Cultivation

Part of the project Aurora: A Platform on Ecology, Interdependence and Mutual Aid
Workshop: Friday November 4, 11:00-15:00, and Saturday November 5, 14:00-18:00

For this workshop we propose an exploration of  semi-industrial areas representative of an era and their interconnection with other territories, inquiring on the operative dynamics that create new landscapes and ruins. Through a series of collaborative entanglements we propose a visit to an industrial complex located around the area of Neukölln/Treptow (exact location to be disclosed), where we will conduct a series of observations and material collections that will be further unpacked during a second session at TIER. Investigating how this location connects to other latitudes and problematics, either by the people who inhabit it or by the materials, resources or non-human forms that have found a way to adapt inside this late capitalism environment.

We propose to work with the idea of satellites as remote sensing tools but also as communication systems capable of receiving and retransmitting signals. How can we embrace this technology to reimagine the colliding of multiple perspectives on our immediate environment? How can these tools be reappropriated and embedded with presence and materiality? Which devices and strategies can we develop to visualize the entanglements of local specificities with transnational narratives and, therefore, the plurality of the lives and the places we inhabit?

We are looking for collective, scientific, speculative and artistic tools and approaches to situate ourselves in a territory, to share,collect and transform data into new forms of knowledge. We will use aeroespacial images to unveil the trans planetarian narrative we are all embedded in. Furthermore we want to create a collective installation designed for the TIER window space with the material gathered in physical form and also using digital interventions. Through this experience, we want to explore the poetic and political potential that can emerge from the exploration of spaces from multiple perspectives, tools and sensitivities, and its posterior transformation into new critical meanings and materialities.

Limited places for the workshop are available. Registration is required at auroraplatformtier@gmail.com

The Venezuelan-born artist Ana Alenso creates sculptures and video-installations made of materials sourced from mining and oil industries. The resulting poetic, but darkly dystopian objects and images, embody our dependence on non-renewable resources. She is currently a grant holder of the Berlin Artistic Research Grant Programme. Recent exhibitions include: Geneva Biennale: Sculpture Garden in Switzerland, Oil, Beauty and Horror in the Petrol Age at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg in Germany and Mad Rush in Nkrumah Volli-ni in Ghana.

Andrea Acosta
is a Colombian artist investigating notions of nature and landscape and their interconnection with urban or industrial environments and materialities. In her process-based practice she combines field research with drawing, sculpture, installation and photography, reflecting on the constant transformation of matter, gaze and territories. Her work has been shown internationally in Europe, Latin America and Asia.
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Aurora. A Platform on Ecology, Interdependence and Mutual Aid
June–November 2022

A project prepared by The Institute for Endotic Research with MELT (Ren Loren Britton & Isabel Paehr), Linda Zhang & Dr. Biko Mandela Gray, Nnenna Onuoha, Shoufay Derz, mordo (Aline Baiana, Camila de Caux & Eric Macedo), Ana Alenso & Andrea Acosta, and Romuald Krężel.

For Nzeyimana this is umwaku: a piece of information, some news, or a comment, actual or false, that is troubling to the mind. The notion of umwaku is of an animistic origin. What makes such comment stirring is not so much its unsolicited delivery, but its pre-emptive, anticipatory resonance to a possibly feared, relatively undesired image of the oneself.

—Christian Nyampeta

Life did not take over the world by combat,

but by networking.

—Lynn Margulis

“Aurora. A platform on ecology, interdependence and mutual aid” is an interdisciplinary project initiated by TIER. The project is presented through workshops, exhibitions, podcasts and a reader publication. It departs from the notion of mutual aid, as a way to understand connections between ecology and interdependence. Aurora, which stands for dawn, is among the most common symbols for hope. The project goes beyond criticism, proposing actionable strategies for imagining better futures.

Zoologist and political scientist Piotr Kropotkin used the term mutual aid starting in 1880 to describe a model in which nature, in many observed cases, functions through collaborative entanglements. This perspective was confronting the one based on competition, proposed by the Neo-Darwinists, who sought a model of nature that justified the exploitative and competitive logic of capitalism from a scientific point of view. This capitalist model based on perpetual extraction is arguably one of the main reasons for the climate collapse.

