Andrea Nagl / Karlheinz Essl / Markus Wintersberger

Geology of Thought

intermedia performance
2026

Created for aNOther Festival 2026 - DIRTY HANDS

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 …