Help Send Mary Maggic to Mongolia (1-15 August):

A Research Residency in an Ongoing Series of Earthly Engagements

I'm an artist and researcher whose practice is rooted in workshopology, the collective process of learning, creating, and “worlding” together under an ethos of love and care. My projects have always explored what it means to be permeable with the environment: its joys, its wounds, and its transformations. My journey started 10 years ago in the global biohacking community, creating workshops around hormones, environmental toxicity, and alienation. This led to a Fulbright residency in 2019, where I spent a year in Yogyakarta, Indonesia exploring the connection between Javanese mysticism and the plastic pollution crisis.

My recent collaborative film Cosmic Land Cosmic Home (Okayama) shows the animistic rhythms of breathing mountains, traveling rivers, and dancing forests as intertwined with our homes and bodies. And since my residency in the Amazon rainforest (Manaus) at the end of 2024, I launched the art-for-ecology platform Atelier Florestania (Vienna), creating public workshops for transforming plastic waste into an immersive forest, drawing on Indigenous Amazonian activist Ailton Krenak's concept of florestania or "forest belonging." At the heart of my projects across landscapes, workshopologies with the more-than-human center our current ecological crisis as the starting point for embodying our permeability and vulnerability with the planet. Contrary to the illusion of separateness, we inter-are with everything else.

Explore my work here:

Website | @marymaggic | linkedin | linktree

What I'm Raising Funds For

I have been selected for "A Journey Through Time and Space", an art residency program in Mongolia hosted by Nomadic Red Corner. This is a rare and meaningful opportunity that extends my ongoing research into earthly engagements, participatory practice, and our relationship with land across vast distances. The residency takes me to two very contrasting landscapes: first Ulaanbaatar, a city caught in rapid urbanization, then Ikh Gazriin Chuluu, ancient granite formations in the Gobi desert, where we will stay with a nomadic family and learn from a land that holds inter-generational memory in its stones.

In both locations, I will lead blind-sensing exercises, a collective practice of knowledging without eyesight, working with the contrasting materials of each place: in Ulaanbaatar, with found and discarded urban objects, and in the Gobi desert, with the subtler frequencies of the earth beneath our hands. Together, these two encounters trace a dialogue between disconnection and return, accumulation and porosity, grief and inter-being, and ask what the land of Mongolia has already been holding for us. Throughout the residency, I will collect film footage as raw material for an evolving body of work on earthly engagements across political ecologies.

How Your Funds Will Be Used - Total €4,000

What is Workshopology?

Like a musical jam session or a multi-ingredient soup, workshopology is the collective and experiential process of togetherness, where knowledge unfolds through inter-disciplinarity, anti-coloniality and negotiations across pluri-versal visions. Originating from the open-source bio-art network Hackteria, these methodologies channel our knowledges into medicine for the world, addressing contemporary conditions of alienation, erasure, scarcity, and uncertainty. Inside the dimension of “awakened action,” the participatory and alchemical process of workshopology can nurture attunement, repair, and new forms of co-creating with the more-than-human. When we workshop together, we not only share knowledge, but we tend the conditions from which new worlds can take root.

My practice has always been rooted in mutual exchange — the belief that knowledge, care, and resources flow best when they move in reciprocal directions. Alongside this campaign, I continue to offer workshopology sessions and resources to those who feel called to go deeper. You can find out more here: https://maggic.ooo/Maggic-Workshopology

Why I Am Doing This

In 2017, four things happened simultaneously: I finished my Masters, I became a mother, moved to Vienna, and committed to working as an independent artist. Through the relocation, cultural barriers, disorientation, exhaustion, and the constant alienation of building a life in German-speaking society, my artistic practice was always the one thing I could rely on. The one thing that never left me. My practice has taken me around the world and connected me with extraordinary people: a global network of artists, researchers, and collaborators without whom I would not have the sense of belonging and fulfillment I feel today. And that’s the whole point. My work has always been about the other: the person on the other side of the workshop, the land that is wounded in front of me, asking to be witnessed. Connection is not a byproduct of my practice - It is the practice.

For years I relied on institutional invitations to take me outside of Vienna. But now, funding cuts across arts, culture and education are making it increasingly clear that we cannot wait for institutions to validate our movements, give resources to our visions, or grant us permission to do the work we know needs doing. This is why I feel we are living in a moment where building networks of mutual care between artists and collectives is the big transition being asked of us. When we exchange energy, resources, knowledge, and guidance directly with each other outside institutional channels, we create something more resilient and authentic than any grant cycle can offer. This campaign is itself an act of that exchange and reciprocity, and a test in breaking out of institutional codependency.

Thank You!

Whether you contribute €5 or €50, you are supporting my most honest and impactful way of working. In my early twenties I chased my dreams without asking permission and waiting for invitations, and I want to return to that liberated energy. My research travels to the Amazon rainforest, into the mystic energies of Indonesia and Japan were following my intuitive desire as a legitimate compass. Thank you for believing that art, land, and knowledge are worth protecting, and for helping me discover the energetic frequencies of Mongolia.