Building Strength
January 25
18:30 doors, 19:00 start: The ‘Unambitious Stripper’ with Isabel Lewis
20:00: Introduction to ‘Wardian Table’ by Luís Berríos-Negrón
20:30: Screening by Mariechen Danz amid installed artworks
January 26
19:00: Performance by Daniel Salomon
19:30: Introduction to ‘Incommensurate States’ by Patricia Reed
20:00: Screening by Emilija Škarnulytė
‘Infratekture’
Where are the fluxes of affect to be located when thinking them as infrastructure?
The Institute for Endotic Research (TIER) proposes a constellation of words as an extension of that question, inspired by the transmediale Study Circle ‘Affective Infrastructures’. This constellation is drawn from Infratekture, a made-up word which mirrors the blurry edges of possible affects. We take the prefix Infra-, meaning below but also within, to think about Perec’s Infraordinary and Duchamp’s Inframince. And we place it alongside the Proto-Indo-European root *teks-, the root of text, textile, techne, technique, tectonic, architecture, hypertext, pretext, context and texture. With this constellation, we chart a course through the invisible links between the words, on the hazy map of affect.
Our approach with The Institute for Endotic Research sees the space as a text that is constantly written and rewritten, edited and reconfigured. Every intervention responds to the status quo of the space and transforms it. We invite artists, architects, and other practitioners to create interventions in the space, while we also produce our own architectural devices to give texture to the space. Both serve as a common infrastructure for the recombination of relations among people and objects. We ask the artists and researchers who are part of ‘Infratekture’ to respond to this context when applying their technique as part of a collectively unraveling text.
‘Infratekture’ will present works in the form of a two-evening event. It will be composed of a series of performances supported by interventions (both new and existing). The performances will explore notions related with the composition of the social body through the invention of its organs, its nourishment and its textures. This social body-text is readable and editable: it is the result of the accumulation of layers of socio-technical conceptualizations, as well as the affective infrastructures that bind them together. The necessary invisibility of the connections within and between the many words inside Infratekture will be used as a metaphorical device to explore affect.
Artists invited to Infratekture: Luis Berríos-Negrón, Mariechen Danz, Isabel Lewis, Patricia Reed, Daniel Salomon, Emilija Škarnulytė.
With existing interventions by: Ana Alenso, Plating Concrete (Miguel Prados Sánchez and Pablo Ramón Benitez), Sofia Lomba, Sara Pereira.
Luís Berríos-Negrón will introduce the ‘Wardian Table’, that was produced to serve as prop for the re-enactment of ‘Metalogue: A Crème de Menthe, a Rusty Nail. Why Intransitive?’ as the core performance of Memory #02 for the ANARCHIVE at TIER.space.
Mariechen Danz’s approach to a nonlinear historiography of both geographical and anatomical charts will be installed at TIER.space, as a way to question systems of knowledge production.
Isabel Lewis will present an iteration of her workshop titled ‘Unambitious Stripper’, which will use ideas and techniques related to movement for participants to reach a personal inner space by figuratively removing layers of social constructs and identity.
Patricia Reed will present the artwork ‘Incommensurate States’, where a camera maps the contours of the entire world in a loop, moving along the path of all nation-state borders following the logic of the ‘traveling salesman’.
Daniel Salomon will share his guts with the audience in the form of a long sausage based on his daily food intake.
Emilija Škarnulytė’s film and video work examining geologically transformed spaces of legacy and existing regimes of power will establish a visual continuity between concrete infrastructures and the haze of affect that animates them.
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A cooperation between transmediale and The Institute for Endotic Research. Supported by the Senate Department for Culture and Europe.
Tuesday, 8 January 2019 from 19:00-21:00
The Institute for Endotic Research yoga series with Lynhan Balatbat
Bimonthly program
The free play consists in 5 acts:
1: Hoş geldiniz
2: ات َك ْلنا منه على ُخ ص ا تحاد قوة
3: Hez dekeyt legel ma bireqsî?
4: месечина
5: शि – shakti flow
– Hoş geldiniz
Wednesday, January 8th, 19:00. RSVP requested.
In this first session we would like to introduce the series with a welcoming class and start the year with a new moon initiation followed by a mindful yoga practice.
(hoş geldiniz: “your arrival is lovely”)
– ات َك ْلنا منه على ُخ ص ا تحاد قوة (date tbc)
“unity is power” – for the second mini workshop in this series we transcend from tiny entities like breath, slow movements, to broader units. Here we will set the focus on connectivity, in and around us.
– Hez dekeyt legel ma bireqsî? (date tbc)
“would you like to dance with me?” – Spring will be celebrated in playful standing asanas, dynamic postures and space for free play.
– месечина (full moon ritual & yoga session)
Saturday, May 18th, 18:00. RSVP requested
We initiate this session with a ritual dedicated to the grounding and nourishing qualities of the end of the moon cycle. The full moon is a time of brightness, where the moon reflects fully the light of the sun— it is a time where consciousness and unconsciousness are in accord and in perfect reflection of one another.
