~SENSING EARTH COLOUR~ is a practice-based and collaborative research and teaching project with a special focus on developing critical colour practices which include the question of ecologies of colour and the kaleidoscopic transformations caused by the current and future chemical make-ups of our environments.

~SENSING EARTH COLOUR~ works and thinks with colour-bearing organisms such as the plants Rubia Tinctorum (Madder) and Isatis Tinctoria (European Indigo) or the microalgae Haematococcus pluvalis and the cyanobacterium Arthrospira platensis, among many others. The research and teaching project takes place at the Department for Visual Arts in the Faculty of Architecture at RWTH Aachen University in Germany.

We propose a posthuman understanding of colouring agents whereas colour refuses to be perceived as a mere decorative feature: instead, as an embodied experience and agentic force, colour moves, scars, imprints. We look to strategies and ways that other entities use to produce pigment, and how these colours are shifting in the era of the Anthropocene. If it be the pigment or dye deriving from a plant, microalgae or cyanobacteria, in its many tints and manifestations it shapes its surrounding and our perception of it reflexively. To attune to these tints, despite the artificial backdrop of synthetic colour, is to engage with all five senses simultaneously. ~SENSING EARTH COLOUR~ is an attempt to (re-)activate those sensitivities in order to equip us with a capacity to perceive and reflect colour shifts especially caused by the Anthropocene, and ultimately to be able to generate meaning of them.

Practicing and interacting with these colouring agents asks us to reflect on ecological, social and economic dimensions of material culture, supported by positions in contemporary theory. Various 'Handlungsvorschläge' (invitations/provocations for doing) are developed which require and contextualise an embodied knowledge and wish to shape a reciprocal and affective gaze towards the non-human. If personal, ecological or planetary, life in precarity asks us not only to rethink, but also to undo and redo, to unlearn and relearn.

Therefore, growing, flowing, fading, sensing and tracing describe and summarise our (un)doings towards the notion of colour, yet from different entry points.