SHAKEN GROUNDS – SEISMOGRAPHY OF PRECARIOUS PRESENCE

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The Shaken Grounds research team (Nikolaus Gansterer, Mariella Greil, Peter Kozek and Lucie Strecker in collaboration with Victor Jaschke, Werner Moebius and others) is currently undertaking a field trip in Iceland. The project explores fragility, resilience, and transformation across unstable geological, social, and existential terrains. Combining artistic research, performative practices, and film, it investigates the literal and metaphorical tremors that shape our shared world. Once regarded as purely natural phenomena, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions are increasingly understood as entangled with human activities—climate change, groundwater extraction, geoengineering, and renewable energy production among them. In this shifting landscape, Earth emerges not as a passive backdrop but as a living, responsive body—one that trembles, resists, and transforms. Shaken Grounds approaches these dynamics through contemporary artistic perspectives, reflecting on the challenges of the Anthropocene and the necessity of collective resilience. It positions art as a seismographic practice—an act of witnessing, sensing, and creatively engaging with a world defined by instability. By interweaving artistic, mythological, scientific, and political viewpoints, the project develops layered narratives that open new ways of perceiving and responding to the trembling grounds we inhabit. During their stay, the team will visit geological sites, film, collect materials and artefacts, and conduct interviews with artists, geologists, and earthquake-affected communities in the Grindavík area.

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