It is time to return to Earth. For billions of years, our Earth has systematically sustained life, pulsing with the technologies of ecologies that sustain hummingbirds, weeping willows, three-hearted octopuses, mycelial networks, and bioluminescence. But now, Earth is aching under the weight of extraction and neglect, unleashed across mere centuries of accelerating industry. It is time to return to Earth.
Our addiction to innovation, progress, and efficiency—to the techno-utopian promise of endless expansion—has depleted the planet’s life support systems. To return to Earth is to re-centre the Earth’s living systems as the foundation of our intelligence, rather than merely the ground to be mined for human ambition.
The exhibition Mensch Maschine: Return to Earth seeks to reactivate the climate conversation through dissonant material, symbolic, and cosmological encounters across different times, speculations, and origin stories. Eight artists and artist duos explore the cracks between worlds to meet our entangled planet: from automated, techno-animal wars to the intelligences of community, from ancestral wisdoms to ecological technologies. The exhibition redirects technologies of violence toward artistic expression, resisting singular hegemonic narratives while embracing multiple poetics of image-making and story-telling, from hybrid creatures to scattered landscapes.
Through active forms of retreat and resistance, can we begin to gather radical positions, tones that move toward symbiotic systems, where ecology and technology are approached as interwoven, living communities rather than separate disciplines? The question is not how to hope, but how to come together in shared intellectual joy, sitting with complexity while embracing empathy and play.
Artistic Positions
E-WERK Luckenwalde, JUNGE AKADEMIE Akademie der Künste and E.ON Foundation are pleased to present the group exhibition of Mensch Maschine fellows 2024–2025 at E-WERK featuring Assem Hendawi, Emerson Culurgioni & Viktor Brim, hn. lyonga & Safiya Yon, Kira Xonorika, Maithu Bùi, Rae Hsu and Sonya Isupova. Together, they will also present Mensch Maschine Musik on 19 September at Stadtbad Live Luckenwalde featuring Bendik Giske, Discovery Zone and Nazanin Noori.
Mensch Maschine: Return to Earth presents eight artists and artist duos who have developed projects responding to the complex relationships between human and machine, animal, plant, and planet amid climate emergency and advancing digital technologies like artificial intelligence. The programme's fellows bring together diverse cultural and geographical contexts, aesthetics, and knowledge systems. At a time when the world approaches ecological tipping points, global wars, and ongoing threats to democracy, Mensch Maschine opens a pluriversal and speculative space for envisioning alternative approaches from within the arts.
Artists may not change the world—a burden too often, and unfairly, placed upon them—but they can offer new imaginaries, ancient wisdoms, ruptures, constellations, and experiences that help us navigate the tangled relationships between human, machine, animal, plant, and planet.
The Mensch Maschine project is supported by the E.ON Stiftung, the Festival Funding Programme of Initiative Musik with project funds from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, in recognition of its ecological sustainability measures, innovative musical programming, and commitment to supporting regional structures. With the kind support of Bildungs‑, Jugend‑, Kultur‑ und Sportstiftung Teltow‑Fläming der Mittelbrandenburgischen Sparkasse in Potsdam and RUẞ Ingenieure AG with generous support from production partners the Präsenzstellen der Hochschulen des Landes Brandenburg, ReBeam - Green-AV specialists and Berlin Projectors and Künstlerhaus Bethanien.
