Sunday 26.November.Encounter & Listening session: 140bpm with DJ BABA
Dates: Sunday November 26th
Time: 19:00-21:00
We are thrilled to introduce a captivating panel discussion featuring DJ BABA, a prominent figure in the Raptor House scene in Caracas, Venezuela. This event goes beyond the music; it delves into the cultural phenomenon that is Raptor House, a genre that has emerged from the heart of Venezuelan ghettos. In the face of heavy discrimination and adversity, Raptor House has become a powerful, expressive movement that symbolizes resilience and creativity in the urban landscapes of Caracas. Raptor House, born from the streets and inspired by the realities of marginalized communities, has proven to be a driving force of empowerment and artistic innovation. This event promises to be an engaging experience for those who are curious about the transformative power of music and its ability to transcend boundaries.
BIO
DJ BABATR “THE RAPTOR” Raptor House, is a musical genre and peripheral cultural movement originating in Caracas at late 90s, popularized during massive daytime raves called “matinés” , which channeled the adrenaline and energetic vibe of the popular neighborhoods of the capital of Venezuela. For the most part, the DNA of Raptor House leads us to its creator, DJ BABATR, who is the initiator and representative of the irrefutable and original underground electronic music movement that imploded in the ghettos of Caracas, representing the sound of youth from neighborhoods like Petare, las lomas, la cota o Catia, DJ BABATR is the reflection of the Venezuelan sound that rethinks and reinterprets electronic music from its own context and flavor, transgressing pre-established parameters that previously influenced the Venezuelan scene, taking genres such as hard techno and ghetto house as a starting point, added to an immeasurable technical recursiveness and avid musical exploration that result in the foundations of a massive cultural movement intimately linked to the neighborhood. DJ BABATR is the reliable representation of a musical movement that transcended from loudness to a social outburst that fought daily against a social stigma, resonating and resisting in dance, music and raves with its own strident and iconic sound, 100% made in the Venezuelan Ghetto.
No RSVP required
Event held onsite: Donaustr. 84, 12043 Berlin
Tuesday 31.October. La Retaguardia / Listening to those who came before, whispering to those who will come after. Archive, counter-memories and collective practices. Publication Screen and encounter: with Anaïs Florin.
Dates: Tuesday October 31st
Publication Screen: November & December
Time: 19:00-21:00
La Retaguardia is a choral, visual and experiential story about El Punt. Espai de lliure aprenentatge. El Punt, is a collective, self-managed and non-profit project that aims to create a Documentation Center and Library on social movements. El Punt is also a social and cultural space that functions as a meeting place for other collectives that may need to use the space or consult its collections, in addition to carrying out different activities such as exhibitions, talks, book presentations and workshops. The choral narrative is the result of the articulation of different interviews and conversations held during the last year with some of the people linked to the Punt. Throughout these interviews, we addressed different topics such as the political importance that these people gave to a project like this, whether in terms of the social library or documentation center or also the type of militancy that characterizes the Punt: an activity far from what we identify as “front line” activities, more visible and more epic. A work in the shadows, a rigorous work that is in charge of sustaining in time the stories that happen around it. A long-term and slow-paced task inseparable from the coexistence that all of them name. A rearguard for the antagonistic memory.
BIO
Anaïs Florin‘s work belongs to the territory of intervention in public space and gives particular importance to collaborative practices with other cultural agents and platforms of citizen resistance. With the aim of generating new social narratives, she is particularly interested in the memory of places and their inhabitants, as well as in the struggles associated with territorial transformations. Her work combines visual practices with activist practices through banners, billboards, photography and social gatherings. Taking the archive as a starting point, Florin builds new narratives of participation through interviews, attentive listening and cooperation. Most of her projects are committed to the collective appropriation of urban spaces, always towards care for the local environment and its long-term sustainability. https://anaisflorin.com/
No RSVP required
Event held onsite: Donaustr. 84, 12043 Berlin
Thursday 26.October. Before the beginning, after the end: Magma and dust against memorial time . Encounter with Talya Lubinsky
Dates: Thursday October 26th
Time: 19:00-21:00
Talya Lubinsky’s practice investigates stone as a material through which normative knowledge and practices around memorialization and commemoration are embodied and subverted. In this artist talk, Lubinsky will give contextual and conceptual background to two recent bodies of work and one work in progress. These site specific projects span from a cemetery in Mamelodi, South Africa, where assassinated political prisoners were buried during Apartheid (Marble Dust, 2020), to a granite quarry situated next to a Concentration Camp Memorial in Flossenbürg, Germany (Melting Stone, 2022) and back to the quarries on Cape Town’s Table Mountain, where enslaved people worked at the beginning of Dutch settler colonialism. Working with magma and dust as conceptual approaches to commemorative practices, Lubinsky suggests possible horizons beyond and before the memorial.
