February 28. Launch of the Agropoetics Reader + Independent Spaces United! Party
Friday, February 28, 21:00–02:00, Madrid
Launch of the Agropoetics Reader + Independent Spaces United! Party
With Elena Agudio (SAVVY Contemporary) + Lorenzo Sandoval (TIER) + Fernando García Dory (INLAND) + Obrera Centro
The Agropoetics Reader unfolds as a collection of texts that informed, grounded, and nourished SAVVY Contemporary’s Soil Is an Inscribed Body: On Sovereignty and Agropoetics’ (August 30th–October 6th, 2019), an exhibition and research project curated by Elena Agudio and Marleen Boschen. The project was conceived in the framework of The Invention of Science, SAVVY Contemporary’s 2019–2020 programme, devoted to questioning the presumed universality and objectivity of the scientific canon. In this context of reflections and cogitations about the epistemic violence perpetrated by the West against other forms of knowledges, Soil Is an Inscribed Body examined anti-colonial struggles of past and current land conflicts across the world in order to address the invasiveness of neo-agro-colonialism and its extractivist logics.
Invited to contribute to the exhibition and to present an artistic position, The Institute of Endotic Research (TIER) proposed to edit a publication together with the curators. The path was longer than expected, the diverted tracks were not few, but here—for the use of readers and many other agropoets—you can find a materialisation of this collaboration. You can linger on a selection of sources that inspired this research and exhibition, retrace the discussions that appeared along the way of its realisation, and engage with the ideas that grounded and sprouted from the project. At the same time, interwoven, you also encounter texts and materials suggested by TIER in dialogue with the curators. The reader has contributions by: Elena Agudio & Marleen Boschen, Lorenzo Sandoval, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Filipa César, Bouba Touré, Mirelle/Jennifer/Alex Ungprateeb Flynn, Marwa Arsanios, Benji Akbulut, Marisol de la Cadena, Mijo Miquel, Ayesha Hameed, Hervé Yamguen, Maria Ptqk, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Luis Berríos-Negrón, Huying Ng, INLAND, Asuncíon Molinos Gordo and Yemisi Aribisala; and it is designed by Cleo Wächter.
The reader will be introduced by Elena Agudio (SAVVY Contemporary) + Lorenzo Sandoval (TIER) + Fernando García Dory (INLAND), with a screening by Barbara Marcel.
There will be some prints at the launch, but the publication is freely distributed as a PDF. Please find it here: http://
The launch of the reader will be followed by a party co-organized with Obrera Centro and INLAND, where Changorama DJ will play some good electrocumbia.
Address in Madrid:
CAR – Centro de Acercamiento a lo Rural
Calle Buen Gobernador, 4, 28027 Madrid, Spain
The Berlin launch will take place at TIER on March 30th, together with the launch of the publication Objects Before and After the Wall.
February 12. PLACES: Plano B. An encounter with Vijai Patchineelam
Wednesday, February 12, 19:00
PLACES: Plano B
An encounter with Vijai Patchineelam
Plano B opened in 2003 in the neighbourhood of Lapa, Rio de Janeiro. A vinyl shop during the day and a cultural space of sorts over the weekend, Plano B housed concerts, performances, talks, screenings, etc. by numerous artists from Brazil and abroad. Over the course of ten years it fomented an alternative music scene in Rio. The space’s founder Fernando Torres was previously a ‘vinyl trafficker’, as he likes to call his earlier profession, scavenging rare and bizarre records in the city of Rio for collectors across Brazil during the 1980s and 90s. For Fernando, Plano B was not just a ‘concert venue’, but a lived installation where all corners of the shop and dynamics between the people who inhabited it were taken into consideration, a collective effort in a small space that developed irrespectively of its lack of institutional or governmental support.
For a couple of years now, Vijai Patchineelam has worked with Fernando Torres on his archive of over 300 live recorded shows that were held in the shop between 2004 and 2013, when the space closed. Their ongoing collaboration has so far resulted in a double album of these recordings as a way of communicating what Plano B was and to leave some trace of it for the current experimental music scene in Rio and beyond. At TIER, Vijai will introduce the record and his collaboration with Fernando Torres in the aural documentation of the space.
