"What Could Possibly Go Right?"
Exhibition, Performances, and Workshops by the School of Commons 2023 Cohort On-Site at Toni Areal, Zurich University of the Arts, at MATERIAL Space for Book Culture, and Online - February 3-4, 2024
Exhibition
Opens Saturday, February 3rd (10:00 - 18:00) and Sunday, February 4th (11:00 - 20:00)
@ Toni Areal, ZT 5.K12 Kunstraum, Pfingstweidstrasse 96, Zürich
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Workshop and Performance Program
Saturday, February 3rd (10:00 - 18:00)
@ Toni-Areal, Viaduktraum 2.A05, Ebene 2 (street entrance), Pfingstweidstrasse 96, Zürich
Saturday, February 3rd (19:00 - 22:00)
@MATERIAL, Klingenstrasse 23, 8005 Zürich, Switzerland
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Sunday, February 4th (11:00 - 23:00)
@ Toni-Areal, Viaduktraum 2.A05, Ebene 2 (street entrance), Pfingstweidstrasse 96, Zürich
Free of charge and open to everyone.
Visual: Lena Pozdnyakova and Eldar Tagi who run the sub-project of Care(full) spam
💞 *hybrid
🏞️ *in-person
Workshop and Performance Program
Saturday, February 3rd
@ Toni-Areal, Viaduktraum 2.A05, Ebene 2 (street entrance), Pfingstweidstrasse 96, Zürich
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🏞️ 10:00 🏞️ Welcome by the SoC Team
💞 10:30 💞 2024 Townhall SoC Alumn* (please fill out the survey below to get the Zoom link)
We'll reflect on the 2023 Alumn* programme, and map out our 2024 events and activities. If you're interested in hosting an event or participating in the program, or being involved in coordination, please join this conversation, which will be held in person in Zurich, and online.
In 2023, the Alumn* Programme included 8 public events for 200 participants, guest speakers, and artist collaborators. This included former and current students, and friends of the School of Commons, as well as people who encountered SoC for the first time. Events took place across 5 locations: Berlin, Izmir, Leiden, Porto, and the Sidvwaba Cave; as well as online, using hybrid methods of inclusion and experimenting with different modalities for supporting our wide peer-learning community. All current and former fellows are invited to our upcoming Town Hall, online and in Zurich. You can offer feedback and ideas or get involved in the curation or coordination of next year's Alumn* Events Programme. Whether or not you can join, we hope that you share your ideas and feedback in the survey. https://forms.gle/yQUzKXQhysJs4G9D7
🏞️ 12:00 🏞️ Weighing Together - Workshop by The Short Big
The Short Big is a workshop and podcast series that aims to bridge the gap between urgent academic research through the collective exploration of language and terminology.
For the workshop, we will playfully activate academic research by immersing ourselves in audio content to gather embodied knowledge, arriving at collective meanings for complex concepts. We will document our findings in the production of a poster series archiving our shared knowledge.
🏞️ 13:00 - 14:00 🏞️ Break / “Wild River: prelude"- Live installation by Jasmine Alakari & Riccardo Acciarino @ Toni-Areal, Orgelsaal, Ebene 7, Raum K06
"Wild River: Prelude" is an extraordinary sensory installation involving collaboration among MONOM Studio, Sentient/LIOS Labs, SABRE GmbH, and composer Pietro Dossena. The installation aims to utilize unique sounds from Europe's last pristine rivers, manipulated in real-time to create an innovative sonic experience. Utilizing a modular synthesizer to merge natural and electronic sounds, it offers an ever-evolving sonic landscape through an autogenerative process. Audience interaction, facilitated by a gyroscopic sensor, allows for spatial manipulation of the sounds, creating a distinct and personalized experience. Its primary objective is to raise awareness about river conservation while exploring new music possibilities with state-of-the-art electronic systems. Video and live acoustic music interactions will be also implemented during the performance.