The programme is curated by Clara Hermann, Director of the JUNGE AKADEMIE, Akademie der Künste; Helen Turner, Co-Director and Chief Curator at E-WERK Luckenwalde; and Katharina Worf, Freelance Senior Curator at E-WERK Luckenwalde, and is a partnership between E-WERK Luckenwalde, JUNGE AKADEMIE of Akademie der Künste and the E.ON Foundation.Emerson Culurgioni & Viktor Brim
Configuration Drift
Gallery One
Configuration Drift interrogates the material substrates of contemporary technological regimes through fieldwork in Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore. The project traces how nickel extraction for Western/Chinese renewable energy markets and datacenter infrastructures serving the same powers constitute parallel forms of resource capture. As Singapore's constraints displace computational capacity to Johor's 33MW facilities, a recursive pattern emerges: both green transition minerals and cloud computing architectures extract Southeast Asian resources while serving distant technological imperatives. Our investigation reveals landscapes where extractive logics perpetually reframe themselves—nickel mining as agricultural precursor, palm-oil waste as smelter fuel, radioactive byproducts as fertilizer. Through drone technology deployed as scanning apparatus and artistic instrument, we examine how automated perception systems parse territorial value. Our evolving visual archive—incorporating union testimonies and environmental documentation—privileges operational over affective representation. These silent infrastructures, machinery, and logistics networks emerge as primary actors structuring asymmetrical technological futures, where Western/Chinese progress materializes through systematic ecological transformation elsewhere.
Viktor Brim
Viktor Brim is an artist and filmmaker whose work explores the ontologies of cinematic spaces, urban phenomena and the concept of power. His work focuses on the physical manifestation of power structures and their spatial and territorial extension. He combines documentary, research and analytical approaches with the sensual, aesthetic and tangible quality of the moving image and installation elements. He is particularly interested in tracing concrete discourses and ideologies that become visible in material forms.
Emerson Culurgioni
Emerson Culurgioni is a media artist and filmmaker whose work explores the interactions between industrial structures, spatial change and socio-economic power relations. His focus is on how visible and invisible influences transform physical, digital and social spaces. He combines documentary and essayistic approaches to investigate aesthetic and structural entanglements of power and resource control. His films LEUNA, HABITAT, LA DUNA and AUSBEUTUNG have been shown in exhibitions and at international festivals. They will create a new installation, using documentary material, 3D simulations and 3D printed objects.
Returning
Ancestral Memory Lab: Technologies of Black Speculative Returning
hn. lyonga and Safiya Yon With contributions from Cate Lartey and David Osaodion Odiase
Gallery Three, Glass House and E-WERK Entrance
To us, technology and “human Sciences remain deeply complicit with the regimes of knowledge, power and practice that subtend and produce the material effects and condition of unfreedom. The radical move would be for the contemporary Human Sciences to produce the necessary sustenance required to both undo the chimera effects of democracy and freedom and instead point us towards a new perspective, one in which grappling with Black being might yet produce the routes, intellectual and otherwise, for a freedom yet to come.” — Rinaldo Walcott, in a conversation titled; Idle No More and Black Lives Matter: An Exchange with Leanne Simpson and Glen Coulthard.
"We must imagine a Black world so as to surpass the everywhere and everyway of Black death, of Blackness that is understood only through such a vocabulary." — Kevin Quashie, Black Aliveness, Or a Poetics of Being
Ancestral Memory Lab is a living archive, conceived by artists hn. lyonga and Safiya Yon. It is a space for remembrance, healing, and speculative imagination that centers Indigenous African technologies. It posits the Lukasa Memory Boards of the Luba People of Congo as a blueprint for trans-digital and intergenerational archives. These archives are not static but dynamic, cosmic portals that encode Black epistemologies and ancestral wisdoms. Rooted in a critique of colonial techno-scientific legacies, the Lab envisions a freedom not yet realized, honoring the DR of Congo, Cameroon, Nigeria, South Africa, Angola, and Ghana as sacred birthplaces of technology, and offering a radically anti-colonial, anti-capitalist framework to reclaim Indigenous knowledge systems as we dream and work towards liberated futures.
Through sacred practices like Gleaning, deep listening, breathwork, movement, and ritual use of the senses, it reframes memory as an embodied, multisensory phenomenon felt, heard, touched, and intuited. Drawing from Pan-Afrikan traditions, Afro-diasporic scholarship, and Black Feminist thought, it challenges colonial definitions of technology and archives, offering instead Technologies of Black Speculative Returning. These are sensual, spiritual, and ancestral tools of survival pending revolution and imagination, grounded not only in data but in the body, spirit, and collective memory.
