Rivers are Languages
Investigating the intersections of IDentities, languages, and spaces.
#myRiver
Alexander Steig
Alexander Steig (*1968) is a multidisciplinary conceptual artist and curator based in Munich and Berlin. He is a member of the German Artists’ Association (Deutscher Künstlerbund). In addition to his artistic and curatorial practice, as well as teaching positions in Hildesheim and Weimar and ongoing publishing work, he is actively involved in cultural policy on a voluntary basis—as chairperson, board member, and advisory board member of various institutions.
DEnaturalizing the Human Gaze
How do likes, shares, and hashtags shape our relationship with nature?
The interactive exhibition series #meinfluss examines digital image cultures – and asks how our online interactions influence collective perceptions of landscape, climate, and environmental policy.
With his work Innkiesel (Erratic Block #6), conceptual artist Alexander Steig brings this reflection into physical space. In a single-channel closed-circuit video installation, a modest pebble from the banks of the Inn becomes a meditative image: over the course of 24 hours, the "Erratic Block" slowly rotates on its axis – almost imperceptibly, yet continuously. The live transmission onto a black screen generates a subtle tension between stillness and movement, surface and depth.
Steig’s work explores temporality, identity, and transformation: the river stone becomes a vessel of geological history and cultural attribution – an object that resists quick readability. Inspired by Heraclitus’ notion that “everything flows,” the piece reflects on the fragile balance between singularity and interchangeability, between permanence and dissolution.
Innkiesel is part of an ongoing artistic engagement with river landscapes – beginning at the Isar in Munich, continuing at the Leine in Hanover, and further expanded at the fjord in Akureyri, Iceland. In Wasserburg, the pebble enters a new dialogue: with the Inn, the exhibition space, and the digital realm of platform culture.
Opening a Channel
Referring to his home river, the Isar, Alexander Steig says:
“The Isar meanders just a few steps from my front door and serves as an urban recreational space. Since its renaturation in 2009, gravel banks emerge and disappear at various points between the Praterinsel and Flaucher, depending on water level and current. These consist primarily of sedimentary rocks of similar size, in shades ranging from almost white to dark grey.
On regular walks, I search for pebbles—less out of geological interest, more as a sculptor. Color, shape, and size determine which stone I choose and ‘borrow’ from the seemingly uniform mass of rubble. Standing at the river and picking up a pebble, one might recall the phrase attributed to Heraclitus, ‘Everything flows’, or Plato’s interpretation, ‘Everything moves on and nothing remains.’
If nothing remains, then the uniqueness of each pebble—its ‘identity’, so to speak—becomes a temporary designation, its condition limited in time until it is eventually ground down.
What appears identical is often only similar. The same thing can be seen—interpreted—differently and appear as two or even many things. Whether it is a case of numerical or qualitative identity leads to reflections on the nature of so-called identity: the sum of characteristics that define a person or object and distinguish it as an individual or entity.
Identity can also be asserted—a pebble from the Isar in Munich or the Alps might just as well come from a gravel plant in Salzgitter-Thiede or from Scandinavia. But one can also simply enjoy the ‘natural beauty’ of the scene: the sea of stones on a water-fringed gravel bank, and the single, wet-glossy pebble in one’s hand.”
Remarks about invisible Cycles
Since the mid-1990s, Alexander Steig has focused in his interventions on processes and applications of (media-based) control mechanisms, exploring the boundaries between “state care” and repression, between public and private space.
He questions the different social mechanisms of influence and the resulting loss of intimacy—whether intentional or not. Depending on the subject, his work also includes economic-ecological and commemorative-cultural references.
To this end, Steig constructs simple models, exhibition architectures, and displays, often focusing on seemingly uneventful areas, everyday objects, or archival materials, which through media translation become abstracted or newly contextualized.
Modes of denaturalized perceptions
#meinfluss
#meinfluss is an artistic-research intervention along the banks of the Inn River that exposes the colonial entanglements embedded in our current relationships to images, nature, and perception. Between June and August 2025, international artists activate the river landscape through performances, installations, and participatory formats that intertwine ecological, migratory, and digital realities.
At the heart of the project lies a critique of visual cultures in which nature is no longer experienced, but algorithmically framed, categorized, and consumed. The core thesis: what appears as communication is often a simulated gesture; what seems like attention follows platform logics of extraction—of gazes, data, and narratives. #meinfluss asks how rivers can become carriers of memory, belonging, and resistance to disrupt neocolonial image regimes and digital control systems.
Digitalimagery & nature
In a moment when digital images do more than depict—they perform—#meinfluss listens to the frequencies beneath the visible. It traces how the visual regimes of social media and tourism rehearse climate injustice and reproduce colonial ways of seeing. Rather than amplify spectacle, the project engages in a practice of attunement: slow looking, collaborative witnessing, and embodied interventions in public space. It insists on the minor gestures, the haptic traces, the resonant silences that disturb dominant narratives. #meinfluss does not just show—it feels through image and place, unsettling the visual logics of extractive knowledge with a politics of relation and refusal.
From Hashtag to Habitat: Rethinking Nature in the Age of Social Media
DigitalImagery & Nature
The Algorithmic Gaze: Who Sees Nature, and How?
Digital Imagery & Biodiversity
René Wilhelm Landspersky
Art enables me and you to attend otherwise ...
Languages are rivers-they carry life, death and futures
Departure
#meinfluss listens before it looks.
It understands art as a practice of attunement — to ecological resonances, to silenced histories embedded in landscapes, and to the quiet frequencies of refusal.
By connecting perspectives from the Global South and North, it creates shared spaces of encounter. Nature is no longer a neutral backdrop, but a relational terrain shaped by memory, power, and perception. Participation becomes a slow, embodied act of witnessing — a way of imagining futures otherwise.
Mduduzi Khumalo
Mduduzi Khumalo is a performer and activist in the field of global learning. As co-founder of the integration theatre Afrikabaret – Backpackers Company, he has been developing performative and visual formats since 2016 that explore both visible and invisible boundaries. His artistic projects serve as tools for transcultural learning.
With his project The Wall – Awareness With Attitude, Khumalo pursues a multiplier approach that uses images and sounds of the environment to make mechanisms of inclusion tangible while critically reflecting on paternalistic power structures in the context of intersectionality.
STADT LAND BRÜCKEN – Global Un/Learning Camp
June 16 – June 16th Remembrance Day – Film Screening
An evening of remembrance commemorating the 1976 student uprising in Soweto – with a film and discussion on resistance, education, and colonial continuities, framed by the question:
June 17 – Open Space: Writing Workshop
Between Sound, Body, and Pen: Language Loss and Images of Nature
A workshop for all who see language as a living organ of change – between silence and understanding, between images of nature and resonance.
June 18 – Open Space: STADT LAND BRÜCKEN – Empowerment by Us for All
Between urbanity, rurality, and community:
A collective space for empowerment, encounter, and solidaric learning – by us, for all.
June 19 – “Grantler Workshop” – For Everyone Who Needs to Let Off Steam!
Complaining, grumbling, venting – together, but constructively!
A humorous space for critical voices and creative complaints.
June 20 – World Refugee Day
Sound Workshop for experimenting, listening, connecting –
a journey through tones, textures, and in-between spaces.
For all who wish to meet the world with open ears.
Curated and led by artist Mduduzi Khumalo