💞 14:00 💞 The Good Enough Host - Listening session with Catwings (*hybrid event can be attended via this Zoom link)
During the SoC Assembly, Catwings will present a live radio show and share a few audio assemblages installed in a cozy corner of the exhibition space. Each episode is bursting with conversations, readings from theoretical texts and sonic tidbits emerging from the research project, The Good Enough Host, and is guided by a single theme, be it the role of disagreement within manifestos of collectives or anti-hierarchal approaches to relational practices. These themes presented themselves during the research process as commonalities and shared experiences among various practitioners, all of whom are working within, around or near the parameters, potentials and limitations of self-organized structures in art and culture.
🏞️ 15:00 🏞️ Hybrid Tools For Transdisciplinarity – Collective sharing workshop with Sarah Drapeau
“By inviting you into the co-creation of a brave space and by activating tools to facilitate discussion, like mapping in space, and embodied tools – I propose a moment to make space for sharing our experiences, our questions, our strengths, our tools, our intuitions, our skills, our fears, our needs, our challenges.
How do we learn and grow together? How to learn to give up, to renounce? How do we learn to take a break, to be lost? How do we learn to grieve possibilities, projects, ideas, and situations? What can we learn from our failures? How do we learn how to fail? How do we keep our motivation when everything is falling apart? What are the things that are essential to a (collective/individual) project? What is missing? How do we deal with the personal and intimate in our projects? What are the tools, the structures missing to grow further? What are our fears and our strengths?”
🏞️ 16:00-17.00 🏞️ Break / “Wild River: prelude" - Live installation by Jasmine Alakari & Riccardo Acciarino @ Toni-Areal, Orgelsaal, Ebene 7, Raum K06
An extraordinary sensory installation involving collaboration among MONOM Studio, Sentient/LIOS Labs, SABRE GmbH, and composer Pietro Dossena. The installation aims to utilize unique sounds from Europe's last pristine rivers, manipulated in real-time to create an innovative sonic experience. Utilizing a modular synthesizer to merge natural and electronic sounds, it offers an ever-evolving sonic landscape through an autogenerative process. Audience interaction, facilitated by a gyroscopic sensor, allows for spatial manipulation of the sounds, creating a distinct and personalized experience. Its primary objective is to raise awareness about river conservation while exploring new music possibilities with state-of-the-art electronic systems. Video and live acoustic music interactions will be also implemented during the performance.
🏞️ 17:00 🏞️ Eggland – participatory performance by i0 xen0, Elisa Lemma, Dorota Grajewska @ Toni-Areal, Orgelsaal, Ebene 7, Raum K06 Take a surreal journey, meet a strange creature, find a common tongue through tactile sound, and emerge with - perhaps - an expanded perspective on the rhythms and cycles as in nature wholly, so in each individual organism. Participatory performance for voice and organ. i0 xen0 @xn_ze_ro (direction, performance) Elisa Lemma @hiddeninplainsight_sonata (organ) Dorota Grajewska @dorota.grajewska (digital fabrication)
🏞️ 17:30 🏞️ “Le Mythe Submerge (The Myth Exceeds)” – Performance by Pule kaJanolintji, Richard Welch, Kit Kuksenok, Elisa Lemma @ Toni-Areal, Orgelsaal, Ebene 7, Raum K06
The myth submerges... is a dialogue between parents, children, and a large cavern of sound. It is a cave of myth that overwhelms reality. Physically, it is the oldest cave known in the world, located in the province of Mpumalanga in South Africa. In October 2023, we spent hours as co-conspirators, listening to what she has to say, and sometimes we respond. We call this emotional moment in the cave “Makhandzambili” which refers to the “Precursors” of this experience in the distant past. On stage for 45 minutes, we carry this experience with us on a journey of submersion into personal myths, in the way they intertwine with natural history – a bricolage of panlingual expressions coming from inside the body of Africa. In the caves are formations of stone known as lithophones – a natural instrument that produces musical sounds when the rock is knocked – the notes of the myth. The questions resonate in the cave of Dolomite without echo. Like that person who lifted their hand for thirty years, it can no longer be put down. "observe closely, connect broadly, and think critically”… The performance will be accompanied by a tour of artworks and objects, and set to the score of the sound of the cave.
