Background
Shaken Grounds explores the relationships between geological, social and planetary instabilities, asking how life unfolds on unstable ground.
Emerging from the artistic research project Shaken Grounds. Seismography of Precarious Presences (2023–2026), funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) through its Programme for Arts-Based Research (PEEK) and conducted at the Performance Laboratory of the University of Applied Arts Vienna, it investigates how seismic conditions, environmental change and human interventions in the Earth’s crust transform the ways humans and other-than-humans inhabit and perceive the world.
Inspired by what Édouard Glissant describes as trembling thinking, the project turns towards fractures, quakes and fault lines as sites of inquiry. Seismography becomes not only a scientific practice but also a way of sensing, recording and relating.
Shaken Grounds: Art as Seismography extends this research through a Creative Europe cooperation connecting artists, researchers and cultural institutions in Austria, Italy, Iceland and Croatia. Through artistic research, site-specific interventions and collaborative curatorial processes, the project explores how natural processes, global warming and human interventions in the Earth's crust shape new forms of reciprocity between geospheres, environments and societies.
Bringing together artistic, scientific and embodied perspectives, Shaken Grounds asks how we can attend to what is shifting and how we might remain with this movement in a trembling relation.
The Zones
Shaken Grounds is structured through six interconnected zones that guide the project’s artistic research, co-curation and artistic co-production. Rather than isolated categories, the zones form fluid and overlapping fields of activity, driving distinct research directions, artistic practices and forms of dissemination. Together, they explore how human and geological systems co-evolve and how artistic research can respond to ecological crises, social and political fragility, and existential disorientation.
