“Animal Escape Plan”

According to the Federal Statistical Office of Germany, roughly 760 million livestock was slaughtered in 2019. A microscopic number of these animals manages to escape the statistic every year, sometimes in adventurous ways.

During the 2021, I travelled across Germany and Austria to meet these special escapees like Ferdinand, Hanni, Wolfgang, Joey, Halla and many more. I collected their stories and captured their personalities.

In both factory farming and the slaughter of so-called farm animals, Germany is sitting up at the top in Europe.

Most of the farm animal breeds up for slaughter and harvest have been developed by farmers and scientists over decades for efficiency’s sake. And it has left deep scars on the animal’s mental and physical health.

Ducks can’t reproduce themselves anymore. The ability to hatch eggs has been bred out because it is no longer required. Sheep grow endless wool and won’t survive without the constant shearing from humans. Bull legs are too thin to carry the body. Cows are dehorned because it reduces bruising to other cows and injury towards farmers. Cows can live up to 20 years, but most only ever live between 5-6 years. Caged in automated cowsheds and perpetually observed by machines, they’ll never get to see or touch the green meadows which adorn their milk packages. The cow’s ability to bear calves and produce the expected amount of milk is a matter of life and death for them.

Most of these animals never reach their average lifespan. They are usually slaughtered in an abattoir or die due to overbreeding illnesses.

To keep public cognitive dissonance at bay, these animals are numbered but never named. This is so the consumer never has to face the reality of commercial farming, when shopping for their meats and dairies in the supermarkets.

64 Pages, 32 images.
Softcover Zine
Size: 21 x 29,7cm
Edition of 800

Photography: Nikita Teryoshin
Design: Manuel Osterholt
Translation: Jeremy Gan

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Is your business secured in the case of ecological collapse?
Or are you unsure?

Oslo Apiary & Aviary is a provider of dark-ecological tools, goods and services. We work in the overlap between art and ecosystemic change, specializing in urban husbandry, feeding birds, growing worms, keeping bees, tending trees.

A consistent activity throughout our work is the inspection of how the domains ‘urbanity-nature’ and ‘private-public’ are expressed and separated: By caring for plants, birds and insects in the city, we question what types of life belong where. By subjugating ourselves to urban husbandry, we revitalize mutually dependent modes of being. Our entanglement allows for moments of enlivenment in a time of atomizing individuation. We are in this together! Through our embedded practice we try to get a sense of the city’s ontology – how the post-sustainable city is constituted and can, or can’t, be reconstituted.

Currently, ‘can’t” is in the lead, gothifying our practice. Drawing on strategies traditionally associated with the multi-roled artist, we find ourselves simultaneously planting trees as well as branching out into survivalist prepping: an entrepreneurial doomsday cult for hire, toiling in the ruins of humancentrism.

Marius Presterud (b.1980, Drammen) is a Norwegian artist based in Berlin and Oslo. He works across a variety of media; performance, poetry, sculpture and ecoventions, as well as in the field of mental health. Presterud has toured Europe as a poet, as well as performed and exhibited in established galleries such as Hamburger Bahnhof, Germany, and Kunstnernes Hus and Henie Onstad Art Center, Norway. From 2014-2019, Presterud worked full-time with his art- and research based practice, Oslo Apiary & Aviary. 

Régine Debatty is a curator, art critic and the founder of award-winning blog we-make- money-not-art.com. Since 2004, she has been writing and lecturing internationally about the way artists, hackers and designers use science and technology as a medium for critical discussion.

Norwegian Sculptor’s Association 2023
Exhibition documentation courtesy of NBF and Kunstdok
Goth Beekeeping camera and editing by Lene Johansen
Grave Talk recording by Marius Presterud
editing by Rebekka Handeland
Press photo by Siv Dolmen
Catalogue design by Elena Feijoo

In mere 100 years from now, the Baltic coastline as we know it will be nothing more than a beautiful memory lost somewhere in history – according to the leading experts studying climate change. The melting glaciers will swallow up Swinoujscie, whilst turning Gdańsk into the modern day Atlantis and Poznan (the author’s hometown in the Western Poland) into a slowly submerging seaside resort town. 

In view of these predictions and out of sheer curiosity, Marcin Matuszak, Poznan-based designer and artist (accompanied by his friend, Tomasz Peukert – music producer who was collecting the field recordings), decided to walk along the entire current Polish seaside, to document the current state of it and to prepare a photo album from the material collected during the journey: “500km”. 

The project of the year-long walk, divided into 12 stages of several days was called “550 km” – as the estimated coastline of the Polish Baltic Sea. After walking the entire length, it turned out to be nearly 607 km from the German to the Russian border.

The project documents the Baltic Sea through four seasons, in the full sun and when it rains, with the wind and against the wind, with stormy horizons and calming sunsets. Against this backdrop, the sand, the shells, the seals, and also the cliffs breaking off with tree roots tell the story of the shifting coastline. 

The material presented, however, is not purely documentary. It is a photo record of a moment. A maximum of a three-second pause. A snapshot that cuts the future from the past.

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The Forest and The Little One is an invitation to enjoy the complex world of the forest and its simple joys. It is meant for every child and adult looking for a walking companion and adventure in nature.

This children’s book is part of the project Neringa Forest Architecture, established at Nida Art Colony, a subdivision of Vilnius Academy of Arts in 2020.

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Sometimes, if you take a closer look at a tree trunk, you may be able to see letters. This swirly script forms part of The Secret Book of Lichens, the pages of which are scattered across the entire forest. Although many plants and animals have tried to read what is written in it, none have ever managed to assemble those mysterious symbols into any kind of cohesive sentence, or even a single word for that matter.

This book is a walk through the mind and imagination of lichens spread across the forest. The short stories tell of lichen love, their mathematics, values and other important things. These compound creatures are never alone and know great ways to make friends. Perhaps that’s why, when looking at lichens, people understood what symbiosis is – knowing how to live together. Composed of allied fungus and algae, these creatures have special powers – for example, they can easily survive in space and melt rocks. And this one particularly special lichen, Graphis scripta, was even called the script of the forest.

This children’s book is part of the project Neringa Forest Architecture, established at Nida Art Colony, a subdivision of Vilnius Academy of Arts in 2020.

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Good Life was awarded with the German Photo Book Prize 21/22 in silver. 
Good Life is a hybrid of a photobook and an artist catalog that summarizes the work from 2017 to 2021 by artist Meike Mann& (b. 1991 in Nuremberg, Germany). It’s the first book Mannel published after her graduation from Academy of Fine Arts in Nuremberg, Germany and goes hand in hand with her exhibition at Kunsthaus Nurnberg in Nuremberg. in order to realize this project, she applied for a debutant promotion. 
Meike Marine’ works mainly on different ongoing series, a selection of which is presented in the first part of the artistbook. After a paper change beginning halfway, there are two texts about Manners work by art historian Dr. Teresa Bischoff (former professor of Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg) and writer Anna Hofmann (masters study at Deutsches Literaturinstitut Leipzig). In the back of the book, her more experimental photo silkscreens and photo installations are shown. 
Marine seeks to preserve the ephemeral with this project. The shown motifs deal with the longing for distance, the uncertainty and the question of survival. In loud and softer colors it presents a world that often lies unnoticed in front of us and whose aesthetics one takes for granted, without recognizing what is special about it. 

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