@MATERIAL, Klingenstrasse 23, 8005 Zürich, Switzerland
🏞️ 19:00 🏞️ Between the Fugue and the Origin – Talk/discussion with Maxim Spivakov and Egor Rogalev curated by Andrea Liu
Between the fugue and the origin: a fragile limit, a temporary homeostasis” — these are the words of Julia Kristeva in describing the acute sentience of those new to a country (Stranger to Ourselves, 1991). Like ever-shifting tectonic plates, waves of people uproot from one place to another, trading universes, recombining in different permutations, coalescing a dynamic environment of cultural syncretism in the wake of their voluntary exile. Today a wave of Russian artists, intellectuals and cultural producers who fled Russia in the aftermath of February 2022 are making more dynamic the Berlin art scene.
Gesture can be a means of physically connecting word, image, and action. It can be a way of bypassing written and spoken signs by linking expression back to the site of its alienation: body. The sign is brought back to the place where it is coupled with the mimetic point of its production. Walter Benjamin construed gesture as dialectical because it is simultaneously both sign and action, both closed and open form (“What is Epic Theater II?” 1939). Gesture suggests a completed movement or action which it simultaneously interrupts, oscillating between movement and frozen sign, between the mimetic and the semiotic.
Gesture is an element (albeit with completely different inflections) in both Maxim Spivakov’s and Egor Rogalev’s work. In his enigmatic video-sculptural installation “G Minor” (2021), Spivakov is preoccupied with gestures of the prehensile instrument, the human hand—whether mediating the flow of images on a sensory touch screen, or mediating electrodes in the electromagnetic field of the theremin (musical instrument), or embodying a gestural incarnation of political will. In his beguiling performance “The Organ of Memory” (2019), Egor Rogalev projects the biomechanics of gesture onto the screen of sound affect, linking memory, historical trauma, and lived experience in a moment when resources of familiar sign systems fell short. With their works, gesture almost becomes a means to store political energy, conjuring Judith Butler’s notion of gesture as a truncated form of action which acquires force and becomes an “event,” despite losing the context of its intelligibility (When Gesture Becomes Event, 2017).
Maxim Spivakov: In a wide range of media that spans from video installation to scholarly research, Spivakov’s work enquires into the general tenets that govern representation as political, aesthetic, and technical practice. Reading Marx’s infamous claim of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: “They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented” as a set of broad and yet unresolved questions (can they?, must they?, who are they?), his projects delve into the formation of colonial Other, the violence of and against the image, embodied spectatorship, and techno-apocalyptic conspiracy beliefs. In his talk, Maxim will address the entanglement of the image, violence and technicity. This three-fold structure will serve as a general framework to the discussion of his artistic practice.
Egor Rogalev Egor Rogalev will give an overview of his study of peripheral ways of interaction marked by microoptics, special distribution of attention, and escalation of empathy. This interest is expressed in his artistic works “Icons” (2019) and “The Organ of Memory” (2019) as well as in his recent dissertation project for Universität der Künste in Berlin. “The Organ of Memory” re-imagines the historical event of the “Leningrad Deaf-Mute Affair”, whereby the NKVD (Soviet secret police) detained 55 members of the local deaf-mute community in August 1937 on charges of forming a terrorist organization. Building on the idea of reenactment, “Organ of Memory” uses performers who perform sign language to a score of the sonic residue of their sign language, whereby vibration becomes a weapon. The event takes on a distinct character as a synesthetic, transtemporal, intersubjective process that resists the politics of silence, concealment, and suppression.
