refuge.earth is a destination without borders or fences. Identification is not required for entry. There is no exit visa. Refuge neither demands nor imposes. It is a restorative retreat into a digital Neverland for weary browsers, surfers and digital nomads. refuge is conceived for quieting –a jewel of relief amidst the overwhelm of ungraspable immensity that is the Internet. refuge enables embodiment through sensory discovery –in spaciousness, light, colour, vibration and motion.
feldman-kiss & Matheuszik are a collaboration of established and emerging pandisciplinary / new media artists. We work flexibly between and among interactive XR environments and media art installations for museums, galleries and temporary public art contexts. We favour process-rich, socially engaged techno-art inquiry on par with decolonial aesthetics, poetry and narrative.
nichola is an established artist with a specialization in the spatial dialectics of form, emergent technologies, lens based media, performance and early netart. nichola’s artwork investigates the contested site of body / identity as related to the uncanny of inbetween. Their process-rich, relationally intensive practice produces pristine collective aesthetic experiments critical of categorical systems that serve and protect social power imbalance –borders, citizenship, gender, race, colour, caste, creed.
Adrienne is an emerging interdisciplinary artist with interests in the uncanny, esp with respect to hybridity, identity and futurity. In process and as installations, her artworks seamlessly blend and mix digital media tools and capacities to offer hybridized experiences that quietly detangle complexities of identity, perception, fantasy and utopian aspiration. Adrienne’s work takes critical and speculative approaches to the use and development of new technologies. Using technology and narrative as metaphor for experiences of mixed ethnicity, Adrienne’s immersive narrative spaces offer alternative understandings of so-called “post” Coloniality.
feldman-kiss & Matheuszik are both highly diverse Canada born Jamaican, Germans –a generation apart. nichola’s ancestry hails through Africa, Europe, and the Levant. Adrienne’s foreparents have migrated from Africa, Europe and South Asia. We met in 2018 as teacher/student and have worked with increasing synergy and interdependence since 2019. Our mutual interests in pan-disciplinary creation with emphasis on digital processes leading to material and spatial outcomes were immediately apparent. With shared artistic drive to advance discourse on ethical representation and contribute to social evolution from the perspective of global citizen, we both pursue hybridized form as decolonial expression with freedom to escape oppressive confines of categorical social structures. Racial reasoning is but one categorical impulse that oppresses the full and joyful expression of human diversity, as are siloed methodological and disciplinary specializations that narrow and limit expressive imaginaries.
refuge.earth is a collaboration to build upon our bi-generationality, honour our gifts, ideals, wisdom and capacity as a conjunction of emerging and established practitioners carving space for critical dialogue and feminist approaches to digital new media in public space.