The Shape of a Pocket Workshop: Character Building: AQUATÓPICOS with Miguel Rodríguez-Casellas
Date: Saturday, November 2nd
Time: 14:00 – 17:00
RSVP at the.shape.of.a.pocket.24@
Character Building: AQUATÓPICOS is a transformative journey, marking my return to a place of artistic creation after a series of projects done collectively. These past projects, while seemingly successful from a creative position, left deep personal wounds and unwanted wells of misanthropic distrust. In this semi-autobiographical exercise, I aim to stage a creative battleground through the most basic form of representation, the portrait, with the all-mighty “auteur” and their seemingly inert, agency-less subject. Six subjects were chosen from my hometown and past/present life in Puerto Rico to test a co-creation methodology, mixing self-narrative, projection, scriptwriting, rendering, hyperbole, and a sense of wonder for the unfathomable edges of identity.
The exercise unabashedly embraces writing’s most rhetorical aspects, its artificiality, as it tests the power of art to foster empathy and generosity, even between strangers. I am deliberately testing the human ability to connect and understand, even in realms of contrived artificiality.
How much of a testimonial remains after the writer has butchered the biographical material? How does mutual discovery between the writer and subject erode their boundaries? How much of the initial asymmetry between the “hunter” and its “prey” is destroyed when the craft of literature negotiates each other’s vulnerabilities? How much of the task of “building up” a character un-builds the self and re-builds a past of trauma and despair into a moment of communion and love for the deep ocean of humanity?
The primary medium of the encounter is the actor’s table, where scripts will be given voice with fearless intuition. Six scripts will be read and/or acted out in real-time by the workshop participants as a back-to-back mock-up of an actual film. Before each of the scenes, or “portraits,” there will be a five-minute explanation of the characters involved in the scene, the situation, subtexts, and the possible motivations. I want to engage with the economy of words and their capacity to weaponize curiosity and empathy through an amateur approach to the art of interpretation. Some lives might fit better in a comedy, while others, like specific segments of mine, can easily pass as a horror story. Generosity towards the subjects would be the driving principle. I have calculated a three-hour marathon of reading/acting, which includes an informal discussion about the meaning and possibilities of the project. The workshop is open to everyone; no previous acting experience is required.
This series is inspired by the need to reach out and collectively heal or inhabit our shared humanity.
This workshop is open to 10-15 people. In case you are interested in joining, I invite you to send an email to the.shape.of.a.pocket.24@
BIO
Miguel Rodríguez-Casellas, a writer, actor, and trained architect with a master’s in architecture from Princeton University, started his career in the early 1990s at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture. His architectural skepticism led him to a significant role in establishing a new architecture school in Puerto Rico, where he served as the dean from 2006 to 2010.
In 2013, seeking refuge from the recent wave of neoliberal violence on the Island, Miguel migrated to Australia. During his time at the University of Technology, Sydney, he collaborated with the Grandeza collective under the name ‘Bajeza’ from 2015 to 2022. Their joint effort, the Teatro Della Terra Alienata, representing Australia, won the Golden Bee award at the XXII Milan Triennale. Bartlebooth Press published a book/script of the same name, co-authored with Grandeza.
Miguel’s commitment to the political and cultural landscape of his native Puerto Rico is evidenced in his writings, radio shows, and media collaborations. His column Buscapié (2007-2016) and the Puerto Crítico radio series (2013-2017) stand out as testaments of his artistic and theoretical positions. Since his return to Puerto Rico in 2023, Miguel has been exploring new avenues in his career. He has ventured into scriptwriting and art direction as part of a new television show, Casi Casi Familia (Almost Family).
Vernisassage: The Shape of a Pocket. with Shoufay Derz, Kandis Friesen, Tammy Langtry and Talya Lubinsky, Kitso Lynn Lelliot, Listening at Pungwe with Memory Biwa and Robert Machiri, Hn. Lyonga, Constanza Mendoza, Eleni Mouzourou, James Nguyen, Miguel Rodríguez-Casellas, Promona Sengupta and Jorinde Schulz.