🏞️ 20:30 🏞️ Reading by Jara Nassar
🏞️ 21:00 🏞️ Decolonial (re)mediators editorial manifesting – Book(s) launch with Decolonial (re)mediators by garaje school (María Angélica Madero + Santiago Pinyol)
In our intense time as part of the SoC we saw our project go from “expectations” to “reality”. We started by proposing an online platform for translating texts related to decolonial theory, and along the way, we were surprised by the experience of collective translation, by the immense possibilities of marginalia, of unbinding books, of shaping pens without hands, of undertranslating. So, to manifest our vague desire to become an editorial, we want to stage a book launch: to seize this opportunity to share and materialize some of the materials that resulted from our undertranslation workshops in Utrecht, Zurich, London, Rotterdam and Bogotá: La cocina situada by Marina Monsónis, Barranquilla 2132 by José Antonio Osorio Lizarazo, Cuando los subalternos entran en el museo: desobediencia epistémica y crítica institucional by Paul Preciado and two chapters of Un mundo ch’ixi es posible. Ensayos para un presente en crisis by Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui (“Palabras mágicas. Reflexiones sobre la naturaleza de la crisis presente” and “Micropolítica andina. Formas elementales de insurgencia cotidiana.” It will be informal, there will be freshly printed publications, spirits and wines that are also publications, merch, beers and snacks and more than probably, reggaeton.
Workshop and Performance Program
Sunday, February 4th
@ Zurich University of the Arts, Toni-Areal, Viaduktraum 2.A05, Ebene 2 (street entrance), Pfingstweidstrasse 96, Zürich
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🏞️ 11:00 🏞️ Improvising Access, for now - Workshop by Freedom Studies (Letitia, Rose and Ella)
"Freedom Studies will be hosting a participatory workshop which aims to learn with Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed techniques to explore questions around access, disability justice, and interdependent ways of living and being together. It will ask: how can we learn to practice transformation at personal and social levels? What does it look like to create conditions for embodied comfort that enable participation? How can we co-create containers to rehearse prefigurative ways of being? Embodying new practices and actions, this workshop aims to foster personal and systemic transformation. Through experiential improvisational methods, we’ll collectively address how social conditions shape us and how we, in turn, shape them.
This workshop will be a space of collective and embodied (un)learning in how to increase our spectrum of available choices, challenging established norms that govern our bodily expressions and interactions. In the spirit of response-ability, as defined by Karen Barad, participants will be offered the opportunity to engage in thoughtful choices, emphasising the capacity to choose intentional responses beyond capitalist and ableist constraints. We are curious to discover – what happens when a group of people tries together?"
🏞️ 12:00 🏞️ Writing letters to/from choreographical elements - Workshop by Lina Zeller
My main interest in practical/theoretical research is related to the body, the movements and the studies that deal with Choreographic Composition. I have never had a specific interest in creating choreography, but I am fascinated by the elements of choreographic making, and how its concepts can be expanded, dissolved, transmuted and reorganized, either in the dance field or not. I think of bringing fundamental questions of the body and choreographic making to contaminate/relate to the poetic practices of SoC colleagues. What would it be like to look into other people's creative process through choreographic ideas? How to evoke dance/movement elements and bring them up to establish a transdisciplinary field? I am interested in making use of this kit/tool in a workshop for SoC members to cross the boundaries of certainties of choreographic making: dissolving convictions, softening memories, and experimenting with movement/choreographic elements. To navigate between the choreographic world and the colleagues' research, I am interested in sending /via post/ handwritten letters that dialogue/affect the creative processes of SoC colleagues. After carefully analyzing each SoC’s proposal, the letters would bring choreographic elements to provoke/stimulate/resonate with them.
13:00 Break
💞 14:00 💞 In-progress co/living - Workshop with yourfriendkas and Agata Guńka (*hybrid event can be attended via this Zoom link)
The "Co/living: Points of Entry" project, consisting of Agata Guńka and yourfriendkas, will do a short interactive presentation on the knowledges, perspectives and practices for shared living environments, which they gathered from conversations, workshops, and other experiences throughout their research in the 2023 School of Commons cohort.