Instead, the mutual aid model looked for a system that understands how all entities are entangled, and how species developed through collaboration in many cases. Scientist Lynn Margulis expanded on this model analyzing how symbiosis is at the basis of all life on Earth, and how this process is based on interdependence. Can the notion of mutual aid (understood both from biology and from politics) offer the tools to face the climate crisis and the developing collapse? By placing focus on interdependence, could it be possible to anticipate strategies against the climate collapse, learning from historical processes inscribed in the colonial program? What role does machine learning play?

The Institute for Endotic Research (TIER) seeks to combine these views and methodologies to produce a platform together with other institutions and collaborators, who work in a critical position between art, activism and science: how can we think and work within ecology from a decolonial perspective, and with the logic of mutual aid? Which kind of speculative fictions are possible to foster the imagination of alternative, more sustainable ways of coexistence among humans, nonhuman lifeforms and nonliving entities based on interdependence?

The platform “Aurora will be presented from June to November 2022. Every month, there will be a new artistic installment at TIER, working as a spatial setting for hosting a workshop led by the invited contributors.

All events are free of charge. Limited places for the workshops are available. Registration for the workshops is required at auroraplatformtier@gmail.com

Design by Lilia Di Bella/Archive Appendix.
Aurora. A platform on ecology, interdependence and mutual aid is supported by:



Part of the project Aurora: A Platform on Ecology, Interdependence and Mutual Aid
One-to-one encounters (30 min each):
Thursday October 13: 14:00, 15:00, 16:00, 17:00, 18:00
Friday October 14: 14:00, 15:00, 16:00, 17:00, 18:00
Saturday October 15: 14:00, 15:00, 16:00, 17:00, 18:00

One-to-one encounter in English of 30 min each. Please book a time slot in advance here: https://koalendar.com/e/microclimate. We kindly ask you to take a COVID-19 test before attending your time slot or to arrive 5-10 minutes before for on-site testing. Antigen self-tests will be provided.

My main reason for postponing the end of the world is so that we’ve always got time for one more story. If we can make time for that, then we’ll be forever putting off the world’s demise. – “Ideas to postpone the end of the world” Ailton Krenak
Microclimate by & with Romuald Krężel. I invite you to enter the microclimate and spend half an hour in it with me. It looks like a house – warm and cozy. Plants inhabit it. There will be tea, a comfy chair and a story I would like to offer to you. We will talk about global changes from a local and personal perspective. We will listen to fern, we will look at the lost futures and we will breathe. We can also gossip if you like to. This half an hour format will be something between an encounter, a performance and a workshop.Microclimate is part of a long-term artistic research project initiated in 2020 by Romuald Krężel as part of the “Wimmel Research-Fellowship” – a joint project between Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Robert Bosch Centre for Research and Advanced Engineering in Renningen and Wimmelforschung. The research has grown through artistic collaborations with René Alejandro Huari Mateus and Carolina Mendonça.

If you have a special question or request please contact us at: microclimateintier@gmail.com

Romuald Krężel  – born in Poland, Berlin-based choreographer and performer. He received his MA in Choreography and Performance at the Institute for Applied Theatre Studies of Justus Liebig University Gießen/Germany. Romuald’s work is nourished by expanded choreographic practices that incorporate visual and performative elements. The resulting movement-based performances, site-specific installations, participatory projects, videos, and other hybrid formats, explore themes such as labor, resistance, class struggle, environmental catastrophes and the potential exchange between humans and more-than-humans. Romuald’s works have been presented in HAU Hebbel am Ufer in Berlin, HELLERAU – European Art Center in Dresden; Kunstverein and Künstlerhaus Mousonturm in Frankfurt; Kaserne in Basel, among others. romualdkrezel.com

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Aurora. A Platform on Ecology, Interdependence and Mutual Aid
June–November 2022

A project prepared by The Institute for Endotic Research with MELT (Ren Loren Britton & Isabel Paehr), Linda Zhang & Dr. Biko Mandela Gray, Nnenna Onuoha, Shoufay Derz, mordo (Aline Baiana, Camila de Caux & Eric Macedo), Ana Alenso & Andrea Acosta, and Romuald Krężel.

For Nzeyimana this is umwaku: a piece of information, some news, or a comment, actual or false, that is troubling to the mind. The notion of umwaku is of an animistic origin. What makes such comment stirring is not so much its unsolicited delivery, but its pre-emptive, anticipatory resonance to a possibly feared, relatively undesired image of the oneself.

