Lectures by Alexandra Střelcová and Marianna Szczygielska, 17 March 2026, TIC Gallery/Cinema CIT
On Tuesday, 17 March 2026, FFA BUT invites you to the TIC Gallery/Cinema CIT for two lectures:Alexandra Střelcová (Haenke)
Conspiring with Plants: Unsettling Hierarchies of Intelligence, Authorship, and Agency
17. 3. 2026, 16:00–17:00
In this lecture, Sasha turns to Free Radicals, a two-year inquiry into what artistic practice might learn from plant biodiversity when plants are approached not as backdrop, but as collaborators in world-making. Moving between theory and shared exercises, we will consider how conspiring with plants might help us quietly unsettle inherited hierarchies of intelligence, authorship, and agency, and rehearse more reciprocal forms of living and making. If weather permits, we will step outside to attend to the small ecologies at our feet, asking what kinds of knowledge persist in the cracks of pavement and what they demand of us in return.
BIO: Haenke is an interdisciplinary research studio based between Prague and Montpellier, working across art and science to reconsider how plant biodiversity shapes society, culture, and more-than-human health. Their projects take form as installations, debate forums, workshops, and university courses, bringing traditional plant knowledge into dialogue with pharmacognosy, ethnobotany, art and design. Plants are approached not as backdrop, but as active agents in the making of shared environments.
The studio's work has been featured in Bloomberg CityLab, Forbes, designboom, Elle Decoration or Vogue Czechoslovakia, and has been recognized by awards including the Czech Architecture Award shortlist and Distributed Design. In 2025, the studio initiated Free Radicals, an ongoing Creative Europe co-funded project conceived as a hybrid educational toolkit. Rooted in interdisciplinary exchange, the platform cultivates ethical, multispecies practices and seeks to strengthen the role of art and culture as forces for social change in ecologically shifting times.
Marianna Szczygielska
From Archive to Animal: Queer Art and the Afterlives of Captivity
17. 3. 2026, 17:30–18:30
This lecture explores contemporary moving-image practice through the lens of what I call “erotics of captivity,” examining how desire, visibility, and control shape encounters with nonhuman life. Rather than understanding captivity only as a zoological or carceral condition, I frame it as an aesthetic and affective regime that structures how bodies are tracked, archived, and made available to feeling. Focusing on Charlotte Prodger’s video work SaF05 (2019), the talk considers her tracing of a maned lioness in the Okavango Delta. The lioness whose mane unsettles normative sexual dimorphism, emerges as a figure for queer kinship, but also as a subject mediated through smartphones, drones, and wildlife camera traps. By foregrounding these devices, Prodger reveals how the “wild” is already entangled in technological regimes of capture. These visual practices are inseparable from colonial histories of exploration, classification, and conservation that have shaped how African landscapes and animals are seen and governed. Situating queer desire within this context, the lecture asks how artistic practice can both expose and rework the colonial and technological infrastructures that bind together intimacy, surveillance, and power, opening a critical space for reimagining multispecies kinship in contemporary art.
BIO: Marianna Szczygielska is a feminist historian of science specializing in the history of zoos, nature conservation, and veterinary expertise in Central and Eastern Europe. She brings queer and decolonial approaches to reflections on the relationship between humans and animals. Szczygielska is also the author of several articles in the journals Historical Studies in Natural Sciences, Environmental Humanities, Centaurus - Journal of the European Society for the History of Science, and Cultural Studies, and co-editor of special issues of Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities and Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience. She is an associate editor of the journal Humanimalia.
The lectures are organized by the Faculty of Fine Arts BUT in cooperation with TIC Gallery.
Lectures will be held in English.
| Author | Mgr. Tímea Vitázková |
|---|---|
| Published | |
| Short URL | https://www.favu.vut.cz/en//f26745/d321245 |