💞 15:00 💞 Curation as community work in a hostile funding context - Exchange by the Oyoun Team (*hybrid event can be attended via this Zoom link)
Oyoun team will briefly present our recent/ongoing curatorial projects. We will also share insights into what happened to Oyoun's funding and existential situation in the last months, particularly within the broader European+ context of censorship and tokenism. Additionally, we aim to collaboratively develop strategies and share collective know-hows on how to navigate through challenging funding frameworks. Oyoun team will also impart some key learnings from our recent research project, "Imagination as a Cultural Right".
🏞️ 16:00 🏞️ Language (as a technology that) re-/animates (dis-/jointed) cartographies - Sound Walk with Monika Dorniak
We consolidate with our environment through walking and talking. Every spoken word, and conducted step, can be considered as an interaction with our immediate surroundings. As a result we evoke waves, that form part of the composed order and chaos that surrounds us in our everyday life. This 30-minute guided walk allows for an interaction with our inner biorhythms, and the outer social rhythms. The environmental sounds, and the aura of objects and things, city landscapes and technologies are intertwined, and newly considered. Words are not just heard, but tasted, felt, embodied, and re-considered through a variety of senses. Participation in this slow-paced, interactive walk does not require prior experience. Please feel free to bring your own headphones, and a smartphone or portable audio device. Get in touch in advance of the walk, if you wish to receive a written script.
🏞️ 17:00 🏞️ The Story of Touch - Workshop with ‘There, there’ working group
What’s the language of bodies? How do they listen, how do they speak? In an imaginative, fugitive and embodied practice we want to move thoughts and feelings. We want to read to each other, listen, envision stories and be in touch. There, there invites you to a series of reading sessions, where small groups practice slow and immersive reading of texts related to forms of solidarity and care through embodied practices, accompanied by a set of somatic rituals. In intimate small groups with interchangeable roles based on personal preferences, we will practice immersive reading and listening. Then we will assemble as a group and, driven by what was heard and felt before, we will use collective imagination to create a common poem.
18:00 Break
🏞️ 19:30 🏞️ Visitor One Thru Eight – Lecture performance by Andrea Liu @ Toni-Areal Orgelsaal, Ebene 7, Raum K06
Barthes 1967 essay “The Death of the Author” rejects the monolithic pre-fabricated authority of the author as the sole determinant of the meaning of the text and hails the “birth of the reader”—the multifarious positions of the reader that comprise the true producers of meaning.
In any given performance, there is a vast reserve of untapped resources: the audience. “Visitor One thru Eight” is a performance where I inhabit the role of 8 spectators who have come to my performance. Visitor One wants to be integrated into the grand narrative of appreciating art. Visitor Two believes in the mystery and the unknowability of art. Visitor Three believes in the emancipatory potential of extreme experiences. Visitor Four yearns for linear and emotional storytelling. Visitor Five believes art should be something direct and visceral, an intimate offering amongst friends. Each Visitor is a hypothetical speculation on an audience member.
I incorporate the opinions, desires, & expectations of the audience as the content of my performance. The audience is a crystal through which various desires, ideologies, assumptions backgrounds, and biases are refracted, projected, frustrated, appeased, challenged, or fulfilled. ‘Visitor One Thru Eight’ inhabits various modes of performance to unpack what are the conditions and ideologies that underlie spectatorship.
🏞️ 20:00 🏞️ "Garden Mythtory: Observe Closely, Connect Broadly, Think Critically" – walkthrough of exhibition by Richard Welch, supported by Pule kaJanolintji for Makhandzambili @ Toni Areal, ZT 5.K12 Kunstraum, Pfingstweidstrasse 96, Zürich
This is a tour of the images that have come to mind in a second chance.