Vijai Patchineelam‘s artistic practice focuses on dialogue between the artist and the art institutions, as the locations of art production and distribution. Conventionally the artist comes to an art institution in a temporary role, for an exhibition, a residency, a commission. At times the artist is employed as a technician, monitor or less frequently as a curator or a board member. Placing the role of the artist as a worker in the foreground, Vijai’s research-driven artistic practice experiments with and argues for a more permanent role for artists—one in which artists become a constitutive part of the inner workings of art institutions. This displacement of roles is part of a larger trajectory that he follows in his PhD research in the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, The Artist Job Description: A Practice Led Artistic Research for the Employment of the Artist, as an Artist, Inside the Art Institution.
PLACES is a nomadic series of one-off events including talks, readings and film screenings where speakers are invited to present a place, imagined or otherwise, through words, images and sounds. PLACES is organized by Shirin Sabahi.
February 11. Insights. An encounter with Diana Troya, Ezekiel Morgan, Margot Potemans and Santiago
Tuesday, February 11, 19:00
Insights
An encounter with Diana Troya, Ezekiel Morgan, Margot Potemans and Santiago
On this evening, we will screen a selection of films by students and recent graduates of the Visual and Media Anthropology program at Freie Universität Berlin, which deals with the representation of culture in and through media. How do (new) technologies shape our world and the way we talk about it? Where can conversation take us? How are we connected to other humans and different species? What does it mean to be an activist in this day and age? And how can ethnography help us understand ourselves and the history we are rooted in? The program, as the field of Visual Anthropology, is constantly changing shape, and the selected films aim to give an insight in this process through diving into a wide range of subjects like multi-species entanglement, feminism, activism and posthumanism.
Please note that this event is a free private screening which requires a RSVP to mail at cleowaechter dot com
Photos by Benjamin Busch
February 8. Cartesian obscenities. An encounter with Sergio Zevallos
Saturday, February 8, 19:00
Cartesian obscenities
An encounter with Sergio Zevallos
Sergio Zevallos’ contribution to the encounter at The Institute for Endotic Research follows his investigations of intentional language disorders. His methods include taking popular expressions and applying surgical operations to displace signifiers related to socioeconomic and racial categories, or connected to the normativity of the body and its affects. With this he creates syncopated structures by making use of the sonorities and meanings of language. He will present the development of these ideas from his drawing praxis to his recent sound compositions.
Sergio Zevallo‘s work is focused on the relation between individuals and power, and between private and public spheres. He is Co-founder of the Grupo Chaclacayo (1982-1995), a collective known for its performances denouncing the sexual and racial violence of the armed conflicts in Peru. He works with installations, drawings, writings, photography, sound and performance, often combining several of these practices. In 2018 he received the HAP Grieshaber Art Prize from the Stiftung Kunstfonds and the VG Bild-Kunst. He also participated at the documenta 14.
February 7. Interiors. An intervention by Tracey Snelling in the Manual Model Museum
Friday, February 7, 19:00
Interiors
An intervention by Tracey Snelling in the Manual Model Museum
Interiors
Within cities, one can live in close proximity to many people, but often rarely know their neighbours. There can be a sense of isolation which contrasts to the amount of people in an area. Tracey Snelling has always been curious about what people do, how they live, and what happens behind closed doors, and also in public/private spaces, when people are alone. As a guest of The Institute for Endotic Research, she will present 3 small small-scale room sculptures in the Manual Model Museum, a glass vitrine and conceptual device. On February 7th, we will present the mini exhibition, and also have a discussion about the artworks, her process, and the idea of neighbours, privacy, and social and domestic spaces.
