MIRIAM SIMUN (US, 1984)
Residency period: January – March 2022
During her residency at La Becque Miriam Simun presented Lynx Links, the final chapter of a multi-year research of exploring rewilding as a regeneration strategy and wildness as a socio-political construct. In it, she takes on Switzerland’s history of managing the country’s lynx population to examine new technologies being put into play in nature conservation strategies. These technologies, for example planetary remote sensing and artificial intelligence, represent an evolution of human/nonhuman relations. In Switzerland, lynx were hunted to extinction in the 19th century, before being reintroduced in the 1970s. They are currently tracked and managed via an array of different technologies by the KORA Foundation, a wildlife management organization based in the Canton of Bern.
Miriam Simun followed the animals in the Jura mountains on walks and with the aid of machines, which resulted in a film essay and a lecture performance, Ghost B126 (Welcome to The Contact Zone), that took the form of a cellphone-aided guided walk in nature.
Miriam Simun works at the intersection of ecology, technology and the body. Her practice spans multiple formats including video, performance, installation, and communal sensorial experiences. Her practice is concerned with the collision of human and non-human bodies with rapidly evolving techno-ecosystems. If collision can be understood as form of disturbance (in the ecological sense), then this disturbance points the way to an opportunity for renewal – and Simun works with the sensory conditions for this renewal.
Miriam Simun has exhibited at Gropius Bau (Berlin), the New Museum (New York), the Bogota Museum of Modern Art (Colombia), and the Himalayas Museum (Shanghai), among others. She is a recipient of awards from the Onassis, Gulbenkian, Creative Capital and Robert Rauschenberg Foundations, and her work has been featured in The New York Times and The New Yorker, as well as on MTV, CBC, and BBC.