– shakti flow: (date tbc)
Shakti is the creative energy of the universe, anything that has Shakti is alive, luminous and desirable. It ́s the essence of vibrant health, feeling good in your own skin and feeling that your life has meaning and value. In this last session we will talk about the feminine cosmic energy in us, the primordial forces it represents and are thought to move in us and through the entire universe.
Suggested donation between 5-10€
Please RSVP to reserve a spot as the space is limited to 12 mats maximum: theinstituteforendoticresearch@gmail.com
Lynhan Balatbat-Helbock is a curator and researcher at S A V V Y Contemporary Berlin and is part of the participatory archive project Colonial Neighbours. She received her MA in Postcolonial Cultures and Global Policy at Goldsmiths University of London and moved to Berlin in 2013. In her work within the permanent collection of SAVVY Contemporary she looks for colonial traces that are manifested in our present. The collaborative archive dedicates itself to discussing silenced histories and to the decanonization of the Western gaze through objects and the stories behind them. In close collaboration with artists, initiatives and activists, the archive is activated through hybrid forms of practice. In 2017 she assisted the management for the documenta14 radio program – Every Time a Ear di Soun, SAVVY Funk in Berlin. Lynhan supported the artist Bouchra Khalili with several projects and exhibitions designed most recently the production of Agnieszka Polska ś new commission for the Germany’s National Gallery Prize show in the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin (September 2018 – March 2019). Lynhan received her 200-hour Yoga Alliance teaching certification through Spirit Yoga Berlin (Patricia Thielemann) and has participated in numerous workshops with Matthew Cohen, Lin Min, Max Strom and Krishnataki (Sunshine House Greece). In her own practice and teaching she seeks a more grounding momentum, the healing power of touch and creating the space to balance our hectic daily hustle.
Thursday, November 1, 19:00, RSVP requested
Sacred Serpent Sessions: The soul is quickened in her grave, the peacock’s tail shimmered
Encounter with Lauryn Youden
Through lecture and guided meditation with accompanying music by Dylan Spencer-Davidson this ritual provides its participants the opportunity to learn and engage with the fifth operation of alchemy, Fermentation. Like the chemical process of the same name, it is a two-stepped process that begins with Putrefaction, the rotting and decay of a material, followed by fermentation, the growth of new life – this metaphorically referring to a dual process of ego death and the following resurrection of the soul.
Samhain, celebrated between Oct 31st and November 1st, is the celtic new year and festival of the dead. It is believed to be a liminal time, when the veil thins between this world and the Otherworld and this boundary can be more easily crossed by living beings, supernatural beings and the dead. Therefore, it is the time of the year to not only honor those who have passed but to also meditate on death itself; to come to terms with the mortality of our physical bodies, and to consider what death not only means to us personally but also on a communal, cultural and metaphysical level.
The lecture and meditation will follow with time for open discussion and conversation. Water kefir will be served.
Please RSVP to reserve a spot. Space is limited. theinstituteforendoticresearch
This event is kindly supported by the Canadian Embassy in Berlin.
Sacred Serpent Sessions: The soul is quickened in her grave, the peacock’s tail shimmered is a special Samhainian iteration of the alchemic ritual performed by Lauryn Youden previously at Very Project Space, Berlin as part of the exhibition Digesture.
Lauryn Youden (b.1989 Vancouver) is a Canadian artist based in Berlin. Her practice is a methodology of performative ceremonies. The objects, installation and writings found in her work are both traces left behind from these actions as well as tools for providing self-care. These derive from Youden’s lifelong research in and navigation through modern Western medicine and alternative healing practices for the treatment of her own mental illnesses. By publicly presenting her personal experiences, and an active and engaged feminist lens on the history of medicine and care, Youden’s work inevitably illuminates repressed, marginalized and forgotten practices and knowledge in medicine and care. As delicate and vulnerable as Youden’s visual language may seem, it is ultimately political at its foundation, questioning the loss of knowledge in our society. Youden was awarded the Berlin Art Prize in 2016 and is co-director of the project space Ashley Berlin.
Recent exhibitions and performances include: Group Therapy at the Frye Art Museum, Seattle (USA), You Say I for me at Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (NL) as part of the symposium Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Paradiso, Amsterdam (NL); 5X5X5 at Manifesta 12, Palermo (IT); May the Bridges I burn light the way at Exile, Berlin; Digesture at Very Project Space, Berlin (DE); Well::ness Bad::ass Festival by Orga Orga at Kunstverein Speyer, Speyer (DE); I am large, I contain Multitudes at Galerie Wedding, Berlin (DE); Beneath the Salt at Kinderhook & Caracas, Berlin (DE); Sacred Serpent Sessions with Reflektor-M, Frankfurt (DE); Silent Empire at Funkhaus Berlin, Berlin (DE); Salon Ghol at Galerie Noah Klink, Berlin (DE); This will never finish at Support, London (CA); and Dream Pool at Pushmi Pullyo, Toronto (CA).
