Robert Švarc

Robo Švarc (*1983, Bratislava) is a visual artist, curator, author, chef, and translator from German. He studied painting at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (2008-2014). From 2009 to 2017, he worked as an art assistant at the Kochkunst workshop of the German-Hungarian artist and chef Arpad Dobriban (https://geschmacksarchiv.de/ ). Since 2013, he has been implementing the Lecture Art project, which connects cultural, gastronomic, and environmental themes through lectures, seminars, workshops, gastro-events, festivals, and more. In 2021, he curated the year-long multidisciplinary festival Beuys Will Be Beuys for the Goethe Institute in Bratislava (https://www.goethe.de/ins/sk/sk/kul/sup/beu.html ). In 2021, his book Non Exit was published and a translation of the book The Congo Tribunal by Milo Rau was published. He is currently finalizing the translation of the book The Art of Assembly. Political Theatre Today by Florian Malzacher. In the academic year 2024/25, he led the seminar "Art in the Anthropocene" at the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava. He is a co-founder of the civic association Hopelessness and Despair, which has been dedicated to utopian-realist projects in ecology and art since 2023.

Anthropocene: Contamination and Interdependence in Environment and Performance

The project with the working title “Anthropocene: Contamination and Interdependence in Environment and Performance” is based on the processual Remediation Sculpture (2024-), located in the orchard of an elementary school in the broader area of the Istrochem chemical factory in Bratislava. The water and soil here are contaminated with the remains of the chemical production of the former communist regime. The Remediation Sculpture consists of 15 circles planted with more than 1,500 suitable plants and fungi, which surround the fruit trees and trigger soil-cleaning processes—environmental biotechnology such as phyto- and mycoremediation. The final phase of the project will consist of moving artifacts from the archive of the Remediation Sculpture area to the gallery spaces, where a multimedia installation will be created, which we plan to enter with performative lectures. On the performative level, we will move the project to the speculative-fictional level of preenactment. We will anticipate various situations/scenarios that could arise, assuming the application of some constitutional amendments proposed within the framework of current legal-theoretical discussions.