Within the exhibition, this ethos comes alive in the works of hn. lyonga and Safiya Yon, and of the invited collaborating artists Cate Lartey, Carlos Carima, and David Odiase. From lyonga’s weeping willow that stands or sits still at the threshold of E-WERK and a hovering board, to Yon’s textile maps inspired by her maternal grandmother’s dream visits, holding memory pathways of embroidered cotton and beads, to Lartey’s AI video revival of her grandmother, David Odiase’s sonic altar, and Carlos Carima‘s paintings based on ancestral photo archives, each element becomes a vessel of reverence and recall. The Lab resists algorithmic erasure and Western-centric innovation, offering a cartography of diasporic becoming. It is more than an installation. It is a space that exists within the “meanwhile” of Black life. A place between mourning and possibility, between rupture and continuity. It is a vessel, a (Space)ship. A frequency, a call. It is a contribution to the long project of building a world where the lives, memories, and futures of Black people are not just preserved or considered marginal but honored, lived, loved fully and fiercely.
Safiya Yon, photo: Tembela Toto Kiesa
Safiya Yon is a Social Practice artist and systemic community mental health counselor. In layering narrative therapy strategies, ancestral remembrance, and collective care interventions, she offers space for transforming (neo-)colonial pain and fertilizing ground for Afrofuturist imagination and reclamation of indigenous life. Yon has held community care interventions at various institutions such as Folkwang Universität der Künste, Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung and Schauspielhaus Dortmund. In 2024, she curated the exhibition Rituals of Regulation at Neuer Kunstverein Wuppertal, as well as co-curated the “Where the wind scatters seeds” Filmfestival for Filmhaus Köln and Akademie der Künste der Welt. In 2024-2025 she was a fellow at Akademie der Künste Berlin, E-Werk-Luckenwalde and Eon-Foundation.
hn. lyonga
hn. lyonga is a Black, Queer, interdisciplinary writer, poet, and curator. His work focuses on writing, storytelling, community making, and neighbouring vocabularies. It looks at migrational inquiries pertinent to historically colonized and marginalized communities. Among other things, he is a neighbor, a (livelong) student, a member of the curatorial board of BARAZANI.berlin – Forum Kolonialismus und Widerstand, working on ideas of rural biographies, transgenerational and cross-continental storytelling. His work qualifies as ‘Wake Work’: a labour within the space of paradoxes surrounding Black citizenship; it is also the work of ‘continuous inhabiting and rupturing of episteme.’ (Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, 2016).”
Cate Lartey, photo: Ardelle Schneider
Cate Lartey, an artist and independent curator based in Düsseldorf, studied Design at the Peter Behrens School of Arts in Düsseldorf and completed a postgraduate program at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne, with a focus on art and media theory. Her work centers on aesthetics, archival practices, and visual and material cultures, with a particular emphasis on Africa and its diaspora. Her curatorial approach is informed by theories of visual and material culture and creates spaces for encounter, learning, and knowledge exchange.
David Osaodion Odiase
David Osaodion Odiase is a transdisciplinary artist and member of the African Narrative Collective whose practice traverses the interstices of poetry, performance, film, indigenous technologies, and speculative methodologies. His work critically engages with Africa’s entangled histories, epistemologies, and cultural imaginaries, often seeking to dismantle hegemonic narratives and foreground ancestral knowledge systems as vital instruments for reworlding. Odiase’s moving-image and performance works have been presented at institutions and festivals across Africa, Europe and the Americas, including the African International Film Festival (Nigeria), Zebra Poetry Film Festival (Germany), SOMA (Mexico), the National Poetry Library (UK), Kampnagel Hamburg, and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt as part of the Berlin Science Week. His current inquiries draw on the convergence of quantum mechanics and African indigenous philosophies, investigating concepts such as quantum memory, retrocausality, and the non-linearity of time. Anchored in Afrocentric ontologies his work proposes a reparative framework for cultural restitution, one that reconfigures temporality and collective memory as emancipatory tools.