Date: Thursday, October 31
Time: 18:00-21:00
Exhibition runs from November 01 until November 10
For the schedule of the full public program of The Shape of Pocket exhibition please click here.
The Shape of a Pocket is a platform dedicated to articulations of voids and absences in social, epistemic and geographic landscapes.
The pocket is an intimate hollow, a ‘pocket of resistance’ or a vessel that carries multiple materials and stories. The ‘shape’ alludes to the imaginary lines that are drawn between the unknown and the known, and to what is revealed or obscured, connected or separated by these demarcations. The void is both the deepest trench and the horizon.
The project confronts absence not as an epistemological deficit, but as rich and generative in its indeterminacy. This does not mean that the unknown is a resource to be mined, located or exploited, but rather it is a necessary resistance to Western thought’s demand for clarity and unambiguous identification. This call to turn towards the unknown relates to ‘absences’ that include enforced silences, extractive practices, linguistic gaps, and erasures in archives and culture. In all its shape shifting mutations, the void resists totalising systems and makes way for a multiplicity and an excess that cannot be contained by the constraints of absolutes or certainty.
Colonialism uses the notion of ‘empty’ space as a pretext to justify the occupation of land, genocide and subjugation. The continuous coloniality of societal structures requires an undoing of this claim over emptiness. Capitalism exploits and extracts human labour and geological matter, causing cultural erasure and ecological catastrophe, with dire consequences for human and more-than-human life. This project aims to unlearn and undo the claim that coloniality makes on ostensibly empty spaces, and to challenge the persistent omissions in hegemonic historical narratives and divisive identitarian determinations. While the concept of the ‘void’ speaks of absence, it cannot be reduced to a mere abstraction, rather, it is material and situated in the world: it has flesh, geography and history.
There are also voids and obfuscations whose contours are less easy or impossible to grasp but must be preemptively imagined to not perpetuate patterns of erasure. Following Saidiya Hartman’s approach, this project embraces the challenge of telling impossible stories while amplifying the impossibility of their telling. In this sense, The Shape of a Pocket works with the double bind of the necessity to be present to absences while resisting imposed silencing. Depending on positionality and context, silence or absence can be constructed as spaces for emancipatory political imagination and relationality or, conversely, as sites of oppression and erasure.
Together we ask: Can we trace the contours of these so-called voids without reenacting the violences of cartography? Who holds the capacity for articulation, about what, and from where?
If, as Glissant says, the abyss serves as an alluvium for metamorphoses, how can we contribute to the emergence of languages that are born from places of irreparable trauma and loss and give rise to forms of solidarity, resistance and transformation?
The Shape of a Pocket is an invitation to reimagine our margins, shared unknowns, cavities, and rifts as meaningful grounds for rupture and connectivity.
The platform runs from May to November 2024 and culminates in an exhibition, opening on 31 October 2024 with Shoufay Derz, Kandis Friesen, Tammy Langtry and Talya Lubinsky, Kitso Lynn Lelliot, Listening at Pungwe with Memory Biwa and Robert Machiri, Hn. Lyonga, Constanza Mendoza, Eleni Mouzourou, James Nguyen, Miguel Rodríguez-Casellas, Promona Sengupta and Jorinde Schulz. The project The Shape of a Pocket is initiated by Shoufay Derz and Talya Lubinsky at The Institute for Endotic Research.
*The Shape of a Pocket is the title of a book by John Berger published in 2002.
With support from the Berlin Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Gesellschaftlichen Zusammenhalt.
