Dino-Henne-Ei

<Lecture Performance, dt.>

Julia Grillmayr and Christina Gruber
Friday, June 4, 2021
2.00 p.m. – 3.30 p.m.
Location: Open University, Urfahrmarkt area

Abstract

We contemplate “the wild.” At best on repeat, looking back towards the geological age named after the human species. – An era in which the “the wild” is found because “the wild” has been lost. We are undertaking an “archeology of the future,” revealing uncanny contemporaries: Archosauria (birds) and Acipenseridae (sturgeons) that share this layer of earth with dinosaurs of a very different nature. We remove layers and unearth fabulous fossils. The colonial, racist, and misogynistic residues that stick to the “the wild” idea do not come clean. But the fascination surrounding this idea and why it also appears in current eco-feminisms is, to some extent, exposed.

Biographies

Julia Grillmayr is a Vienna- and Linz-based cultural studies scholar, journalist, radio maker, and science communicator. She holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Vienna and is currently working on her first Post Doc project, Science Fiction, Fact & Forecast, at Kunstuniversität Linz. She is the creator of the radio broadcast Superscience Me. The rest of the time, she spends in muddy Danubian wetlands and her tap shoes.

Christina Gruber is an aquatic ecologist, visual artist, and sturgeon caretaker in Vienna. She researches at the Institute of Hydrobiology at the University of Natural Resources and Applied Life Sciences Vienna for the LIFE Sterlet project to strengthen wild populations of sturgeon in the Danube River. In 2018, she published From Mud To Outer Space. Her book navigates along large rivers and uses a speculative narrative to explore interspecies relationships, alternative forms of care, political resilience, and ecological pedagogy.