Matter is Messy #1
Embodied Ecologies
Exhibition curated by Minou Tsambika Polleros
4.-6.7.2025
Exhibition text Andrea Nagl:
Andrea Nagl’s artistic practice unfolds at the intersection of geological embodiment and environmental performance. Her work oscillates between the somatic enactment of deep-time processes and the sculptural inscription of the body into more-than-human landscapes. These gestures are not representations but acts of contact – of merging, of becoming-with.
While earlier projects addressed ecological grief and loss more directly – particularly the disappearance of glaciers (EIS.stein, 2012, Rettet die Gletscher, 2015) – her current focus has shifted toward the dissolution of binaries: human and non-human, living and non-living, body and mineral (smART Data BRIDGE Krahuletz, 2024, soil, 2024). Through movement, tactile sensing, and attentive presence, she renders geologic durations – vast and inhuman – momentarily graspable.
Grounded in geological research and somatic inquiry, Nagl’s approach treats stone not only as material or metaphor, but as archive, companion, and temporal witness. Her practice merges movement, drawing, casting, and sound into a form of speculative fieldwork. The body becomes a site of knowledge transmission – a porous surface through which time, memory, and matter flow.
Communion with stone: a dialogue beyond language, a listening that bypasses words. To touch rock is to touch time.
_allochthon (aLpiN)
Concept, choreography & performance: Andrea Nagl
Costume: Sarah Sternat
Hohe Tauern, 2023
Photos: nagl～wintersberger
In her stage work _allochthon, Andrea Nagl draws from her ongoing engagement with geology, deep time, and natural phenomena to develop a choreographic language that resonates with the Earth’s own dynamics. Movements emerge as associative responses—abstracted embodiments of processes like folding, erosion, sedimentation, and tectonic drift. Like the evolving soundscape (SEELEWASCHEN by Karlheinz Essl), her subtle and porous physicality conjures a state of continuous transformation, a living system in motion.
In the aLpiN version, selected choreographic patterns are transplanted into the mountainous terrain of the Lasörling Group, inscribing the body into rock formations, folds, and weather systems—blurring the boundary between organism and geology.
Looping. Folding. Melting. Floating. Becoming terrain
Nacktes Gestein
Photo series by Andrea Nagl / nagl～wintersberger
Research, intervention, and performance in the Zillertal Alps and Hohe Tauern, 2024
From the series GEHE RÜCKWÄRTS DURCH DIE ERDE, Created during the 2024 City of Vienna Working Grant
Created during a multi-day field research hike across the main Alpine ridge (Zillertal Alps / Hohe Tauern, 2024), this video merges choreographic sequences rooted in geoscientific research with somatic responses to the raw presence of high mountain landscapes.
Part of an ongoing inquiry into geological embodiment and eco-somatic performance, Nacktes Gestein (Bare Rock) explores the body as a site of knowledge and resonance—where stone and self, matter and memory, collapse into one shared temporality.
„The body itself becomes a vessel of geological process—becomes both witness and material, stone structure. A seismograph of ancient landscapes. A research tool. A fragile inhabitant of geological time.
We are of the Earth, not merely upon it.”
EIS.stein Hohe Tauern 2012
Videostills, Nationalpark Hohe Tauern, 2012
Concept, choreography & performance
Photos: nagl～wintersberger
A return to the origin: conceived for the stage, EIS.stein is re-situated in its elemental setting—amid glaciers, alpine rivers, and highland meadows. Inspired by Ilija Trojanow’s EISTAU and shaped by personal memory, Andrea Nagl’s body meets the mountain as both archive and mirror.
The dancer dissolves into the landscape, merging with rock and ice. Presence becomes timeless. The physical encounter with the glacial world becomes a tactile meditation on impermanence, memory, and loss.
As the glaciers vanish, part of us vanishes too. Ice by ice, stone by stone, the world unspeaks itself.
“Als wäre ich mit einer Moräne verwachsen. So alpträumt es mich durch jede Nacht.” (EISTAU, S. 17)
Photo credits: Raoul Bartolome and Anna Kushnerova // Matter is Messy #1 - Minou Tsambika Polleros
_allochthon (aLpiN)
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Nacktes Gestein
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EIS.stein Hohe Tauern 2012
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