February 24. TIER.cast hosted by Aouefa Amoussouvi, Olivia Berkowicz and Sasha Engelmann. Sound design by Sara Pereira
Online – Wednesday, February 24, 19:00 Berlin/CET
TIER.cast hosted by Aouefa Amoussouvi, Olivia Berkowicz and Sasha Engelmann. Sound design by Sara Pereira
Listen at
TIER.cast is a long-term series of sonic encounters creating a platform for interdisciplinary intimate, process rather than goal-oriented conversations and listening session 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 first edition will be a three-way conversation with geographer Sasha Engelmann, curator Olivia Berkowicz and new artistic co-director of TIER, curator and biophysicist Aouefa Amoussouvi. They are currently fellows in residency at Akademie Schloss Solitude, and in a 3-part series they will 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, being tarot in this first edition.
This first series of episodes of TIER.cast is made in collaboration with the Akademie Schloss Solitude.
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 explores 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 air and atmosphere. 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 current fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart.
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 context of intersectional feminism and de-coloniality. Especially, she explores how the development of digital technologies creates opportunities as well as ethical challenges within western and non-Western contexts. 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 currently a fellow in residency at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany.
February 9 – April 17. Stephanie Comilang: Yesterday in the Years 1886 & 2017
Tuesday, February 9 – Thursday, April 17
Stephanie Comilang: Yesterday in the Years 1886 & 2017
Stephanie Comilang’s exhibition at The Institute for Endotic Research takes a hybrid format, with the film Yesterday in the Years 1886 & 2017 being screened online at TIER.space for the duration, accompanied by a series of online encounters, and a video installation in the physical space of TIER.
Online performance lecture:
Paradise Lives in the Ruins of Colonial and Dictatorship Architecture
Tuesday, February 9, 17:00 Berlin/CET / 11:00 EST
Use this link to join: https://meet.jit.si/TheInstituteForEndoticResearch
In her lecture Stephanie Comilang will talk about her recent research and work into feminizing and decolonizing spaces of Colonial and Imperial architecture in Southeast Asia by way of a drone.
Exhibition:
Yesterday in the Years 1886 & 2017
Tuesday, February 9 – Thursday, April 17
Due to covid restrictions, please register for a professional visit in advance:
Make an appointment for Tuesday, February 9, 18:00-21:00 by clicking here.
Make an appointment for any Thursday, Friday or Saturday, 14:00-18:00 by emailing us at theinstituteforendoticresearch@gmail.com.
Comilang’s two-channel video installation follows two protagonists whose histories interlace with Filipino nationalism and Spanish colonial rule. Yesterday, In The Years 1886 and 2017 is a two-channel video projection installation. The two protagonists José Rizal and Lourdes Lareza Müller occupy a channel each; projected adjacent to one another, they inhabit the same space while remaining distinctly separate. José Rizal (1861-1896) was a Filipino nationalist, considered a national hero for his advocacy and thinking that led to the Philippine revolution against Spanish rule. While he worked as an ophthalmologist he was well known for his literary works. While living in Berlin he completed his book Noli Me Tángere (Touch Me Not) in 1887, a book that many have credited for its proposition of nationalism and resistance to Spanish colonial rule through its formulation of the idea of an ‘imagined community’ in the Philippines. Lourdes Lareza Müller is the other protagonist in Yesterday, In The Years 1886 and 2017. Having migrated to Germany in 1968, she worked as an archivist at one of Europe’s largest libraries, Berlin’s Staatsbibliothek, for 28 years. The thread that ties these two figures is their chosen life in Berlin, away from the Philippines. The disembodied feminine voice remains unidentified throughout but narrates from a distant future. She hovers and is distinctly non-human and speaks of inhabiting both Rizal and Lareza Müller in human form. Positioned as a third protagonist, she speaks of a connectedness through adaptation, bodies as archives, and entangled narratives of possible futurities. While this film speaks to a specific place, particular people, the role of the disembodied narrator, casts a wider net of questions around mobility, a rearrangement of geographic concepts of centre/periphery, and the disruption of historical linearity and continuity.
Stephanie Comilang is an artist living and working between Toronto and Berlin. Her documentary based works create narratives that look at how our understandings of mobility, capital and labour on a global scale are shaped through various cultural and social factors. Her work has been shown at Transmediale Berlin, Ghost : 2561 Bangkok Video & Performance Triennale, S.A.L.T.S Basel, Tai Kwun Hong Kong, International Film Festival Rotterdam, and Asia Art Archive in America, New York. She was awarded the 2019 Sobey Art Award, Canada’s most prestigious art prize for artists 40 years and younger.
