruct Speciesism and fear of others. Re-inventing interspecies relations asks for a new symbiotic imaginary, and designers are at the forefront of creating and manipulating images and myths. Thomas Pausz´s practice and teaching experiments aim at ´re-wilding´ of our perceptions of nature and creating new interspecies dialogues.
Species without Spaces operates in this liminal space.