This interview of Brandon LaBelle with curator, artist, and researcher Berit Fischer offers insight into her transformative approach to contemporary art practice that challenges conventional notions of empathy and ecological awareness.
Conducted between 2022 and 2023, the conversation explores Fischer's pioneering work in creating embodied, transdisciplinary experiences.
Fischer discusses her Radical Empathy Lab and the (Re-)Gaining Ecological Futures curriculum at Floating University Berlin, where she facilitates "affective encounters" grounded in alternative pedagogies and experiential knowledge production. Reframing empathy as "affective translation" Fischer articulates her vision of what she terms "energetic ecological citizenship"—a holistic knowledge formation engaging both body and mind.
Her post-representational curatorial and artistic approach emphasizes unmediated, embodied experiences that foster critical consciousness and interconnectedness, challenging anthropocentric worldviews. The interview also addresses Fischer's 2023 co-founding of the International Forum for Eco-Embodied Arts (IFEEA) and explores themes of technology, spirituality, and political love as agents for social and ecological transformation in an age of ecological crisis.
Complementing the interview the publication also includes an original essay by Fischer, which elaborates the notion of "fluid compos(t)ings" as a conceptual and practical methodology.
Berit Fischer is a transdisciplinary cultural practitioner: an artist, curator, scholar, writer, and an editor. She has been working internationally since 1999. Previously based in New York and London, she now works from Berlin. She holds a Ph.D. from the Winchester School of Art/Southampton University, UK. Her practice based doctoral research asked how curatorial practice can activate spaces and conditions for a micropolitical and holistic making of social empathy as an approach for a post-representational practice. Her research interests include civic engaging, somatic, and listening practices, feminist- and eco-pedagogies, critical spatial practices, and a holistic and experiential knowledge production to permeate the status quo. Her practice often unfolds in forms of affective encounter and relational learning that strives to activate agency and an active micropolitics, fields of action and spaces for critical consciousness raising and engagement.
Brandon LaBelle is a
musician, artist, writer, theorist, curator, educator and editor based in Berlin.
His work, based on performance,
sound installation, recording and use of found sounds, focuses on questions of agency, community, pirate culture, and poetics, which results in a range of collaborative and para-institutional initiatives, including: The Listening Biennial and Academy (2021-), Communities in Movement (2019-), The Living School (2014-16), Oficina de Autonomia (2017),
The Imaginary Republic (2014-19),
Dirty Ear Forum (2013-), Surface Tension (2003-2008), and
Surface Tension (1998-2002). LaBelle reflects fluently on his artistic practice, drawing attention to the social dimensions of listening and manner in which sounds, in multiple variations, play upon public spaces, and drawing connections across media and incorporate video, as well as architectural and sculptural vocabularies into an expanded field that embraces rhetorical and spatial challenges.
In 1995 he founded
Errant Bodies Press, an independent publishing house supporting work in sound art and studies, performance and poetics, artistic research and contemporary political thought.
