janet grau

The Studio for Curious Matters is the strand of my artistic practice that translates complex scientific and social questions into accessible, emotionally resonant experiences. It is a space where ideas from anywhere – philosophy, psychology, climate science, science history and everyday life – are turned into shared stories.

Working with performance, lecture-performance, installation, video and participatory formats, I create spaces where data, theory and daily experience can meet.

Since 2022, I have developed projects that draw on research in neuroscience, climate science, social psychology and science history to explore how we understand the world and our role in it. These works often take the form of staged lecture-performances, guided encounters with objects and images, and interactive situations that invite audiences to think, feel and respond together.

A central focus of the studio is collaboration with young people and diverse publics. In workshops and co-creation processes, participants help shape texts, images, performances and visual metaphors about topics such as climate anxiety, planetary futures and the desire to make a difference. By combining clear communication, humour and artistic experimentation, the studio treats science communication as a shared, imaginative practice rather than a one-way transfer of information.

The following projects are examples of my art and science communication practice and can be adapted or newly developed in collaboration with partner institutions. They are available as live and video-based lecture-performances, workshop formats, participatory projects and exhibition modules for schools, universities, cultural organisations and research institutes, and can be tailored in length, focus and level of participation to specific audiences and contexts.

• The Mattering Instinct is a lecture performance that stages philosopher Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s “mattering theory” through language, objects and movement. Playing the philosopher on stage alongside two performers, I translate abstract ideas about our human drive to matter into tangible, humorous and visually driven scenes that make philosophical concepts accessible to wider audiences.
  
  
• Learning Machines (Everything We’ll Ever Think is Potentially There from the Start) is a lecture performance that draws on philosophy, cognitive science and developmental psychology to explore how knowledge, imagination and play are intertwined. Live lecture and video scenes with children – based on classic experiments by psychologist Albert Bandura – run in parallel, showing how pretend play can become a cultural laboratory for new realities and new forms of learning.
  
  
• Hallo Zukunft! Das Zeitalter der Künstlichen Intelligenz is a commissioned lecture-performance and participatory format developed with scientists from the Leibniz Association. Combining lecture-performance, visual storytelling and interactive elements, it communicates – in an engaging, image-rich way – the history of artificial intelligence and current research on how AI is changing our world. The work invites audiences to engage with scientific findings not only cognitively but also emotionally, using images, metaphors and performative situations to open up discussion about possible futures.
  
  
• Not the End of the World is an evolving performance and media project dealing with climate anxiety, sustainability, planetary health and the dangers of catastrophe messages. Through a mix of lecture-performance, data visualisation, video, stop-motion animation and participatory elements – often developed together with young people – the project examines how stories about crisis and the end of the world shape our emotions, our sense of agency and our ability to imagine different futures.

The Studio for Curious Matters offers custom formats for institutions and partners who want to open up scientific and social topics in new ways – from lecture-performances and exhibitions to workshops and longer-term participatory processes.