Applying ecological thinking means that every act we commit can have consequences for the environment and that everything is connected to everything else. Whatever we do leaves traces. Things don’t just disappear; they take on a new shape according to the environment and climate. Gerlinde Gruber talks about the various phases of a body’s decay following death. What environmental influences act on the putrefaction process, and how? Is there really such a thing as ptomaine poisoning, and if yes, what is it that makes a corpse poisonous? Kilian Jörg questions the puritan attitude of capitalism and asks what our consumer society’s garbage dumps hide. What would a culture of poisoning, waste, and survival in sustainable societies beyond the Anthropocene look like?

Claudia Bosse lives in Vienna and Berlin and works as a director, choreographer, artist, and head of theatercombinat. Her works negotiate forms of violence, history, and concrete utopias. She describes her space-consuming choreographies, in which she interweaves myths, rituals, texts, and documents with bodies, language, objects, and choruses to create her pieces, as “art in a temporary community”. Inside and outside of Europe, in museums, architectures, theatres, landscapes, and urban spaces, Claudia Bosse devises site-specific works and interventions. She is currently working on commune 1-73 with 73 fragments on the Parise Commune of 1871 and on her four-year project ORGAN/ismus poetiken der relation. Her most recent works include ORACLE and SACRIFICE 1 oder die evakuierung der gegenwart at Tanzquartier Wien and FFT Düsseldorf, and the last IDEAL PARADISE in Jakarta, which also featured at Deutsche Tanzplattform in Essen. www.theatercombinat.com

Gerlinde Maria Gruber is an anthropologist who works as doctor of anatomy with a specialisation in osteology at the Karl Landsteiner Privat University in Lower Austria. Her main field of activity is in body donation and teaching (dissection courses), but she also does research. As an anthropologist she works at the University of Vienna’s department of evolutionary anthropology and teaches osteology and neuroanatomy.

Kilian Jörg works, both artistically and philosophically, on the subject of the climate catastrophe, its toxic entanglements, and political framings. He is the founder of the philosophy collective and a member of im_Flieger as well as of the research cluster Stoffwechsel – Ökologien der Zusammenarbeit. He is currently working on post-doc research on the car as a metaphor for our toxic dependence on modern lifestyles. His most recent publication (with Anna Lerchbaumer) is Toxic Temple. Edition Angewandte/de Gruyter, 2022. www.kilianjoerg.blogspot.com