Post-Futuristic Archaeology: A Project by Artist Katrin Leitner
In this blog series, we invite designers to step behind their finished work and share the stories, decisions, and challenges that shaped it. Rather than presenting projects as polished outcomes, we’re interested in the thinking, experimentation, and moments of uncertainty that happen along the way.
In this post, artist Katrin Leitner discusses her artistic approach behind Post-Futuristic Archaeology, a ceramics project on post-futuristic artifacts. In her own words, she describes the methodology she adopted during her Spazju Kreattiv residency period in March 2025.
In long-term, thematically structured work cycles, I combine material and immaterial media such as ceramics, video projection, print, drawing, and text in both word and image. The results of these multimedia approaches culminate in variable, site-specific installations, exhibitions, performative stagings, and participatory projects.
My practice is modular and situational. I repeatedly invite viewers into environments shaped by artistic artifacts—especially ceramic objects and fragments—to foster a deeper understanding of the complex structures and interconnections that define our existence.
My work continually poses fundamental questions to the present, past, and future, addressing mechanisms of perception, our (co-)existence, and our intricate relationship with the planet and its living beings. I explore how knowledge is preserved and passed on within human communities across diverse cultures. Against the backdrop of virtual lifeworlds, rapidly accelerating technologies, and a natural environment exploited and gravely threatened by humans, I consciously create handmade objects from the natural element of earth. This form of artistic practice—working with clay—has been a vital component of human coexistence since the Neolithic era. For me, it is an essential, archaic act of survival.
In the body of work Post-Futuristic Archaeology – Terra Totems, I focus on ceramics as a medium, particularly the diversity and cultural significance of fired clay artifacts across civilizations. I examine their mythological uses, ritual practices, and roles in everyday life.
Through an intensive exploration of mythological and ritual strategies developed by people throughout history to cope with their environments and the challenges of life, I have imagined a post-futuristic era in our future, asking: What if our future were already the past? In this context, I see myself as a kind of “chronicler.”
By exploring the connections between past, present, and future, we can not only honor the wisdom and experiences of Indigenous cultures worldwide but also discover innovative solutions to pressing contemporary issues—and collectively rethink new strategies for a global-Indigenous consciousness.
All works are developed with techniques I have cultivated myself: applying glaze directly onto unfired, moist clay; intentionally using thick, self-mixed glazes; repurposing typical effect glazes in conceptually different ways; and intentionally producing misfires, cracks, fractures, and broken ceramic objects as part of the artistic concept to simulate a post-futuristic archaeology. The handmade and the seemingly flawed are consciously embedded into each ceramic piece.
These works create a material, analog counterbalance to an increasingly perfected, artificial world shaped by technology, optimization, and perpetual growth. Many pieces are modular and are reconfigured for each site and exhibition, making the physical space itself an essential narrative and conceptual element.
Clay is my central medium: an archaic, handmade material that I use consciously as a counterbalance to today’s digital and hyper-technological world.
It is not just a material but a cultural archive. For thousands of years, humans have shaped earth to preserve knowledge, rituals, and stories.
My work explores questions of past, present, and future. I investigate how cultures preserve and pass on knowledge, how we live with nature, technology, and contradiction—and what we might learn for tomorrow.
In the cycle Post-Futuristic Archaeology – Terra Totems, I create fictional artifacts from a future past—an artistic reflection on the world we live in.
Artist Bio
Katrin Leitner, born in 1974 in Nürnberg, Germany, is a multimedia and highly versatile artist. She studied Fine Arts and Visual Communication at the Kassel University of Arts, where she was mentored by Rob Scholte, Carsten Nicolai, Daniel Richter, Jason Rhoads, and Ursula Panhans-Bühler, with study periods in China. Her works have been exhibited at numerous venues both nationally and internationally, including at Kunsthalle Fridericianum, and she was recently awarded the Doris Kriniger Prize for outstanding artistic achievement in 2023.
Katrin Leitner is a teaching associate at the University of Kassel and served as a guest professor in 2022 at the Department for New Media Art and Design at Beihang University in Beijing. She has received a variety of scholarships and residencies, most recently in Malta, Italy, Hesse, Saxony, and across Germany. Her work has been supported by a Neustart Kultur scholarship from the Stiftung Kunstfonds in 2022, as well as a research grant from the Stiftung Kulturwerk of VG-BildKunst/Neustart Kultur in 2021.
Her artistic practice currently includes working with ceramics, video and media art, photography, experimental drawing—primarily in the form of multimedia spatial installations—and collaborative project work. Her approach is characterized by international networking and new, critical perspectives.
Katrin Leitner
Email: katrinleitner74@gmail.com
Web: www.katrinleitner.com
Instagram: @katrinleitnerpete
