Martina Menegon: Becoming Chimeric

Workshop with Martina Menegon hosted by Erika Farina (Mz*Baltazar’s Lab)

The self we inhabit is never one thing, and it is never only its own. It is a gathering of relations, shaped through encounters with other beings, materials, and worlds. Yet dominant systems of power, built around human superiority and narrow ideas of who and what counts as normal, enforce fixed divisions, often violently, severing the relations that connect all of us, human and more-than-human alike. These divisions leave us isolated and categorized, with little room for ways of being and becoming that are fluid, unruly, and glitched.

Becoming Chimeric is an evolving workshop practice that invites participants to refuse these cuts, resist these constraints, and reclaim the weird, the monstrous, and the hybrid as ways of being, becoming, and relating. Through hands-on experimentation with generative systems and extended-reality technologies, the workshop cultivates a space for imagining identities as mutable, relational, and entangled. Glitching and chimering form a choreography through which we stitch ourselves back into relation, building hybrid self-bodies in kinship with other beings, materials, and worlds. To become chimeric is to practice inter-being: to glitch with others, remembering that nothing is ever truly separate and that we are always in chimeric kinship.

This is the spell of becoming otherwise:
let(y0urs, m1ne, 0urs).CHIMERA.rise();

Participants are kindly asked to bring their smartphones and laptops.

WHO:
Martina Menegon (she/her) is an artist, curator, lecturer, and PhD researcher based in Vienna. She works as a Senior Artist at the Department of Transmedia Art at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. In her artistic practice, she explores embodiment in digital and extended realities, as well as the hybrid and chimeric nature of contemporary embodiment.