—Christian Nyampeta

Life did not take over the world by combat,

but by networking.

—Lynn Margulis

“Aurora. A platform on ecology, interdependence and mutual aid” is an interdisciplinary project initiated by TIER. The project is presented through workshops, exhibitions, podcasts and a reader publication. It departs from the notion of mutual aid, as a way to understand connections between ecology and interdependence. Aurora, which stands for dawn, is among the most common symbols for hope. The project goes beyond criticism, proposing actionable strategies for imagining better futures.

Zoologist and political scientist Piotr Kropotkin used the term mutual aid starting in 1880 to describe a model in which nature, in many observed cases, functions through collaborative entanglements. This perspective was confronting the one based on competition, proposed by the Neo-Darwinists, who sought a model of nature that justified the exploitative and competitive logic of capitalism from a scientific point of view. This capitalist model based on perpetual extraction is arguably one of the main reasons for the climate collapse.

Instead, the mutual aid model looked for a system that understands how all entities are entangled, and how species developed through collaboration in many cases. Scientist Lynn Margulis expanded on this model analyzing how symbiosis is at the basis of all life on Earth, and how this process is based on interdependence. Can the notion of mutual aid (understood both from biology and from politics) offer the tools to face the climate crisis and the developing collapse? By placing focus on interdependence, could it be possible to anticipate strategies against the climate collapse, learning from historical processes inscribed in the colonial program? What role does machine learning play?

The Institute for Endotic Research (TIER) seeks to combine these views and methodologies to produce a platform together with other institutions and collaborators, who work in a critical position between art, activism and science: how can we think and work within ecology from a decolonial perspective, and with the logic of mutual aid? Which kind of speculative fictions are possible to foster the imagination of alternative, more sustainable ways of coexistence among humans, nonhuman lifeforms and nonliving entities based on interdependence?

The platform “Aurora will be presented from June to November 2022. Every month, there will be a new artistic installment at TIER, working as a spatial setting for hosting a workshop led by the invited contributors.

All events are free of charge. Limited places for the workshops are available. Registration for the workshops is required at auroraplatformtier@gmail.com

Design by Lilia Di Bella/Archive Appendix.
Aurora. A platform on ecology, interdependence and mutual aid is supported by:



mordo (Aline Baiana, Camila de Caux & Eric Macedo):

Merographic relations: steps to an ecology of the partial

Part of the project Aurora: A Platform on Ecology, Interdependence and Mutual Aid

Workshop: Friday, September 23, 17:00-20:00, and Saturday, September 24,

14:00-18:00

 

What is a relation? Could alternative ways of thinking relationality help us deal with the current ecological crises? In this workshop, we invite participants to a collective unlearning of relations taken for granted in our everyday thoughts. Engaging in talks, reflexive exercises and working together in the construction of material structures, we will look for the “displacement effects” enabled by changing the description of our own decomposition into open partialities.

 

Merography – a concept developed in the work of British social anthropologist and feminist Marilyn Strathern – could be defined as the study of relations between parts without wholes: anything can be seen as a part of something else. A perspectival change does more than change the ‘part’ we are to see; new connections bring new ontologies. Starting from a contrast between “plural” and “post-plural” worlds, we will discuss themes such as kinship between human and non-human beings, political belongings and action, and the paradoxical roles of all-encompassing ideas such as Nature and Gaia in contemporary discussions regarding the Anthropocene.

 

We recommend coming to both days of the workshop; however you can also join only one. Limited places for the workshop are available. Registration is required at auroraplatformtier@gmail.com

 

mordo is an artistic collective composed by:

 

Aline Baiana (she/her/hers) is an Afro-Pindoramic artist, born in 1985 in the territory today known as Brazil.
 Her research addresses Afro-Brazilian and Native-Americans worlding practices and ontological conflicts between the Global North and South. She participated in several exhibitions in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Belo Horizonte, and her work has been featured at the 11h Berlin Biennale and Sharjah Biennial 14. She is currently a grant holder of the Berlin Artistic Research Grant Programme.