BIO
Talya Lubinsky (b. 1988) is an artist from Johannesburg, currently based in Berlin. In 2019-2020 she was awarded a one year residency at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, funded by the KfW Stiftung. Solo exhibitions include Delithification, Künstverein Schwäbisch Hall (2023), Melting Stone, Flossenbürg Concentration Camp Memorial, Flossenbürg (2022). Marble Dust, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (2020), Floating Bodies, Iwalewahaus, Bayreuth, (2017) and If we burn, there is ash, Wits Anthropology Museum, Johannesburg (2016). Lubinsky received an MFA with distinction from University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. She is a recipient of a NEUSTART Stipendium from the Stiftung Kunstfonds for 2022 and 2023.
No RSVP required
Event held onsite: Donaustr. 84, 12043 Berlin
Saturday 21. October. System Haunting: multi-sited workers’ inquiry in the platform age. Encounter with Benjamin Gerdes
Dates: Saturday, October 21st
Time: 19:00-21:00
The encounter with Benjamin Gerdes is part of his artistic research project, Ghost Platform: Generating the “Complex Image” of Data, Labour, and Logistics, engages in questions of invisible labour in the contemporary circulation of materials and information, particularly the conditions under which this is popularly experienced in the Global North. The phenomenon of the digital platform, as a mechanism of extraction, communication, aestheticization, and spatial and social reorganization, occupies one focus of the project. This research examines the possibilities of repurposing related tools toward more equitable outcomes. This project convenes a study circle of logistics workers and artistic researchers to co-design a software tool: a ghost platform. It pursues a complex image combining sound, image, text and virtual elements with discussion of these obscured perspectives.
BIO
Benjamin Gerdes is an artist, writer, researcher, and organizer working primarily in video and related public formats. He is interested in intersections of radical politics, knowledge production, and popular imagination. His work focuses on the affective and social consequences of economic and state regimes, investigating methods for art and cultural projects to contribute to social change. His individual and collaborative projects emerge via long-term research processes in dialogue with activists, trade unionists, architects, and geographers, among others, including many years as a co-organizer of the group and space 16 Beaver Group in Lower Manhattan. Exhibitions and screenings include: The Centre Pompidou, National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.), New Museum (New York), Rotterdam International Film Festival, Museum of the Moving Image (New York), Gothenburg International Biennial of Contemporary Art, Venice Architecture Biennale, and the Tate Modern. After two decades in New York City, he is presently based in Stockholm at the Royal Institute of Art, where he directs the Swedish Research Council-funded artistic research project Ghost Platform. In addition, he maintains an ongoing research affiliation with the Department of Visual Culture at the Technical University of Vienna.
No RSVP required
Event held onsite: Donaustr. 84, 12043 Berlin
Thursday 31. August. The Legal Personality of Mar Menor. Encounter with Teresa Vicente
Dates: Thursday August 31st
Time: 19:00-21:00
The Mar Menor Lagune is the first ecosystem in Europe with own rights: The Popular Legislative Initiative that has given legal personality to the Laguna del Mar Menor and its basin. Law 19/2022, of September 30 (BOE October 3, 2022)
Teresa Vicente Giménez Professor of Philosophie of Law Director of the Chair of Human Right and Right of Nature University of Murcia
We need a radical response to the ecological disaster caused by humans on the planet, we need to rethink our anthropocentric model in favour of a new ecocentric model based on the relationships between humans and Nature, which recognizes ecological Justice as a new paradigm that has its roots in ecological awareness and ecological ethics. A new generation of rights is coming from the Ecological Justice: Rights of Nature. The mass mortality disaster in the Mar Menor in October 2019 and the strong environmental awareness that arose in the riverside population gave me the opportunity to draft a law proposal to recognize legal personality and a bill of rights for the salty coastal lagoon.
