Presented for the first time in the context of the city of Prague, A devoured hedge burrows deep II is an interactive spatial installation featuring a virtual game that forges new avenues for aesthetic and environmental engagement.
The experiential and entertaining aspect of the game is presented as a possible way to face complex issues of ecological catastrophe concerning the modern cityscape, where feelings of guilt and powerlessness often prevail. Situated in the Czech National Library of Technology, the project presents an amalgam of interactive sculptures connected with audio-visual content and a virtual landscape. The exhibition invites viewers to explore the interplay between their digital surroundings and the ecosystems they seek to represent, fostering discourse at the intersection of data, technology, and ecology.
The active engagement of visitors is central to this experience, as their (inter)actions directly shape the appearance of the simulated landscape and the evocative ambient sounds that envelop them. It will be open to several groups of visitors–players during a guided participatory game session with the artists. In the game, participants will be able to inhabit non-human characters based on the different actants in urban environments.
Eloïse Bonneviot (France, 1986) and Anne de Boer (Netherlands, 1987) are the Berlin-based artist duo behind the installation. In their work, they look at interspecies relationships, climate anxieties, and world-building speculations. In A devoured hedge burrows deep II, they use different types of gameplays to generate collectively imagined stories about our future within times of ecological collapse. Dwelling on digital culture, technology, and DIY methods, the duo carefully picked the materials used in the work in entanglement with their surroundings. Their experiments result in installations and performative works that engage with an audience differently than traditional exhibition formats. From 2014 to 2022, they operated as the Mycological Twist.
Curated by Veronika Čechová with production by Ondřej Houšťava and Zuzana Šrámková, Eloïse Bonneviot & Anne de Boer: A devoured hedge burrows deep II is on view April 19–May 2 at the Czech National Library of Technology in Prague, Czech Republic.
The exhibition is organized as a part of the program of Jindřich Chalupecký Society within the scope of the international project Islands of Kinship: A Collective Manual for Sustainable and Inclusive Art Institutions, co-funded by the European Union.
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