Kira Xonorika
Deep Time Dance
Turbine Hall
During the three-month Human-Machine residency, Kira Xonorika expanded on her film Deep Time Dance, which explores macrocosmic connections, speculative terraformation, and dance. Informed by Guaraní cosmology and Two-Spirit Indigenous Futurism, the work centers joy, pleasure, and movement as vital forces. Alongside the film, Kira created a monumental sculpture installed in the Turbine Hall, engaging in a spatial dialogue with the moving image. Together, these works explore the potential of AI to cultivate ancestral intuition as a process of re-Indigenization—revitalizing somatic knowledge systems, symbolic memory, spirituality, and techno-scientific futures.
Sediment
Flag installation
EW Flagpoles
The Sediment installation included textile banners featuring AI-generated imagery developed through Kira’s research using ethically trained datasets. Incorporating digital collage techniques, these works reimagine ancestral cultural archives within eco-futurist and regenerative landscapes.
Kira Xonorika
Kira Xonorika is an artist, author, and futurist whose work explores technoscience, Indigenous sovereignty, temporality, world-building, planetary and interspecies intelligence. Her awards, residencies, and fellowships include the Vera List Center for Art and Politics, Hyundai Artlab, Dreaming Beyond AI, Momus, Eyebeam, Salzburg Global Seminar, and Ars Electronica. Her writing has been published in e-flux, C Magazine, and Cambridge University Press. Her work has been exhibited internationally at the Ford Foundation Gallery, arebyte, Honor Fraser Gallery, and the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater. She’s the founder and curator of South America’s first residency exploring AI, the Future Memory Lab.
Maithu Bùi
Operation Remediation
Turbine Hall
Operation Remediation examines the migration of technological innovations and their impact on ecosystems, with an emphasis on renegotiating the boundaries of the humanoid. Informed by Maithu Bùi’s personal history, the work addresses the enduring legacies of war and the entanglement of technological systems with structures of exploitation. The project focuses on the instrumentalization of biological agents in the detection and disposal of explosives—for example, giant pouched rats, honeybees, or genetically modified E. coli—often in conjunction with sensor technologies within complex environmental conditions. In Vietnam, for instance, war-related pollutants are reactivated by seasonal flooding and erosion intensified by climate change. As Leah Zani suggests, former battlefields may be understood as “bomb ecologies.”[*] Operation Remediation questions who is protected within these techno-ecological systems — and who is not. What if only privileged children, equipped with biosensor-enabled suits, could play safely on contaminated playgrounds?
[*] Zani, Leah. 2018. Bomb Ecologies
Maithu Bùi, photo: Markus Amon
Maithu Bùi (b. 1991, Plauen) explores networks of human intervention and their entanglements with life forms at the intersection of collective history, science, and technology. They studied Philosophy of Language and Logic at LMU Munich and Fine Arts at UdK Berlin. Their work has been presented at the 12th Berlin Biennale, Bundeskunsthalle Bonn, and Kunsthalle Bratislava. Bùi co-founded the research collective Curating through Conflict with Care (CCC) and the working group art+computation at the Gesellschaft für Informatik. They are a 2024 Human Machine Fellow at Akademie der Künste, a 2025 Dreaming Beyond AI fellow and a 2025 recipient of the Stiftung Kunstfond stipend.
Rae Hsu
Water Remembers What Capital Forgets (water does not speak, it spills)
Gallery Two
This installation juxtaposes ancient weaving technology with financial and computational infrastructures. Instead of fibers, the warp and weft of this weave is a continuous stream of water. A microcontroller ties the flow of water to real-time volatility in NVIDIA’s stock price, binding ancient craft to today’s markets and the company that stands in for its dominance in the global AI thirst. Overhead, a generative soundscape co-written with The Empathy Machine, a language model trained to privilege difference over sameness, meditates on notions around liquidity, computation, empathy, and wealth. AI is a function of liquidity: capital, computation, and water. Financial speculation feeds AI's expansion, while fresh water cools server farms and ultrapure water cleans silicon wafers. With the spilling of water, what stories leak when the abstractions of profit meet the material cost of thirst?
