Asia Bazdyrieva
Asia Bazdyrieva is a scholar and writer with a background in art history and analytical chemistry. In her work she articulates the relationship between natural sciences and their seemingly neutral techniques, and the production of imaginaries that span social strata, while shaping politics and poetics of the earth. In 2018-2022, she co-authored ‘Geocinema’ — a collaborative project exploring the infrastructures for earth observation as co-producing forms of cinema. Bazdyrieva was a Fulbright scholar in 2015-2017 at The City University of New York, and Digital Earth fellow in 2018-2019; she was also a research fellow at the Bauhaus University Weimar. She is currently pursuing her PhD at The University of Applied Arts Vienna, and serves as an advisor in the Advisory Board of the transmediale festival in Berlin.
In her contribution to the gathering, Asia Bazdyrieva will expand on the themes central to “Bodies as Lands — Sociotechnical Imaginaries and Spatial Arrangements in Eastern Europe,” a project she co-curated with Egija Inzule in Nida in 2023. Focusing on specific cases of territorial imagination, she will explore the ways environments are mediated, as well as the material consequences of these processes, which often involve the flattening and erasure of multiple worlds. The entanglement of aesthetic regimes, power, and technopolitics has a long history, rooted in the interplay of imperial and colonial forces, operating through resourcification—processes that persist and intensify today. By outlining the geographic and temporal scales of these dynamics, she will propose to recenter the growing conversation on geopower and geoaesthetics, in order to render visible the missing dimensions of the geo.
List of Collaborators