 

Camila de Caux (she/her/hers; they/them/their) is a writer and ethnologist. Their interests, formed in the confluence between literary aesthetics and anthropological questioning, revolve around notions of multiverse and corporeality, and their reverberations in political practices. Their essays, poems, and short stories have appeared in Ruído Manifesto, mallarmagens, Revista DR, and elsewhere. They are co-editor of the online publication aperfectstorm.net.

 

Eric Macedo (he/him/his) is a social anthropologist, working on themes related to colonialism, ethnocentrism, anthropocentrism, and alterity relations. His PhD thesis describes the historical process of colonization in the region around the city of Altamira, in the Brazilian Amazon, and changes introduced by the Belo Monte Hydroelectric dam. He is currently a researcher at the Institute of Speculative and Critical Inquiry, investigating images of extraterrestrial beings in science fiction narratives, with a particular interest in crossings between multispecies and decolonial perspectives.

 

 

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Aurora. A Platform on Ecology, Interdependence and Mutual Aid
June–November 2022
A project assembled by The Institute for Endotic Research with MELT (Ren Loren Britton & Isabel Paehr), Linda Zhang & Dr. Biko Mandela Gray, Nnenna Onuoha, Shoufay Derz, mordo (Aline Baiana, Camila de Caux & Eric Macedo), Ana Alenso & Andrea Acosta, and Romuald Krężel.

For Nzeyimana this is umwaku: a piece of information, some news, or a comment, actual or false, that is troubling to the mind. The notion of umwaku is of an animistic origin. What makes such comment stirring is not so much its unsolicited delivery, but its pre-emptive, anticipatory resonance to a possibly feared, relatively undesired image of the oneself.
—Christian Nyampeta
Life did not take over the world by combat,
but by networking.
—Lynn Margulis

 

“Aurora. A Platform on Ecology, Interdependence and Mutual Aid” is an interdisciplinary project initiated by TIER. It departs from the notion of mutual aid, as a way to understand connections between ecology and interdependence. Aurora, which stands for dawn, is among the most common symbols for hope. The project goes beyond criticism, proposing actionable strategies for imagining better futures.

Zoologist and political scientist Piotr Kropotkin used the term mutual aid starting in 1880 to describe a model in which nature, in many observed cases, functions through collaborative entanglements. This perspective was confronting the one based on competition, proposed by the Neo-Darwinists, who sought a model of nature that justified the exploitative and competitive logic of capitalism from a scientific point of view. This capitalist model based on perpetual extraction is arguably one of the main reasons for the climate collapse.

Instead, the mutual aid model looked for a system that understands how all entities are entangled, and how species developed through collaboration in many cases. Scientist Lynn Margulis expanded on this model analyzing how symbiosis is at the basis of all life on Earth, and how this process is based on interdependence. Can the notion of mutual aid (understood both from biology and from politics) offer the tools to face the climate crisis and the developing collapse? By placing focus on interdependence, could it be possible to anticipate strategies against the climate collapse, learning from historical processes inscribed in the colonial program? What role does machine learning play?

The Institute for Endotic Research (TIER) seeks to combine these views and methodologies to produce a platform together with other institutions and collaborators, who work in a critical position between art, activism and science: how can we think and work within ecology from a decolonial perspective, and with the logic of mutual aid? Which kind of speculative fictions are possible to foster the imagination of alternative, more sustainable ways of coexistence among humans, nonhuman lifeforms and nonliving entities based on interdependence?

The platform “Aurora will be presented from June to November 2022. Every month, there will be a new artistic installment at TIER, working as a spatial setting for hosting a workshop led by the invited contributors.

All events are free of charge. Limited places for the workshops are available. Registration for the workshops is required at auroraplatformtier@gmail.com

MELT (Ren Loren Britton & Isabel Paehr): Conspiring Timelines: Shimmering Temporalities
Workshop: Thursday, June 2 & Friday, June 3, 16:00-20:00
Spatial Setting: June 4–18, Th, Fr & Sa 14:00-18:00

Linda Zhang and Dr. Biko Mandela Gray: Phenomenology of the Road: Tracing the Materiality of Loss
3D Scanning Workshop: Friday, July 15, 16:00-20:00 & Saturday, July 16, 14:00-18:00

Shoufay Derz: Towards the Unknown: Rituals of Alienship
Workshop: Tuesday, September 6, Wednesday, September 7 & Thursday, September 8