Encounter: 6th Tea Oval: Anarchic Art Practices in China under AI Socialism
Date: Thursday, October 17
Time: 19:00-21:00
In the 1960s, Myanmar’s most influential scholars, politicians, activists, and artists admired China for its stability and ideology for world peace. However, Chinese long-standing support for Myanmar’s ruling Juntas, China’s influence on Myanmar’s media, and the provision of surveillance technology to the junta have raised concerns about press freedoms and human rights. The 6th Tea Oval session will explore the totalitarian state of China today, especially in its most advanced AI socialism and its severe impact, via Ma Yongfenhg, a Chinese artist and curator based in Berlin who has a deep understanding of the intersection of art, technology, and politics.
China’s ban on major international social media platforms and internet apps around 15 years ago has led to the emergence of a highly advanced AI totalitarian state. This state relies on massive data and a closely monitored algorithmic model, along with traditional authoritarian governance methods. The resulting AI socialism is a fully controlled system designed to maintain stability through algorithms, creating a blend of a futuristic cyberpunk dystopia and a digital feudalistic kingdom. Dealing with issues such as facial recognition, grid management, and crowd control in public spaces, traditional anarchic practices must urgently establish mutual aid, direct democracy, technical counterattack, and platform cooperation in the digital realm. It is not just a task but an urgent necessity for artists, hackers, and activists to prioritize reclaiming physicality as a political goal under the rule of AI socialism.
BIO
Ma Yongfeng resides in Berlin and works with video and film, conceptual art, socially engaged practices, and political art, and has realized successful art projects as a curator. Lately, his focus has been on political video and film, site-specific interventions, and situations. Some of his projects involve flexible, guerrilla, and immaterial social participation. His politically engaged tactics involve introducing new concepts and methodologies into existing mechanisms through social practices and relational resistance. His innovative approach challenges the feasibility of establishing a direct-democratic, alternative-political algorithmic model to replace the current technological oppression shaped by nation-states and multinational tech giants.
This program is supported by The Senate Department for Culture and Europe’s Weltoffenes Berlin Program
The Shape of a Pocket Encounter: “Çınaraltı”: Under the plane tree with Eleni Mouzourou & guests
Date: Wednesday, 9 October
Time: 19:00 – 21:00
In a performative conversation, Eleni Mouzourou explores the place of centenarian trees in contemporary urban spaces, delving into the human stories and uses around them and the values and fantasies projected onto them. Thereby, the artist shares an insight into her ongoing research on ancient trees as biodiversity habitats and as living time-machines connecting deep pasts and distant futures for human and more-than-human city dwellers.
In the framework of a research residency in Istanbul in spring 2024, the artist focused her attention on Plane trees designated as “monuments/monumental” by the Istanbul municipality, taking into account their notable presence in the materiality of the city, as well as in regional folklore and the social imaginary. For her encounter, she reconfigures individual interviews conducted with various local interlocutors during her residency and blends them with audiovisual footage and archival material in an experimental polyphonic reading.
The conversation brings together the voices of an interdisciplinary tree researcher, a cultural manager, a paleobotanist/
Trees are considered as physical entities in their impermanence and mortality, as well as in their potential timefulness beyond their organismal age. They emerge as sites of remembrance and social gathering and as places of refuge. Addressed are the ways they can become instrumentalised in the production of nationalism, the monumentalisation of “nature”, the politics of belonging in the construction and maintenance of landscapes, and the growing risk of tree loss as a result of anthropogenic activity.
In view of the troubling thriving of far-right ideologies across the globe, this project engages with the ecological and political implications of biodiversity and chronodiversity as one continuum through which to acknowledge differences to cultivate communalities.
