June 29. TIER.cast: The Castle of Crossed Destinies – Part 3

Online from Tuesday, June 29, 19:00 Berlin/CET
TIER.cast hosted by Aouefa Amoussouvi, Olivia Berkowicz and Sasha Engelmann. Sound design by Sara Pereira
The Castle of Crossed Destinies – Part 3
Listen at http://theinstituteforendoticresearch.org/wp/projects-current/tier-cast/

TIER.cast is a long-term series of sonic encounters creating a platform for interdisciplinary intimate, process rather than goal-oriented conversations and listening sessions beginning in February 2021. In each session, the guests are invited to discuss and present with voices and sounds their past and current projects, intellectual and personal inspirations, works-in-progress, work/production methodologies, and practices.

The aim is also to address and challenge the capitalistically and individualistically driven practices of knowledge and art production, as well as the myth of the isolated genius. The interdisciplinary encounter itself is an exercise of collective knowledge-based and practical exchange, and becomes an act of collective production itself.

The sonic and non-visual format is envisioned as a soft intrusion that infiltrates into the domestic spheres, forces self-imagination for the lacking esthetics and focuses on audio imprint of the conversations/speakers. It is a journey through voices, music, noise, sound and silence.

The Castle of Crossed Destinies – is 3-part sonic project with geographer Sasha Engelmann, curator Olivia Berkowicz and artistic co-director of TIER, curator and biophysicist Aouefa Amoussouvi. They initiated the project whilst being fellows at the residency at Akademie Schloss Solitude in 2020-2021. In a 3-part series they discuss tarot, radio, rituals, technologies, feminist narratives in science and art, as well as personal experiences and reflections on transgenerational memories & migrations. Each encounter focuses on one practice, Part 3 focuses on Amoussouvi’s practice with raw cacao and her research on the science, rituality and the entanglements with imperialism of this food commodity.

This 3-part sonic project departs from the writer Italo Calvino’s book The Castle of Crossed Destinies (1973). In the tale, a group of travellers meet each other in a tavern in the woods. Afflicted by a strange predicament that affects their capacity to speak, they turn to a stack of tarot cards to tell stories about one another. From a secluded room in Schloss Solitude, Amoussouvi, Berkowicz and Engelmann extend the invitation of Calvino’s story to reflect upon the use of divinatory tools, creative props and experimental techniques for collective knowledge making. Situated in pandemic times, the conversation conjures vocabularies, glossaries and sounds. Moving in a circular motion, three fellow travellers explore stories within stories within stories.

Sound production & mix by Sara Pereira (and a thanks to Rosa & Altes Finanzamt)

Episode 3 is made with support from Akademie Schloss Solitude

Aouefa Amoussouvi is a French-Beninese research scientist based in Berlin, Germany and holds a PhD in Theoretical Molecular Biophysics from the Berlin Humboldt University, Germany. Outside the lab, she researches and develops curatorial projects on history and alternative narratives of science in the context of intersectional feminism and de-coloniality. She is also interested in the endotic exploration of the human psyche, body-mind relationship, group dynamics and transgenerational trauma and is training as a coach of process-oriented psychology. Between 2014 and 2019, she collaborated on several interdisciplinary projects at SAVVY Contemporary – Laboratory of Form-Ideas. She is a former fellow of the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany.

Olivia Berkowicz is a curator, writer and editor. Her practice explores the intersection of critical visuality studies and contemporary art theory. She is interested in vocabularies and practices which challenge modernist-colonial principles of exhibition histories, art production, and collaborations. Together with Marianna Feher, she organises Tentative Transmits (2020-2022), a discursive radio project investigating the ”former East”, supported by the artistic research funding of the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. She is a current fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart.

Sasha Engelmann is a London-based geographer exploring interdisciplinary, feminist and creative approaches to environmental knowledge making. Her new book Sensing Art in the Atmosphere: Elemental Lures and Aerosolar Practices (Routledge, 2020) traces the potential of artistic, community-driven experiments to amplify our sensing of atmosphere, marrying attentions to atmospheric affect with visceral awareness of the materials, institutions and processes hovering in the air. Together with Sophie Dyer she leads the feminist radio project open-weather. She is Lecturer in GeoHumanities at Royal Holloway University of London and a former fellow of Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart.

Sara Pereira is a visual and sound artist, working primordially in collaborative intermedia forms. Regular enrolment with group Discoteca Flaming Star, with whom Sara is performing and collaborating since 2010, engaging currently in the research project Hospital(y)tis. Since 2016 playing with Sofia Lomba, as AVA. Previously developing sound work within duo Gentileza and solo as Napa. Co-founder and former member of Altes Finanzamt Project-space (Berlin), Marvellous Tone CD-r collective (Porto) and PISO collective (Porto-Berlin). Sara is dealing with questions of self-organisation, through drawing and in musical improvisation.