
Geology of Thought
Performance
March 14, 2026, 19:00
HISTORY OF SCIENCE
aNOther festival, Klangtheater Future Art Lab, mdw
W.A.L.Z. Performance collective (Karlheinz Essl, Markus Wintersberger, Andrea Nagl)
Drawing on the “geological revolution” – that moment when humans first began to grasp the depth (and continuity) of Earth history – Karlheinz Essl (sound), Andrea Nagl (dance, objects), and Markus Wintersberger (visuals) explore, in a performative installation, how thought, perception, and the body shift when time and matter are renegotiated.
“Getting one’s hands dirty” becomes a double image: a gesture of investigative proximity, echoing the early field geologists, and a contemporary call for a sensuous, co-responsible relationship with the Earth in the Anthropocene.
What once marked a scientific revolution becomes an artistic practice: tracing the thresholds between knowledge and sensation, research and touch.
Sound, objects such as stones, sand, and fossils, text/language, movement, and projection become instruments of an embodied mode of thinking, unfolding into an atmospheric field of transformation.
Between field laboratory and stage, theory and tactility, an experimental space emerges in which knowledge sediments, categories shift, and thinking becomes corporeal.
A tentative inquiry into time, change, and our planet …

references:
Gottfried Hofbauer (2015): Die geologische Revolution. Wie die Entdeckung der Erdgeschichte unser Denken veränderte.
Schär, Kathrin (2021): Erdgeschichte(n) und Entwicklungsromane. Geologisches Wissen und Subjektkonstitution in der Poetologie der frühen Moderne.
Cuvier, Georges (1830): Die Umwälzungen der Erdrinde in naturwissenschaftlicher und geschichtlicher Beziehung.
Lyell, Charles (1830): Principles of Geology
Playfair, John (1802): Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth
Ussher, James (1650): Annales Veteris Testamenti a prima Mundi Origine Deducti
Werner, Abraham Gottlob (1787): Klassifikation und Beschreibung der verschiedenen Gebirgsarten.