Titled Maintenance! Domestics as Institutional Becomings, acknowledging the work of Mierle Laderman Ukeles, our series of solo exhibitions and online events addresses the domestic from different vantage points related to institution-making. We are preparing a reader on the topic that will be launched soon as well. During this program of exhibitions, the previous interventions will remain at The Institute for Endotic Research (TIER). In that way we’ll keep working on the space as an editorial device to be renegotiated, and an ecology of artworks, underlining its conception as an inner garden based on principles of cultivation.
The online presentation and exhibition by Stephanie Comilang are presented in partnership with the Embassy of Canada as part of Canada’s culture program as Guest of Honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2021.
January 27. Encounter with Aouefa Amoussouvi and reflection on TIER
Online – Wednesday, January 27, 19:00
Encounter with Aouefa Amoussouvi and reflection on TIER
Use this link to join: https://meet.jit.si/
In this online encounter, Aouefa Amoussouvi, the new third Co-Director of TIER, will introduce herself in an online conversation with Benjamin Busch and Lorenzo Sandoval. Together in the digital encounter, we will reflect on the past year of TIER and envision the one that just began.
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 context of intersectional feminism and de-coloniality. Especially, she explores how the development of digital technologies creates opportunities as well as ethical challenges within western and non-Western contexts. 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 currently a fellow in residency at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany.
December 7. Luiza Prado de O. Martins: In Weaving Shared Soil. Hosting: Milena Bonilla
Online – Monday, December 7, 19:00
Luiza Prado de O. Martins: In Weaving Shared Soil
Hosting: Milena Bonilla
Watch here: https://youtu.be/umDdGMYUGxI
The second iteration of In Weaving Shared Soil – a project initiated this summer by artist Luiza Prado – will now move indoors at TIER, taking the shape of a living installation featuring plants and flowers associated with the works of the writers and poets Gloria Anzaldúa, Lorna Goodison, and Layli Long Soldier. By promoting this symbolic encounter between the works of women whose lives and works engage with the effects of patriarchal and colonial power structures, the garden aims to discuss issues of decolonization, care and affection, reproductive and domestic work, and community building in times of extreme political instability.
The installation will be activated through a series of conversations with invited guests; in December, Luiza will be joined by artist Milena Bonilla. The conversation will touch upon Milena’s work with plants that were collected by Rosa Luxemburg during her years in prison and whose particularities rely on their medicinal capacities in connection with mental health.
In Weaving Shared Soil will continue throughout the winter of 2020 and spring of 2021 with other guests. The project is being developed as part of the transdisciplinary project Somatic Charting, initiated by choreographer and curator Elena Basteri in collaboration with Lorenzo Sandoval and Benjamin Busch of TIER.
Milena Bonilla’s research-based practice is currently invested in epistemological colonialism and the different ways it affects organisms, language and social structures. By identifying patterns, gaps and silences within specific historical narratives, the artist draws tensions between predetermined political templates and uses of cognition. These conceptual and perceptual exercises appear weaved across the manifold manifestations of her work.
Recent venues where her work has been shown include: A Tale of a Tub, Rotterdam; Museo d’arte Contemporanea MACRO, Rome; Kadist Paris and San Francisco; Framer Framed, Amsterdam; The Mistake Room, Los Angeles; The Jewish Museum, New York; Claustro de San Agustín, Bogota; MHKA, Antwerp; Temporary Gallery, Cologne and Konsthall C, Stockholm among others.
Luiza Prado de O. Martins is an artist and researcher whose work engages with material and visual culture through the lenses of decolonial and queer theories. She is particularly interested in technologies and practices related to fertility and contraception, and their entanglements with colonial hierarchies of gender, race, ethnicity, class, and nationality. Her current artistic research project, titled “A Topography of Excesses,” examines the transmission of indigenous and folk knowledges about herbal reproductive medicine in Brazil as a decolonising practice of radical care.
Somatic Charting. The House is the Body is supported by Hauptstadtkulturfonds, with additional support from Between Bridges.