Paintings, drawings, maps, found objects all come to light in a journey through unanticipated submission to what was long present,Makhandzambili, those, our fellows, who went before, the un-echoing gently dripping silent vastness of the prehistoric Sidvwaba Caves, the thundering pouring magnificence of the ancient multiple falls called after that intensively private public person, Queen Victoria - Mosi oa tunya the smoke that thunders. Reflections of a life unexpectedly, redeemed.
When I was 15, I painted a picture of the deep gorge near which we lived and in which I'd spend almost every waking hour. Knowing the wild cat which basked on a high rock. The fish turning enticingly in the stream. The buck disappearing into the bush. Oh the joy of those encounters.
The judge of the competition I entered it in gave it 2nd prize, remarking:" It would have made first, but for it being ' too ambitious'. Then I learnt, sadly, to make experience make me, in a long lifelong fruitless quest for some kind of inward perfection.
"I next began to paint at 72. In my Geriatric Renaissance " , an extraordinary event preceded by a major mental meltdown, in which scent, sight and sound took on a charming immediacy, which thrilled and provoked walking in the night hours , to the consternation of the night staff of the Care Facility I resided in, barefoot, and in the rain, watching the silhouettes of the joyous trees in the old walls of the stoep as they danced in night air. I began to tour the beautiful old neglected garden, with it's venerable trees, our mortal companions. Just as I had done in the gorge on the edge of which our home once perched.
🏞️ 20:30 🏞️ “On Mutual Support”: ISSUES 2023 Launch Event
ISSUES is the annual digital publication published by School of Commons (SoC). It features contributions from each of the projects that form the annual SoC cohort.
Contributions to the publication encapsulate, through text, audio, film, meme, or other alternative publishing means, the processes, outcomes, questions, and challenges each project has encountered during their time within the SoC programme. For each edition of ISSUES, a collectively thematic framing is decided upon. The selected theme for the 2023 Edition of ISSUES is “Mutual Support”.
Through the act of amassing and assembling the various themes, ways of workings and methodologies that connect the SoC 2023 cohort, ISSUES, itself, provides a distributable, publishable (mutual) support structure.
Join us for the festive launch event of ISSUES 2023 on the evening of Sunday 4th Feb from 20.30pm CET onwards to hear specially invited guest, Sophie Mak-Schram, discuss “mutual support” in relation to support infrastructures, and self-organised supportive systems before joining the ISSUES contributors and editor in conversation, to discuss how their contributions seek to add further nuance and perspective to this collective framing.
About Sophie Mak-Schram
Sophie Mak-Schram cares about how a diverse we (come to) know and what forms knowledges take. She works with others, both as method and as form. Spanning experiential education, inclusion work, collective practices and artistic research, Sophie convenes, writes, reads, makes objects to learn with or listen to, and performs. She likes to linger in the ‘and’ between art and education.
Her current research (in part held through the academic frame of the EU: Horizon 2020-funded FEINART project, where she is completing a PhD at Zeppelin University in Germany between 2021-2024) thinks alongside contemporary alternative educational and artistic practices of communal learning about the forms of pedagogy they propose.
🏞️ Exhibition 🏞️
Opens Saturday, February 3rd (10:00 - 18:00) and Sunday, February 4th (11:00 - 20:00)
@ Zurich University of the Arts, Toni-Areal Kunstraum, room 5.K12, Level 5, Pfingstweidstrasse 96, Zürich
Vjosa, one of Europe’s last wild free-flowing rivers found protection by transforming into nature reserves; the first independent newspaper has been printed in Kosovo after all other printed newspapers have ceased. We glean insights about lifelong learning from the German Volkshochschule, we learn to be better hosts, practice curation as community work, share collaboratively developed strategies on how to navigate through challenging funding frameworks and explore a communities’ collective intelligence that emerges in times of collective traumas. These are just a few examples of what the SoC 2023 fellows have been working on to shape this year’s programme. We invite you to explore their outcomes, reflections, and explorations through a selection of 25 practice-based projects presented in the form of an exhibition and accompanying performance and workshop programme.