Photos by Benjamin Busch
Friday, October 12, 20:30
Undoubtedly problematic
Private screening with Luiza Folegatti, Marzia Jamili/Brittany Nugent, Solomon Mekonen and Laura Na
This screening program is curated by new Visual Anthropology graduates from the Freie Universität. The MA program especially raises questions about problems in representation of culture, what global digitalization means for cultures and societies and the significance of ethnographic films and photography for Social and Cultural Anthropology.
What should be the primacy of an ethical response from visual media and research in a time where everything is in flux, where demagogues take center stage and the role of the media is undoubtedly problematic. Visual Anthropology can serve as a proposition for not only documenting the world and depicting lived experience, but for modelling and envision futures and raising new questions. Self-reflexivity and collaborative methods lie in the core of the field, and the films are interwoven by these approaches in four hybrid pieces, that brings subjects like gender, performativity, belonging, racialized identity and decolonization to the forefront.
Please note this is a private screening, which requires a personal invitation. Please contact us for more information.
Monday, August 27, 19:00
Poetry as technique
Reading by Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung
As part of our inquiry on the notion of technique, we are exploring a series of devices. One of the approaches we would like to think with about this topic is how technique can be considered a way of creating the infrastructure of common symbolic systems, being those institutions, cosmologies, or commonalities, just to name a few. Poetry in that sense is a well-known provider of images with which people can gather around its illuminations. We are interested in how, in many of the projects of Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, the title and the images spread craftily through his texts are verses coming from his reading of poems.
Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, PhD (born in 1977 in Yaoundé, Cameroon) is an independent art curator, art critic, author and biotechnologist. He is founder and artistic director of SAVVY Contemporary Berlin and editor-in-chief of SAVVY Journal for critical texts on contemporary African art. He was associate professor at Muesius University Kiel, and is currently guest professor in curatorial studies at the Städelschule in Frankfurt. He was curator-at-large for documenta 14, and was a guest curator of the 2018 Dak’Art Biennale in Senegal. As part of the Miracle Workers Collective, he will curate Finnish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2019. Recent curatorial projects include: Whose Land have I Lit on Now? Contemplations on the Notions of Hostipitality, SAVVY Contemporary, 2018; We have Delivered Ourselves from the Tonal — of, with, towards, on Julius Eastman, SAVVY Contemporary, 2018; Every Time A Ear di Soun — a documenta 14 Radio Program, SAVVY Contemporary, 2017; The Conundrum of Imagination, Leopold Museum Vienna/ Wienerfestwochen, 2017; An Age of our Own Making in Holbæk, MCA Roskilde and Kunsthal Charlottenborg Copenhagen, 2016-17.
Photos by Benjamin Busch
Friday, August 24, 19:00
Intervention by Sara Pereira and Sofia Lomba
Intervention by Planting Concrete
Sofia Lomba and Sara Pereira bring together two perspectives on body and transformations, staging deformations, mutation and hybrids. Facing with, looking at, being looked at, showing, exploring and showing again, are processes that both works deal with. In their part they propose a classificatory approach. On one hand, Pereira introduces a collection of moments extracted from the forest of everyday life, made of notebooks that track the the fluidity of bodies and the precarious landscapes in which they are placed. On the other hand, Lomba proposes a series of drawings exercising botanical taxonomic systems that consciously confuse the reproductive organs of plants and humans.
TIER.space will also present the results of the Planting Concrete workshop lead by Miguel Prados Sánchez and Pablo Ramón Benitez. The outcomes of the workshop held on August 11 and 12 will serve as a new part of the space’s infrastructure, working on the topic of cultivation through the production of a series of planters (see description and bios for the workshop above).
Sofia Lomba moves between drawing, performance, video and music.
works around and with body identities and transformations.
collaborates with the collective Discoteca Flaming Star, incorporating since 2015 the character Ingrid on video and live.
also worked with João Alves (Thundera), performed with Wojciech Kosma as part of “The Family” and starred in Graw Böckler’s videos, among others. In 2016, founded AVA with Sara Pereira, a non-binary shamanic beat drone blade runner hypnotic lullaby lana keller improvisation band/performance/collective.
Sara Pereira works mainly with sound and drawing. Sara has been producing in collaborative-formats since 2005 in Oporto and 2010 Berlin – Projecto Gentileza, Marvellous Tone CDr-label, PISO collective and Discoteca Flaming Star. In 2014, completes the master program ‘Art in Context’ in Berlin, with a drawing research on collectives. Between 2010-2015 is co-founder-member of Altes Finanzamt projectroom and co-organized event series such as Time Lapse for experimental electro-acoustic music. Since 2016 together with Sofia Lomba and guests, is engaging in explorative musicalities under the name AVA.
Photos by Benjamin Busch