The research was realised in the framework of the Berlin cultural exchange stipend 2023/24 in cooperation with DEPO/Anadolu Kültür
BIO
Eleni Mouzourou’s work navigates the intersections of natural and sociopolitical landscapes, mapping perspectives often overlooked in dominant narratives. Her practice challenges totalising worldviews by highlighting the specific and localized within broader sociopolitical contexts. Using multiple media, including drawing, video, and artists’ books, she investigates the complex interconnections between personal, historical, environmental, and political issues, focusing on their influence on the formation of (national) identities. Postcolonial Cyprus serves as a point of departure for her explorations, with more-than-human entities—such as trees, pigeons, and bees—emerging as witnesses to displacement, colonial legacies, and migration. Eleni was born in Nicosia and is based in Berlin. She holds a degree in Visual Arts from École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Lyon and the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg, and an MA in Art Therapy from Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weissensee (2019). That same year, she co-founded ANDPRESS, a collective dedicated to the production and dissemination of artists’ books and paper-based works. Her recent exhibitions include Speculative Properties at Adalbertstr. 9, Berlin (2023); Twister at nGbK, Berlin (2022); and Papier Marché at Steirischer Herbst ’21, Palais Attems, Graz (2021).
Encounter: Probador de Poesias #16 with Jesús Montoya, Léonce W. Lupette, Geraldine Gutierrez-Wienken, Hensli Rahn Solórzano, Federico Beckhoff. Organized by Regina Riveros, Angélica Freitas
Date: Friday, 27 of September
Time: 18:00h – 21:00h
Probador de poesías is an independent project for expanded literature readings that proposes an experimental space for authors, language and sound artists to explore different possibilities of performing their work. It has been running since October 2022 and in its 15 editions there have been presentations from 90 poets from different backgrounds, some with renowned careers and some in the development of them. For the 16th edition we will hold the space for 4 poets and a folk musician. Three of the poets are coming to Berlin briefly so we are taking the chance to hear their resonance in our space. There are 3 venezuelan poets: Jesús Montoya, Geraldine Gutierrez-Wienken, Hensli Rahn Solorzano and the french-german poet Leonce W. Lupette. Also, the venezuelan musician Federico Beckhoff. For this evening, we will create an atmosphere of deep listening before the performances in order to attune the audience before the poetic immersion.
BIO
Probador de poesías has developed as a collective process whose curators are:
Angélica Freitas (Brazil, 1973). Poet and translator, that has published Rilke Shake (2007) and um útero é do tamanho de um punho (2016), both of them published in many languages.
Regina Riveros (Venezuela, 1986). Psychoanalist, poet and performer whose poetry has been published in latinamerican magazines and has presented her performance work in Berlin – Germany, Venezuela and Spain.
No RSVP required
Event held onsite: Donaustr. 84, 12043 Berlin
Tea Oval Session Encounter: Unveiling the Silence – Urging International Advocacy for Artists in Sudan with Ahmed Isamaldin
Date: Wednesday, September 25th
Time: 19:00 – 21:00
Zoncy wondered why NGOs, INGOs, UN organizations, and many EU embassies hesitated to help Myanmar artists at risk during the 2021 Spring Revolution. After arriving in Berlin in August 2022, Zoncy encountered global activism and felt she found possible answers there. Exploring the challenges faced by artists in authoritarian regimes underscores the crucial role of international advocates. What innovative actions can these artists inspire? This is not just a question for individuals or organizations, but for all of us. It demands our collective attention and action, now more than ever. Understanding the emerging themes of internationalism versus political will in promoting artistic freedom is vital. How do these themes contrast with preserving national interests? The artist and cultural activist Ahmed Isamaldin from Sudan will join the 5th Tea Oval to discuss the above mentioned questions. Wisdom holders and those with experience are equally welcome to join the oval discussion with the speaker.
BIO
Ahmed Isamaldin is a multidisciplinary artist and researcher from Khartoum, Sudan. He holds a degree in physics from the University of Khartoum and has studied graphic design, photography in Cairo, and visual communication at Weißensee Kunsthochschule Berlin. His work centers on themes of immigration, psychology, revolutionary processes, decolonial design, and technology.
This program is supported by the Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion Department of Culture fellowship program Weltoffenes Berlin.
No RSVP required
Event held onsite: Donaustr. 84, 12043 Berlin