The School of Commons’ 10-month peer-led programme grants each project the freedom to develop its research in self-directed ways. To be transparent the title “What Could Possibly Go Right?” emerged later and isn’t a strict curatorial concept guiding each contribution. However, upon closer inspection, the common thread among the 25 projects developed in the framework of SoC we observe is that most are making propositions for something they believe in rather than solely pointing fingers at what’s wrong in the world (which is undeniably important). These practices cultivate hope by fostering community, resources, tools, and infrastructures, predominantly as collective efforts bringing together individuals across diverse backgrounds, from the somatic to the scientific, and from the poetic to the political. Instead of adopting a simplistic solutionist approach of attempting to “fix” the problems of our time, they embrace the complexity and interconnectedness of the reality we inhabit and acknowledge that there is no such thing as an idea or an object in isolation. They share the belief that possibility and hope arise from being together, maintaining openness, and sometimes even playfulness.
With contributions by:
Agata Guńka & yourfriendkas
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Andrea Liu
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Catwings (Steph Joyce & Theresa Zwerschke)
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Decolonial (re)mediators by garaje school (María Angélica Madero + Santiago Pinyol)
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Lina Zeller
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Makhandzambili (Pule kaJanolintji, Balkind, Elisa Lemma, Kit Kuksenok, Luyolo Lenga, Lizo Sonkwala, Duduzile Mathebula, Richard Welch Mic, Vuyiswa Xeketwane, Wandile Ndlovu & the Sidvwaba Cave)
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Miwa Negoro
“living library of becomings” is a research and performative library project dedicated to the multiple artistic narrations from intersectional, queer, and decolonial feminist perspectives, with an attempt to create a platform in which such voices and texts are shared in tactile and performative ways. In the SoC Assembly, artistic publications gathered during the SoC, the process of research, and its growing digital platform will be displayed.
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Riccardo Acciarino & Jasmine Alakari
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Rahel Stange & Sinem Görücü
"Proving the Unprovable" presents a series of documents that interrogate the concept of materializing personal bonds to places in submittable forms. This collection of 'unofficial official' documents challenges the notion of quantifying personal connections through standardized evidence. Each piece embodies a satirical exploration of this theme, contrasting subjective experiences of belonging against objective criteria. The work prompts reflection on the nature of attachments and the difficulties in representing these profound, yet intangible ties.
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"There, there" working group with sound works "Postcards From The Piano" by Germain Cls, "Elephant in the Room" by Eldar Tagi (w. Lena Pozdnyakova), and "Tashkent on Air" recorded by Isabel Candia (s0.any), Dima Gerasimov, Evgeniy Galochkin, Boris Lesnoy, polycarpicae, Anna Pronina, Sergei Podluzhnyi, Vika Ryskina, Maxim Spivakov, Filiz Suleymanoglu, Sabina Suleymanoglu, Sofia Seitkhalil, Josef Tumari, Denis Volkov, coordinated by Anna Pronina and Julia Polikarpova (polycarpicae) and mixed by Sergei Podluzhnyi. The sculpture pieces are from Lena Pozdnyakova, with contributions from Luise Willer and Anna Kücking.
"Tashkent on Air" is a collection of soundscapes by musicians, artists, cultural workers, and researchers born or based in Tashkent. It includes a huge diversity of sounds recorded through the loving gaze on the city, from the clatter of the wheels of the Tashkent subway, the birdsongs in the parks and the police whistling at rush-hour, to fragments of a lecture on the musical traditions of Uzbekistan, the singing of muezzins and rehearsals at the conservatory. Dozens of fragments were assembled on the initiative of the collectives ‘There there’ and ‘Bahor/Весна’ and carefully edited by the sound engineer Sergei Podluzhnyi. The resulting sonic mosaic is a collective Tashkent soundscape made of personal answers to the question ‘How does my Tashkent sound like?’, fragmentary and by definition unfinished.
See you all soon,
Your SoC