S(p)oiled Art – A Poetry and Material Crafting Workshop
Free Entry
Saturday, October 26, 12-4pm
Pflanzstelle, Neuerburgstr. 19, 51103 Köln-Kalk
This workshop took place as part of Bodenlabor’s Betreten Verboden workshop series and was aimed at exploring themes of contamination, decay and waste through creative writing and object making practices. Participants engaged with the contaminated soil at the Pflanzstelle (site of a former factory) in Kalk and crafted poems as well as objects.
Led by Tanya Gautam and Carmen Armenteros Puchades
Tanya Gautam is a Doctoral Researcher at the Multidisciplinary Environmental Studies in the Humanities (MESH) research hub at the University of Cologne, Germany. As part of the research project on “Eco-Critical Literacy in Musical and Literary Practices of Cultural Education” funded by Germany’s Federal Ministry of Education, she explores informal and non-formal practices of cultural education, focusing in particular on ways of cultivating multispecies community futures through music and literature based practices. She is the founder of Moonlit Brooks — a spoken word poetry project and multidisciplinary event series taking place in Germany since 2020. As a poet, Tanya explores the beauty and brutality in living, belonging and passing.
Carmen Armenteros Puchades is a Junior Research Fellow at MESH from May until October 2024. She is a visual artist and PhD student in Landscape and Environment at the University of Sapienza in Rome. Her research addresses the representation of subterranean landscapes, with a focus on art and ecology. She graduated in Fine Arts at the Polytechnic University of Valencia in Spain. Studied photography in Athens and was part of the painting department at CCA in San Francisco. Currently, Carmen’s artistic practice unfolds in a world of rapid change and climate collapse, where the term natural is continually redefined and where the concept of the superiority of the anthropos has allowed acute speciesism, landscape exploitation, and an utter lack of solidarity. Through art she aims to create spaces of interconnectedness, environmental awareness, and poetic research. Early works have circled ideas of memory, heritage and playfulness.