HSURAE
HSURAE is an artist and educator based between New York and Taipei. Their practice embraces the concept of latency within nature and its artifice. Instead of working to reveal or accelerate, they find small pleasures in the indeterminacy that latent space and latent knowledge offers. A sort of photogrammetry of the universe from inside Plato’s cave. Their artistic medium, like their self, is never pure object, never pure subject; ranging from hot glass to fibroblasts, passports to fecal sports. They work towards unraveling the relational geometries between humans, nonhumans, and machines through layered, multiscalar narratives of agency and temporality. Their current research entertains the irreducibility of artificial intelligence as an aesthetic quality—a quality that, like latency, resists total comprehension but invites speculation. They hold a Master of Science in Art, Culture, and Technology from MIT, and currently teaches at The New School and NYU. Their work has appeared at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, MAXXI Rome, European Cultural Center, TORN theater space, Dubai BAIT15, Taipei Digital Art festival, Medialab Prado, Weisner gallery, Sakiya Palestine, Grand Siecle gallery, Yiri Art Gallery, Olfactory Keller NY amongst others. Artist residencies they’ve taken part in include SymbioticA, hangar.org, MedialabPrado, _V2 institute for the unstable media, Coalesce bioart lab and Urbanglass.
Sonya Isupova
Dnypro: Witnessing changes of the Ukrainian landscape: surveilling, tracking and targeting,
Engine Room
Infrastructure is often invisible until it fails, as tragically demonstrated on 6 June 2023, when the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam caused immense human suffering and became a major environmental disaster with far-reaching consequences.
This project explores the ecological repercussions of the ongoing war in Ukraine, focusing particularly on the heavily affected southern regions and the aftermath of the Kakhovka Dam’s destruction. The installation examines the relationship between humans and machines, the mapmaker and the map, and the challenges faced by remote-sensing infrastructures. It also questions the processes of mapping itself, as a way of sensing the daily changes occurring in the landscape during wartime.
For this work, Sonya Isupova built a metaphorical satellite, a self-constructed machine that hovers above the land, mapping data with limited accuracy and transforming satellite images into maps. Using NDWI (Normalized Difference Water Index) data, which monitors water content in vegetation and open water bodies, she charts the Dnypro River’s altered course after the dam’s destruction. With the dam gone, the river has returned to its original bed. The map unfurls like the river itself, revealing swirls, rapids, channels, and spurs piece by piece. Imperfect and incomplete, the map embodies the inherent inaccuracies of all mapping — the only certainty is that the roll keeps turning, and the river keeps emerging.
For the exhibition at E-WERK Luckenwalde, Isupova constructed a new vertical drawing machine, transforming the way the maps are presented. Instead of lying flat, the maps cascade downward to the floor as they are generated in real time, allowing audiences to witness mapping as it happens, emphasizing both the fluidity of the landscape and the continuous production of knowledge.
Credits
Scientific collaborators: Anatolii Chernov PhD, Sofia Hordiichuk
Technical assistance: David Heritier, Frédéric Butor-Blamont
With support from: HEAD Geneva, Kyiv Emergency Art Platform
Sonya Isupova
Sonya Isupova (Kyiv, Ukraine, 1994) is a Ukrainian visual artist and designer, and a PhD student at the Estonian Academy of Arts. Her work combines art and design in the creation of machines that map Ukrainian territory affected by war. Current projects focus on postcoloniality, territoriality, and the inherent contradictions of mapmaking in uncertain times. Through her machines, she explores the relationship between humans and remote-sensing infrastructures, and the limitations of both. Her Mapping Uncertain Landscape project received an honorary mention from the S+T+ARTS Prize Ars Electronica.
