Stefanie Knobel’s and Samrat Banerjee’s collaboration stands in an experimental relation with the notion of training. With an artistic practice that lies between visual arts and choreography, they resume postures to remember their own training from their different cultural and geographic backgrounds. It gives them access to value systems that they negotiate within performative situations created for the purpose of training itself and moreover to challenge it with storytelling and speculative fiction.
In 2021 they found The Institute for Plant, Animal and Human Migration. This creative format aims to focus on migration as a dynamic process of interdependence and connectedness of human and more-than-human agencies. It explores the diverse relationalities that sustain our collective well-being on a macro- and microcosmic level.
Stefanie Knobel grew up in Switzerland and first studied dance, language and choreography in Bern, Giessen and Paris before working at the Fine Arts department at Zurich University of the Arts from 2013 to 2019. Her work pursues a polyphonic breathing that catches up with the technogenic substances in our alienated bodies and brings forth future imaginaries that have yet to be woven. Textile and tactile intersect, allowing the past to resonate in the present. Her transdisciplinary works have been shown at FRAC Lorraine Metz, Kunsthalle Schaffhausen, Künstlerhaus Bremen and Helmhaus Zurich, among others. In 2019 and 2022, her work will be awarded a work prize in visual arts and performance by the Aargauer Kuratorium. Between 2017 and 2020, she will spend residencies in Paris, Russia, India and Bangladesh. Since then, the Indian subcontinent has occupied an important place in her work.
Samrat Banerjee grew up in India and absolved a Master of Fine Arts in Zurich. Some recurrent themes of his works are colonial history, critical posthumanism, animism, digital technology and knowledge production. His practice questions the foundations of anthropocentric production of values through collective imaginations that unfold a radical plurality of becoming.