Nnenna Onuoha: Apocalypse Where: Scenes from the Ends of the World
Workshop: Tuesday, September 13 & Wednesday, September 14

mordo (Aline Baiana, Camila de Caux & Eric Macedo): Merographic Relations: Steps to an Ecology of the Partial
Workshop: Friday, September 23 & Saturday, September 24

Romuald Krężel: Microclimate
Workshop: October (dates tbc)

Ana Alenso and Andrea Acosta: We are Satellites, Experimental Observations in Semi-Industrial Territories.
Workshop: November (dates tbc)

 

Design by Lilia Di Bella/Archive Appendix

Aurora. A platform on ecology, interdependence and mutual aid is supported by:

 



The Bob Dorsey Project

 

Participants: Artur Albrecht, Stefan Aue, Ann Cotten, Clémentine Deliss, Christian Filips, Lama El Khatib, Lee Plested, Vincent Sauer, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Alper Turan, and Scott Watson

Dates:          Various Dates from September 15 to October 2, 2022

Locations:   The Institute for Endotic Research, Donaustr. 84, 12043 Berlin

Kasper Theatre Rixdorf, Böhmische Str. 46, 12055 Berlin

 

Presented by The Institute for Endotic Research and Kasper Theatre Rixdorf, and organized by Lee Plested and Alper Turan,  The Bob Dorsey Project is a unique investigative program on the artist Bob Dorsey (1932-1994). Initiated to frame the production of this little-known African American painter, the project conceptualizes the organization of the artist’s estate, resurfaced now nearly three decades after Dorsey’s death. Life partner of Fassbinder actor Volker Spengler, Dorsey moved to Germany in the 1960s and produced extensive visual material. As of yet dates and titles for these works remain obscure to history.

 

Structured as a pre-encounter with this enigmatic artist and his legacy, this program consists of lectures, readings, and workshops intended to both contemplate methods for approaching his body of work and to make initial steps in engaging with this estate responsively. The Bob Dorsey Project is aiming to collectivize the knowledge production around artist Bob Dorsey while testing an open methodology to engage responsibly with the legacy of artists whose identities were historically marginalized and whose works, so far, have existed largely in the dark.

 

Dorsey died of AIDS in 1994, and the accumulation of his paintings & drawings were left untouched in their apartment for years until finally stored in the shipping container inherited by Artur Albrecht, the adopted son of Bob Dorsey & Volker Spengler, who brought this massive estate to his puppet theatre, Kasper Theatre Rixdorf, last year. Formally expressionist abstractions composed through hermetic mark-making, Bob Dorsey’s unexhibited and uninventoried works do not immediately provide meta-information on his practice, nor help viewers to any ready interpretation. His early instruction at The Art Students League in New York, under George Gross, led to an informed understanding of line and proportion which underlies these briskly handled contortions where forms often emerge from the tangles of suggestive pigment. Except for the scattered bits of biographocal information (i.e. his nationality and race, his relationship with Spengler and sexual orientation, and his premature death due to AIDS), Bob’s life narrative remains essentially as abstract as his works, full of expressive gaps.

 

Can we see Bob through his paintings? Can we find his story there, and what is the value of examining his life’s work? What tools are useful to tell his story? Can we see his racialized and sexualized body in this art? Can we read the sheer obsessive volume of the discrete production, in tandem with the fragility of his entropic materials, as charging these works with the anxiety of the AIDS crisis? And will investigating his life reveal the power of these paintings?

 

To create a space for contemplation before action, the project is conceived as a speculative opportunity to reflect on curatorial approaches and examine myriad modes of engaging with the unexamined works of an ‘unknown’ artist. Through the example of Bob Dorsey’s estate, we may be able to ponder upon questions intrinsic to the curatorial process. How do you approach an artwork before there is specific meta-data and potentially eschew traditional modes of evaluation? How could one contextualize how to engage with it in an expansive, essentially social, way? Does an artwork really speak for itself? How is it possible to look at an artist’s whole career as a disrupted but unified whole? What are the ethics and politics of engaging with the artworks of an artist who showed no real interest in exhibiting his works and may have been intentionally circumnavigating the art market?

