Anatomy of Descent / to the Terra Incognita exhibition
The symposium Anatomy of Descent examines mountains as a liminal space of geographical and geopolitical shifts, trauma and the climate emergency. The symposium is supported by the Prague City Gallery in the context of Terra Incognita, an exhibition that explores the social, material, and political dimensions of mediation.
The programme offers counter-stories to human-centred understandings of mountains, foregrounding ecological and Indigenous perspectives as alternatives to prevailing narratives of conquest, extraction and coloniality.
Through Melanie Manchot’s new filmic lecture performance, it examines conflicted Cold War histories, following their traces from the Sudetenland to Mount Makalu in the Himalayas. What happens after the summit is reached and the stories of descent are the subject of the keynote lecture by writer and scholar Eva-Maria Müller. The film screenings activate the notion of borderlands through Bára Mrázková’s take on lithium mining on the Czech–German mountain Cínovec, and the effects of climate change unfold in Nepalese filmmaker Shanta Nepali’s and Rosa Barba’s films examining the relationship between earth rights and memory, community and grief.
The symposium is the first part of the public presentation of ongoing research by the artist and filmmaker Melanie Manchot; audiovisual archivist and curator Matěj Strnad; and art historian and curator Hana Janečková (Academy of Visual Arts, Prague).It continues with the event Eye of the Mountain, at KINDL Berlin, in December 2026.
Symposium language: English.
