May 23. The Institute for Endotic Research gains a permanent address at TIER.space, Donaustr. 84 in Berlin-Neukölln, and an inaugural program.

The Institute for Endotic Research (TIER) began in 2015 as a fictional institution understood as a habitable sculpture. It has since brought different practices together, namely architecture, art, mediation and curation, to foster a transdisciplinary approach. TIER.space is a continuation of that project and was founded this spring as a virtual site and a physical location. This endotic institution will serve as a host for TIER’s program in its many different forms, continually adapted and re-tooled for new uses. TIER.space will become a basis for experimenting with forms of institutionalization mediated through encounters between people, materials and devices.

The endotic

The institute is dedicated to research about forms of generation and presentation of subject matter related to the endotic – an antonym for exotic. French writer George Perec used it as a conceptual tool to approach everyday life in one’s own immediate surroundings. With this idea, he proposed to preserve the fascination that comes with the act of exploring while also avoiding to produce the figure of the other. In the public sphere, TIER conducts a space based on notions directly related to the domestic, which are usually confined to the private sphere and reproductive labour. TIER.space foregrounds this relationship to the domestic by combining a public program with a habitable space for hosting transdisciplinary projects.

The fabric of the public program is composed of five interwoven threads: cultivation, building strength, making public, percenting and technics. The converging and diverging of these thematic threads depends on future collaborations that will unfold in different directions.

Cultivation

The first thread is a statement: it suggests to literally and metaphorically work with another understanding of timing. The practice of cultivation will shape the architecture of the space. In the same move, it will approach the formation of the program as a way to maintain ongoing collaborations and germinate future ones. This first thread will be translated into a series of encounters to set the patterns of those collaborations, with roots that extend deeper into the neighborhood.

Building strength

With this thread, TIER.space seeks to establish a series of pedagogical devices to develop multiple skills towards proactive notions of resilience/resistance, healing/self-care and techniques for building both constructions and communities. It will be complemented by group reading sessions and informal presentations.

Making public

One of the meanings of the word publication is to make something public (veröffentlichen). If the relations between local and global are regarded as a text that can be read through contemporary art practices, a pertinent tactic would be to substitute the idea of exhibition with publication. This means to understand exhibitions as narrative machines, as expanded books that can also unfold a set of other possibilities such as cross-temporal approaches, choreography of bodies moving through the extensive idea of text and support structures.

Percenting

The term “percent for art” and its German sibling “Kunst am Bau” speak to an institutionalization of art in public space. It refers to financial incentives for developers and marks a tendency for institutions—public and private—to instrumentalize art and the figure of the artist. Dealing with this notion belonging to the idea of social welfare, TIER.space will gather practitioners who have worked on the presence of art in the city to approach the question: What are the functions and possibilities of art in public space today?

Technics

For institutions and the digital realm, technique is one of the main mediators of social relationships. As such, it deals with many of the interchanges of everyday life refracted through multilayered technologies. With the intention of understanding the different levels that compose the quotidian, this thread will research notions that compose the epistemology of technics. Combined with an approach originating in the historical construction of the idea of technique, TIER.space will look at parallel narratives that position technique outside the western canon of historiography.

Colophon

The Institute for Endotic Research is initiated by Lorenzo Sandoval. TIER.space is elaborated and maintained by Lorenzo Sandoval and Benjamin Busch. The space is generously supported by the Berlin Senate with funds from the Arbeitsraumprogramm.

TIER.space, Donaustr. 84, 12043 Berlin
theinstituteforendoticresearch@gmail.com

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