Artificial Gut Feeling

If winning can only occur in a competition between equal opponents, someone who isn’t equal will need to adopt a different strategy and let go of the promise, or the curse, of victory. Anna Zett takes up the challenge in Artificial Gut Feeling, a collection of personal science fiction, registering the traces that systems of power leave in the body, in its locomotory, nervous, and digestive systems. Dedicated to the feminist revolution, the post-socialist subject of Artificial Gut Feeling questions logocentric and capitalist beliefs about the economy of meaning. The book gathers together fists, guts, and brains to gain a deeper understanding of the non-verbal roots of dialogue.

Published in October 2019 by the independent Brussels-based press Divided, Artificial Gut Feeling is Anna Zett’s first book. For this afternoon event at ICI Berlin, Zett will present readings from the book and appear in dialogue with ICI Fellow Amelia Groom.

There will also be a screening titled Zwischenarchiv (2019), with two recent videos by Anna Zett, which use and respond to archival material from the Robert-Havemann-Archiv, the Berlin archive of oppositional movements in the GDR. Both videos are part of Zett‘s current project Deponie (Dump), addressing disposal as a symbolic and material practice in need of borders and looking at language-based power from an environmental perspective.Anna Zett (b. 1983, Leipzig) is an artist, writer and maker of films and radio plays. Their work combines historical research and poetic form with a playful, dialogic practice. In recent years, their research into the cosmology of scientific modernism has focused on post-communist trouble, industrialism, and the German heritage of violence. Formally, their artistic emphasis moves towards rhythm, sound, and the human body’s capacity to improvise verbal and non-verbal communication. Zett has written and directed two experimental radio plays for German public radio and (co-)hosted participatory formats of storytelling, discourse, and choreography.