Poetic Futures or the Earth Dreams in Love
An interactive talk by Petja Ivanova
What does it mean to trace the soul through the ruins of empire? What forms of knowledge — and what forms of love — might survive the entangled violences of migration, capitalism, and technological abstraction?- Type
- Talk
- Location
- Online
In this interactive talk, Petja Ivanova, artist and researcher from the Studio for Poetic Futures & Speculative Ecologies, explores “soul loss” as a condition of imperial modernity — a psychic fracture shaped by exile, economic precarity, normalized machine-ic abuse, and the inherited wounds of dis-belonging. Weaving personal narrative with theoretical inquiry, the talk draws from decolonial philosophy, feminist technoscience, somatic poetics, and digital media practice to ask:
How does empire dismember love, turning care into labor, longing into shame, connection into data? How do capitalist technologies capitalize on our emotional vulnerabilities, shaping not only how we relate, but whether we can at all? And what might it mean — politically, poetically, in practice — to retrieve the soul as a practice of resistance? Drawing from her exhibition Soma of the Land — a cartographic and embodied inquiry into the connection between the nervous system of the land and that of the human body — Petja Ivanova invites us to remember the body, and rehearse other ways of being. This is not a return to a lost wholeness, but a speculative gesture toward futures grown through cracks.
The talk will include excerpts from fieldwork, visual materials, and emergent practices for poetic more-than-survival with a group discussion and a Q&A.
Petja Ivanova, born in Bulgaria, is an artist, lecturer and performer whose practice is framed by her “Studio for Poetic Futures and Speculative Ecologies”. Seeking to overcome the linear and binary thinking that technology carries, Petja introduces poetic, emotional, mycelial and psychic relations to the living world into Computational Art. She studied Visual Communication andComputational/Generative Art at the Berlin University of Arts. Ivanova has taught speculative design at Linnaeus University (Sweden) and Hamburg University of Applied Sciences, where she received the 2021 Lecturer Award. Recent exhibitions include Soma of the Land at Folkwang Museum, Broken Machines & Wild Imaginings, New Now Festival, 3hd Festival ‒ Echo Chambers, at V2 in Rotterdam and Our Data Bodies for transmediale Vorspiel in 2023. Petja is a 2023 Human Machine Fellow at the Akademie der Künste, Berlin.