Exhibition
Installationsansicht von Mensch Maschine: Return to Earth im E-WERK Luckenwalde mit Kira Xonorika, Deep Time Dance, 2025. Foto: Laila Kaletta.
Project Information
Role
Co-Curator
Venue
E-WERK Luckenwalde
Partners
JUNGE AKADEMIE, Akademie der Künste, E.ON Foundation
Dates
19 September 2025 – 22 February 2026
Programme
Exhibition & Performance Festival
Overview
Mensch Maschine: Return to Earth brought together eight international artists and artist duos to explore the evolving relationships between technology, ecology and the more-than-human world. Developed as the culmination of the Mensch Maschine Fellowship 2024–2025, the exhibition examined how artistic practice can offer alternative ways of thinking about artificial intelligence, climate crisis and ecological futures.
Presented during Berlin Art Week, the exhibition was accompanied by the inaugural edition of Mensch Maschine Musik, extending its themes through a programme of live music and performance.
As Co-Curator of Mensch Maschine: Return to Earth, I worked alongside Clara Hermann and Helen Turner to develop the exhibition as the culmination of the Mensch Maschine Fellowship 2024–2025. Presented at E-WERK Luckenwalde in partnership with JUNGE AKADEMIE, Akademie der Künste and the E.ON Foundation, the exhibition brought together eight international artists..
Exhibition Essay
It is time to return to Earth. For billions of years, our Earth has systematically sustained life, pulsing with the technologies of ecologies that sustain hummingbirds, weeping willows, three-hearted octopuses, mycelial networks, and bioluminescence. But now, Earth is aching under the weight of extraction and neglect, unleashed across mere centuries of accelerating industry. It is time to return to Earth.
Our addiction to innovation, progress, and efficiency—to the techno-utopian promise of endless expansion—has depleted the planet’s life support systems. To return to Earth is to re-centre the Earth’s living systems as the foundation of our intelligence, rather than merely the ground to be mined for human ambition.
The exhibition Mensch Maschine: Return to Earth seeks to reactivate the climate conversation through dissonant material, symbolic, and cosmological encounters across different times, speculations, and origin stories. Eight artists and artist duos explore the cracks between worlds to meet our entangled planet: from automated, techno-animal wars to the intelligences of community, from ancestral wisdoms to ecological technologies. The exhibition redirects technologies of violence toward artistic expression, resisting singular hegemonic narratives while embracing multiple poetics of image-making and story-telling, from hybrid creatures to scattered landscapes.
Through active forms of retreat and resistance, can we begin to gather radical positions, tones that move toward symbiotic systems, where ecology and technology are approached as interwoven, living communities rather than separate disciplines? The question is not how to hope, but how to come together in shared intellectual joy, sitting with complexity while embracing empathy and play.
Artistic Positions
E-WERK Luckenwalde, JUNGE AKADEMIE Akademie der Künste and E.ON Foundation presented the group exhibition of Mensch Maschine fellows 2024–2025 at E-WERK featuring Assem Hendawi, Emerson Culurgioni & Viktor Brim, hn. lyonga & Safiya Yon, Kira Xonorika, Maithu Bùi, Rae Hsu and Sonya Isupova. Together, they also presented Mensch Maschine Musik on 19 September at Stadtbad Live Luckenwalde featuring Bendik Giske, Discovery Zone and Nazanin Noori.
Mensch Maschine: Return to Earth presented eight artists and artist duos who have developed projects responding to the complex relationships between human and machine, animal, plant, and planet amid climate emergency and advancing digital technologies like artificial intelligence. The programme's fellows bring together diverse cultural and geographical contexts, aesthetics, and knowledge systems. At a time when the world approaches ecological tipping points, global wars, and ongoing threats to democracy, Mensch Maschine opens a pluriversal and speculative space for envisioning alternative approaches from within the arts.
Artists may not change the world—a burden too often, and unfairly, placed upon them—but they can offer new imaginaries, ancient wisdoms, ruptures, constellations, and experiences that help us navigate the tangled relationships between human, machine, animal, plant, and planet.
Supporters
The Mensch Maschine project was supported by the E.ON Stiftung, the Festival Funding Programme of Initiative Musik with project funds from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media, in recognition of its ecological sustainability measures, innovative musical programming, and commitment to supporting regional structures. With the kind support of Bildungs‑, Jugend‑, Kultur‑ und Sportstiftung Teltow‑Fläming der Mittelbrandenburgischen Sparkasse in Potsdam and RUẞ Ingenieure AG with generous support from production partners the Präsenzstellen der Hochschulen des Landes Brandenburg, ReBeam - Green-AV specialists and Berlin Projectors and Künstlerhaus Bethanien.
Curators
The programme is curated by Clara Hermann, Director of the JUNGE AKADEMIE, Akademie der Künste; Helen Turner, Co-Director and Chief Curator at E-WERK Luckenwalde; and Katharina Worf, Freelance Senior Curator at E-WERK Luckenwalde, and is a partnership between E-WERK Luckenwalde, JUNGE AKADEMIE of Akademie der Künste and theE.ONFoundation.
About Katharina Worf
Katharina Worf is a curator specialising in interdisciplinary exhibitions and public programmes that explore the intersections of contemporary art, ecology and technology. She works collaboratively with artists and institutions to develop ambitious exhibitions, commissions and cultural projects that engage with the social and environmental challenges of our time.
Mensch Maschine: Return to Earth at E-WERK Luckenwalde, Design: Basics09