November 20. Luiza Prado de O. Martins: In Weaving Shared Soil. Hosting: Pati Sayuri
Online – Friday, November 20, 19:00
Luiza Prado de O. Martins: In Weaving Shared Soil
Hosting: Pati Sayuri
Watch here: https://youtu.be/8KVes6YPSww
The second iteration of “In Weaving Shared Soil” – a project initiated this summer by artist Luiza Prado – will now move indoors at TIER, taking the shape of a living installation featuring plants and flowers associated with the works of the writers and poets Gloria Anzaldúa, Lorna Goodison, and Layli Long Soldier. By promoting this symbolic encounter between the works of women whose lives and works engage with the effects of patriarchal and colonial power structures, the garden aims to discuss issues of decolonization, care and affection, reproductive and domestic work, and community building in times of extreme political instability.
The installation will be activated through a series of conversations with invited guests; in November, Luiza Prado will be joined by visual artist Pati Sayuri. The conversation will touch upon Sayuri’s work with indigo plants and dyes, as well as human and non-human practices of migration, rooting, and making.
“In Weaving Shared Soil” will continue throughout the winter of 2020 and spring of 2021 with other guests. Initiated by dance curator Elena Basteri, Lorenzo Sandoval and Benjamin Busch (The Institute for Endotic Research), the transdisciplinary project Somatic Charting. The House is the Body develops around the theme of somatics.
In this long-term project, The Institute for Endotic Research will become home to a small garden of plants associated with revolutionary anti-fascist movements. In promoting this encounter, the garden means to nurture discussions around matters of decolonisation, care and affect, reproductive labor and community-building in times of extreme uncertainty and instability.
Pati Sayuri is a Japanese Brazilian Artist based in Weimar (Germany) and São Paulo (Brazil). Her practice is situated at the intersection of the fields of arts, textiles and agriculture, through researches in Shibori and Japanese Indigo dyeing, both traditional Japanese handmade fabric-dyeing techniques. The core of Sayuri’s work is informed by her independent and intimate investigations into her own ancestral heritage, and an interest in processes of the making and developing of color compositions.
Luiza Prado de O. Martins is an artist and researcher whose work engages with material and visual culture through the lenses of decolonial and queer theories. She is particularly interested in technologies and practices related to fertility and contraception, and their entanglements with colonial hierarchies of gender, race, ethnicity, class, and nationality. Her current artistic research project, titled “A Topography of Excesses,” examines the transmission of indigenous and folk knowledges about herbal reproductive medicine in Brazil as a decolonising practice of radical care.
Somatic Charting. The House is the Body is supported by Hauptstadtkulturfonds, with additional support from Between Bridges.
October 24 – January 9. Fermín Jiménez Landa: The Visits
Fermín Jiménez Landa: The Visits
Commencement: Saturday, October 24, 16:00-21:00
October 24 – January 9, Thursday-Saturday 14:00-18:00
Closed November 2nd-30th due to COVID-19
Fermín Jiménez Landa proposes a group of small interventions with the idea of exploring the notion of home, seeking to scrutinize the public dimension of the domestic, as well as the possibilities of touching, of meeting, of winking from the isolated. Jiménez is interested in the looks from a balcony, discrete meetings with neighbours, the smell of fried food, or the sound of a bad song. Invisible but perceptible elements, air currents that filter through the cracks, common airs, domestic spaces that are not so quarantined. The intention is to weave ubiquity into singularity, the political by repetition of the domestic. We work in the contiguous, the adjoining, with the walls, corners, baseboards, edges, sofas and mirrors in times of quarantines, gentrification, airbnb, uber, mass tourism and forced migrations.
At TIER, Jiménez Landa presents The palmist (2013-ongoing), an expanding collection of bars of soap, preserved at their last moment of use, won from the bathrooms of other people’s homes. Poor but precious objects, polished, transparent and fragile, these soaps have no economic value, but rather an intimate one: an extended effort is required to bring these fragile pieces into existence.
In conversation with this work, Jiménez Landa initiates a light bulb exchange with the neighbors of TIER. We ask them for their white light bulbs (to be installed in the space) in exchange for an equal but yellow one to be installed in its place, in their homes in rooms facing the street. If, when walking by the neighbors’, we see a yellow light in the window, we are witnessing the exhibition.
A third work is materialized in a smell. Every day of the exhibition, a plate of prepackaged ramen noodles will be heated. Depending on the position of the curtains of the neighbors across the street from TIER, the smell will be of vegetables or shrimp.
