We enter a cave, a space that has its own rhythm: it compels us to lower our voices, reset our pace, and asks for time so that we can orient ourselves within it. The installation PLANETARY INTIMACY by the Austrian interdisciplinary artist Stephanie Winter is conceived as an immersive situation rather than a set of autonomous objects. What unfolds here emerges over the course of the exhibition and in relation to the presence of its visitors. The space becomes a site of coexistence and co-production of meaning, where bodies, materials, microorganisms, and narratives encounter one another.

The cave is not merely a motif but a way of organizing experience. In the artist’s conception, it becomes a tentacular space, almost a living being with nerves, roots, and tentacles—akin to dreams that connect the visible with the invisible and the psychic with the earthly. The logic of the cave redirects our attention away from performance and quick readability toward orientation within shifting signals, toward bodily perception and toward that which usually remains in the background.

The exhibition poses the question of how to think about our relationship to the home planet and to the more-than-human world through practices of care, preservation, and collaboration. Its point of departure is a shift toward a different “beginning” of culture, inspired by Ursula K. Le Guin’s essay Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. Instead of the heroic gesture and tools of dominance, Le Guin places at the center the container as a principle of gathering, carrying, transmitting, and sharing. Culture functions as an infrastructure for sustaining life, as a set of relational technologies that make it possible to survive together.

This concept is materialized in the installation through material and process-based thinking. Textiles, ceramics, video, and the fermentation of ingredients transform the gallery into a living laboratory in which materials operate as active participants in processes of transformation. Fermentation, understood as one of the oldest cultural technologies, is used here as a model of interspecies collaboration between humans and microorganisms. It enables nourishment, preservation, and sharing. At the same time, as the writing of Sandor Katz also suggests, such sharing is never entirely neutral, but always carries within it a relation of trust, the transmission of knowledge, and a certain form of responsibility. Fermentation introduces into the exhibition a different temporality—slow, relational, and mutually dependent—and opens up a perspective of culture as something that has been more-than- human from the very beginning. Over the course of the exhibition, the installation space is further activated through participatory and performative gatherings with the artist, which translate this temporality into a collective experience.

From spatial experience, attention gradually shifts toward the body. The perspective of the human microbiome reminds us that the body itself is an ecosystem inhabited by trillions of microorganisms that co-shape digestion, immunity, perception, and emotion. The boundary between “self” and “other” thus becomes porous and temporary. The fermenting container here presents itself as a mirror of the gut, while culture in the jar points to the cultures that themselves constitute us. It becomes necessary to recognize that we do not exist as autonomous individuals but as multispecies constellations whose stability is the result of cooperation and fragile balance. In this sense as well, fermentation does not represent only a biological process but also a social and political figure: sharing a living culture of food or a starter may be understood as a gesture that disrupts the logic of ownership and reminds us that life is sustained through dependence, care, and circulation.

PLANETARY INTIMACY closes the arc by returning to the question of beginnings. In place of a narrative based on expansion, a story of alliances, preservation, and collaboration comes to the fore. The container appears here as both a feminist and an ecological technology that makes time, relation, and transformation possible. Visitors enter a situation that functions as a shared container for collective being, where the human and the more-than-human meet in everyday forms of coexistence.

Stephanie Winter is an interdisciplinary artist working at the intersection of artistic research, speculative fiction, installation, performance, film, and participatory formats. She develops immersive experiential environments—walk-through, multisensory installations that function as social interfaces, stages, and sites for the collective production of knowledge. Her work is devoted to planetary consciousness and combines atmospheric density with intellectual depth. It addresses themes of transformation, feminism, ecology, posthumanism, and interspecies interconnectedness. Collaboration is central to her practice and is reflected in participatory performances. Winter transforms spaces, institutions, and even entire abandoned buildings into walkable artworks, personal experiential environments, and shared sites of exchange and transformation.

Stephanie Winter’s works have been presented at international film festivals and exhibitions, including Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo (Turin), Ludwig Museum (Budapest), Kunsthaus Wien (Vienna), MQ Art Box (Vienna), Gallery 5020 (Salzburg), Forum Stadtpark (Graz), Volkskundemuseum Wien, CHB – Collegium Hungaricum Berlin, Ars Electronica (Linz), Philip K. Dick Science Fiction Film Festival (New York), Busan International Short Film Festival (South Korea), In Wonderland Videoarte (Tenerife), Bunter Hund (Munich), and Festival International de Films de Femmes de Créteil (France).

For her work, Winter has received several awards and grants, including the Akademiepreis of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (2007) for a twelve-channel video installation, the Excellence Award at the Busan International Film Festival (2010), the City of Bonn Fellowship (2011–2012), the Förderpreis für Bildende Kunst der Stadt Wien (2014), and a residency at the Cité des Arts in Paris. In 2020 she received the Jahresstipendium für Bildende Kunst from the state of Salzburg, and most recently the Creatives for Vienna Award from the Wirtschaftsagentur Wien (2021).