The recognition of legal personality and rights to the Mar Menor and its basin have been brought up by a social movement which promoted the Popular Legislative Initiative (PLI) claiming the rights of Nature for an ecosystem of great ecological value in danger. The reasons to propose a Popular Legislative Initiative that recognizes the legal personality of Mar Menor lagoon and its basin in order to grant its own rights are: the serious ecological damage that Mar Menor has suffered, the ineffectiveness of the current legal norms that pretend its protection, the inactivity of administration and, the empowerment of civil society to participate in environmental matters.
BIO:
Teresa Vicente Giménez, Professor of Philosophy of Law, is Deputy Director of the Center for Cooperation and Development Studies (CECODE) of the University of Murcia. She is also Director of the Chair of Human Rights and Rights of Nature of the same University. Her teaching and research profile as a professor of Philosophy of Law is “Theory of Justice and Human Rights”. In this area, she has researched specifically on the new paradigm of Ecological Justice and the Rights of Nature. In this context, she has participated as a speaker in international and national congresses, conferences, and seminars, and has been invited to international meetings. She is the author of numerous publications addressing ecological justice, the rights of children, social rights, and the rights of Nature, among many others.
Teresa Vicente Giménez has been the leader of the Iniciativa Legislativa Popular (ILP) or Popular Legislative Initiative in Murcia that seeks to give legal personality to the Mar Menor lagoon and his entire basin. Mar Menor is the largest saltwater lake in Europe and has come under threat mainly due to water contamination resulting from the unchecked growth of agriculture and waters have become choked with algae. The 639,826 signatures gathered by the citizen movement throughout Spain became the key to open the process that will recognize the legal personality of Mar Menor. She defended before the Commission for Ecological Transition and Demographic Challenge of Congress the proposal of law to recognize the legal personality of the Mar Menor, and, on 5 April 2022, the Spanish Congress of Deputies overwhelmingly voted to expedite drafting of a law so that Mar Menor will have legal personality thus becoming the first ecosystem in Europe with his own rights.
No RSVP required
Event held onsite: Donaustr. 84, 12043 Berlin
Lunar Tides and the Spirals of the Universe. Encounter/dinner with Luiza Prado De O. Martins
Dates: Thursday July 27th
Time: 19:00-20:00
RSVP is required at luiza@luiza-prado.com
“Lunar Tides and the Spirals of the Universe” is a food installation and performance-dinner; a ritual exploring the separation of food from the realm of the commons, to its positioning as commodity mediated through spectacle and performance under capitalist and colonial systems. Looking at spiritual practices meant to invoke both forces of change as desire, extinction, fertility and death, this edible artwork explores the ongoing historical pathways of an ancient spice, medicine, and aphrodisiac called silphium — a plant overharvested to extinction during the Roman Empire, triggering waves of destruction and chaos that echo through time and space. The work takes as a starting point the Cult of Sylphis — an ancient religious practice revolving around the planting, tending, growth, protection, sharing, and consumption of silphium in Antiquity — to explore changing forms of worship and spiritual practices in the context of climate disaster.
BIO
Luiza Prado De O. Martins is an artist, activist and researcher. Her work moves between installation and food, using performance and ritual as a way of invitation and activation for audiences. Her practice explores relations and knowledge between food, infrastructures and technology, and questions what structures and process are needed for collective concerns of care. She holds a PhD from the University of the Arts Berlin, and an MA from the University of the Arts Bremen. Her ongoing artistic research project, “Un/Earthings and Moon Landings” narrates the extinction and later reappearance of an ancient contraceptive, aphrodisiac and spice, called silphium, through a series of artworks. She has exhibited and performed work at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art Warsaw, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Savvy Contemporary, Akademie Schloss Solitude, and Kampnagel, among others. She is currently based in Berlin.
RSVP: luiza@luiza-prado.com
Event held onsite: Donaustr. 84, 12043 Berlin
Image credit: Luiza Prado De O. Martins