Making performances, public interventions or installations, Fermín Jiménez Landa works in equivalence, inversion and interchange processes that makes us see reality from an equidistant point between absurd and prudent, moving and iconoclastic, empirical and unverifiable. His work has been shown in MANIFESTA 11, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, CA2M, MAZ, Artium, 1646, La Casa Encendida, MUSAC, Travesía Cuatro, and Nogueras Blanchard.
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Amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, new constraints are present. Our public program has grown from social closeness in the formats of encounters, workshops and interventions. We charted a course not to work with exhibitions, instead emphasizing the relations between art’s productive and reproductive elements.
With respect to everyone’s health, and abiding by current laws, we take a step back and look at exhibitions as the most convenient format at this moment. Exhibitions can be a powerful collective experience, but one of their constitutive powers is the contemplation of the artworks by the viewer, creating individual readings in shared constellations. It seems to be the best moment to use that capacity in times of necessary small gatherings. We welcome the format of the exhibition, which brings with it certain expectations. We look to the domestic sphere, which has become an especially important site of production in recent months, as a model for institutions, which always depend on reproductive labor. The domestic model also has many problematic aspects, such as exploitation and unrecognition of labor and rights. It is perhaps in the tension between its conflicts and possibilities where the power of the domestic lies. It is also where the possible paths for the reorganization of institutions can be uncovered.
Titled Maintenance! Domestics as Institutional Becomings, acknowledging the work of Mierle Laderman Ukeles, our series of solo exhibitions and online events for the next months will address the domestic from different vantage points related to institution-making. We are preparing a reader on the topic that will be launched soon as well. During this new program of exhibitions, the previous interventions will remain at TIER. In that way we’ll keep working on the space as an editorial device to be renegotiated, and an ecology of artworks, underlining its conception as an inner garden based on principles of cultivation.
Hygienic measures (updated October 2020): The publicly accessible space of TIER is 35 m², allowing for maximum 5 occupants keeping 1.5 m distance and wearing masks that cover mouth and nose. Guests are requested to individually register for events in advance with the RSVP link (click here). Guests who arrive at events without an electronic reservation will be offered any remaining available reservations, and their contact information will be recorded before they enter the space. Personal data will be deleted after the required four weeks. Hand disinfectant is provided at the entrance. Thanks for helping us protect the health of everyone.
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Existing interventions viewable at TIER:
Luiza Prado de O. Martins, In Weaving Shared Soil, 2020–ongoing
In this long-term project, The Institute for Endotic Research will become home to a small garden of plants associated with revolutionary anti-fascist movements. In promoting this encounter, the garden means to nurture discussions around matters of decolonisation, care and affect, reproductive labor and community-building in times of extreme uncertainty and instability.
Josep Maynou, TIME, 2019
Hanging lamp in the workshop of TIER
Kanako Ishii, Re-Landscape, 2019–ongoing
Painting in four iterations. Intervention in the front window of TIER
Ana Alenso, green and yellow, boom and bust, 2018
Fountain with oil barrel. Intervention in the front room of TIER
Miguel Prados Sánchez and Pablo Ramón Benitez, Planting Concrete, 2018
Concrete planters. Intervention in the front room of TIER
Shannon Garden-Smith, Upright is fine, but downright is where I am, 2019
Microplush polyester curtains. Intervention in the workshop shelves of TIER
Sofia Lomba, Spongy Bodies / Naked Bodies #2, 2018
Painting. Intervention in the bathroom of TIER
The Institute for Endotic Research, Broken Parliament, 2016
Seating and display infrastructure with painted surfaces at TIER
Sara Pereira, Pulso, 2018
Two-channel sound installation. Intervention in the front room of TIER
Tracey Snelling, Interiors, 2020
Intervention in the Manual Model Museum of TIER
Luís Berríos-Negrón, Wardian Table, 2018
Table, blackboard and portable greenhouse
Javier Bravo de Rueda, Ritual Containers, 2019
Ceramics for food presentation and other purposes
Stephen Kent, Were we never fish, 2019
Sculptural centerpiece of the TIER kitchen table
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Publications available for download:
- The Endotic Reader N.1
- Agropoetics Reader (collaboration with SAVVY Contemporary)
- Objects Before and After the Wall (collaboration with Tlaxcala 3)
Photos by Benjamin Busch