Through the use of sculpture, photography, video, and large-scale installation, Tracey Snelling gives her impression of a place, its people and their experience. Her work derives from voyeurism, film noir, and geographical and architectural location. Within this idea of location, themes develop that transport observation into the realm of storytelling, with reality and sociological study being the focus. Snelling has exhibited in international galleries, museums and institutions, including the The Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Belgium; Palazzo Reale, Milan; The Museum of Arts and Design, New York; Kunstmuseen Krefeld, Germany; and El Museo de Arte de Banco de la Republica, Bogota, among other places. In 2015 she received the Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant. In 2017, Snelling was awarded a fellowship at the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan, and also completed a permanent sculptural commissions at the Historisches Museum Frankfurt. She was a 2017/2018 artist at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin. Her work most recently showed in the Arsenale at the Venice Biennale, sponsored by Swatch, and in the Havana Biennale 2019. Snelling will soon begin residencies at the Cité internationale des arts, Paris, and TOKAS, Tokyo, Japan. She will have solo exhibitions at Cokkie Snoei, Rotterdam; Galleria Giampaolo Abbondio, Milan, in collaboration with Studio la Citta; and in Berlin with H27 Gallery, opening February 1st. Snelling lives and works in Berlin.
Manual Model Museum
MMM space reflects on the potentialities and possibilities of micro-scale exhibition making. It is inspired by Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual, where the writer handled the building as the structure for the book’s narrative.
January 25. Radicalizing speculation: emancipatory imagination in an age of future fatigue. Hosted by Jorge Vega, with Edna Bonhomme and guest TBA
Saturday, January 25, 19:00
Radicalizing speculation: emancipatory imagination in an age of future fatigue
Hosted by Jorge Vega, with Edna Bonhomme and guest TBA
Octavia Butler called Science Fiction ‘the freest genre in existence,’ based on the author’s perceived freedom to define their own limits or boundaries, especially those that transcend the limits or boundaries of contemporary society. The power of speculative fiction lies in its capacity to conjure what Ursula K Le Guin identified as ‘realism of a large reality.’
More often than not, speculation is tied to the future. And the future as territory is subject to the same historical dynamics of colonization, exploitation, appropriation, co-optation, and commodification: at best to sell technoscientific solutionism and humanize market narratives, at worst to normalize – in its mass media incarnation – the state of emergency and its ideologies of self-alienation and collective nihilism.
When can speculation transcend its aesthetic and recreational consumption, into the realm of transformative change? Whose voices and which values set the metaphorical conditions that can guide our escape from Mark Fisher’s capitalist realism or realize Angela Davis’ vision of Critical Resistance? And how, both as an artistic and political practice, might speculative fiction become what adrienne maree brown called a “way to practice the future together”?
In this discussion circle we’ll invite researchers and practitioners rooted in speculative practices and future narratives to shed light on how they approach and understand Speculative Fiction, especially that framed by narratives from Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC), and generally responding to the need for alternative visions of futures built on transformative change, multi-species emancipation, planetary healing, and restorative justice.
This discussion circle is invited by Luiza Pado de O. Martins as part of her residency at TIER, In Weaving Shared Soil.
Edna Bonhomme is an activist, historian, writer, curator, and lecturer whose research interrogates disease, gender, surveillance, and embodiment. Edna earned a PhD in history of science at Princeton University with a dissertation that examined plagued bodies and spaces in North Africa and the Middle East. She is also co-host of the podcast Decolonization in Action. Her creative work is guided by diasporic futures, herbal healing, and bionic beings. Follow her on Twitter @jacobinoire
Jorge Vega. Born in Puerto Rico (1987). For the past 8 years has worked as an ethnographer and design researcher, in places like São Paulo, Lyon, Guangzhou, and Jeddah. The output varied, but most projects have involved understanding emerging systems and behaviors, often demystifying the technologies and cultural context underpinning them. Speculative fiction and narratives and symbols pertaining to the social imaginary of the future underpin his work.
He is currently focused on artistic and projects under ‘Peripheral Intuitions,’ an ongoing collaboration with artist Chaveli Sifre. They mix artistic interventions, immersive spaces, and education guided by the senses as a way to break from logic-driven oppression while championing cultures in flux and marginalized subjectivities as agents for collective change.
