OFFSHORE (CH/DE)
Residency period: January – March 2022
The project The Myth of Memory is Offshore’s second chapter in their long-term project about the comeback of wolves. After the duo has investigated the techno-scientific apparatus implemented to surveil and control the predator in their work Managing the Wild, they addressed the role of landscape, myth, and memory in the second part of the project. They tackled the question how wolves become figures that embody cultural narratives and sentiments. The duo investigated how wolf mythologies and memories are produced, read, negotiated, and recycled, used, and abused in order to make sense of the return of wolves in today’s contested landscapes. By proposing this new perspective, The Myth of Memory reflects upon the complex relationship between humans and other animals through storytelling and poses the urgent question how we want to memorize and remember the past, in order to shape our multi-species future.
The final version of their project The Myth of Memory. Gods, Ghosts and Beasts: Roaming Today’s Wolf Territories was then presented at My Monkey Gallery in Nancy in July 2022.
Offshore is a Zurich- and Eindhoven-based design studio, founded by art director and graphic designer Isabel Seiffert and author and designer Christoph Miler. Their design practice reflects the fundamental idea of “Offshoring”—the relocation of working processes to other cities, countries and continents. Driven by the aim to explore the remote, unknown and invisible, being and thinking offshore embodies one of the studios’ key principles. In doing so, their modes of production become inevitably collaborative, transnational and decentralized, questioning the traditional boundaries of space, time and professions.