 

On September 15, the project will host a panel discussion with Clémentine Deliss, Lama Khatib and Stefan Aue, and Scott Watson. Moderated by Lee Plested, the panel will consist of presentations by these curators and researchers whose practices seek out answers for organizing queer, metabolic, or weird archives to ask how are specific materialities from the past (re)connected to the present? Through comparative, speculative, and fictional modes of meaning-making, these researchers will posit terms and means which may further inform paths for encountering and organizing the estate. The event will be presented in English.

 

Independent researchers have been engaged to do the actual work of ordering the estate and will draw terms and concepts from this initial discussion. Developed in close conversation with the organizers, from September 22 to 25, they will actualize the accounting and initial organization of the estate, taking on the marathon task of sketching an inventory of Bob Dorsey’s works and papers. Their discussions and processes will be documented and gathered. Over the afternoon of September 25, and conducted on the last day of the inventory process, we will have an open house at the Kasper Theatre Rixdorf for people who knew or knew of Bob to collect oral histories. These documents will become a part of the estate and may facilitate future scholarship on the artist.

 

September, 29, TIER will host a conversation with curator and writer Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung and Bob Dorsey’s estate-owner and puppeteer Artur Albrecht. These two close friends will discuss narratives that emerge around the investigation of Bob Dorsey’s estate through sharing the personal memories of Artur Albrecht and reflecting on contemporary issues of representation. By presenting this discussion publicly, we seek to ask who has the access to memories and how do they form narratives? Who determines what will become shared memory and how does this process work? This event will be in German.

— THURS 29TH SEPT PUBLIC CONVERSATION CANCELLED —Due to unforeseen circumstances, the conversation scheduled for Thursday September 29 between Artur Albrecht and Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung has been cancelled. We are working to arrange a future date and will keep you posted.

 

Amongst Bob Dorsey’s drawings, paintings and photos were found a small notebook, actually a “Schulheft” (exercise book), which has been transcribed by literary critic Vincent Sauer. On the evening of September 30, acclaimed poets and translators Ann Cotten and Christian Filips will read passages from texts found in the estate, including an extended monologue by Dorsey from this notebook, addressed at Spengler, reflecting on their relationship over the years and accusing Volker of a lack of empathy. They will also read from Volker Spengler’s diary as a young ambitious student of acting and short-time sailor, as well as his notes from the later hospital decades, ordering “Gin Tonic durch die Nasensonde” (gin tonic via nasogastric intubation). This event will be in both German and English.

 

October 1 and 2, Rixdorf Theatre will host a collective speculation workshop on Bob Dorsey, his works and his personal history together with a composed group of contemporary artists whose practices are informed by fiction and speculation. Initiated by curator Alper Turan, this open-ended workshop entails focused time spent collectively with works of Bob to generate alternative narratives in relation to larger societal conditions, to fill the gaps of Dorsey’s biography with fictional stories, and potentially formulate new artworks that are born out of or in response to Bob’s works, created individually or within a group. Interested artists are welcome to participate! Please apply until September 18, with a short introduction of your practice to alper2ran@gmail.com.

 

Through a series of public gatherings around and within Bob Dorsey’s enormous body of works, The Bob Dorsey Project will collect some critical perspectives on Dorsey’s life experience and bring the work into conversation with cultural practitioners and artists who will guide these initial encounters with the Dorsey corpus. Through speculating on the politicization of this body of art production, we seek to understand the modes through which we encounter artists, their processes and products, and the potential of their creativity for social transformation. The documentation of this research project will be developed into an artist-driven, digital testament by Berlin-based Andreas Villareal, who will be an active viewer of the entire encounter.

 

Full schedule

 

  • Thursday, September 15, 19:00 @ TIER

Don’t Tell a Soul: Approaches to an Estate

Panel discussion with Clémentine Deliss, Lama El Khatib and Stefan Aue, and Scott Watson; Moderated by Lee Plested – In English

 

  •  Friday, September 22 – Sunday September 25, 12:00 to 17:00, @ Kasper Theatre Rixdorf

Counting the Estate, Making an Inventory.

 

  • Sunday, September 25, 12:00 to 17:00, @ Kasper Theatre Rixdorf

Collecting Stories 

 

  • Thursday, September 29, 19:00 @TIER

Conversation with Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung and Arthur Albrecht – In German

 

  • Friday, September 30, 19:00 @ Kasper Theatre Rixdorf

Reading from Dorsey and Spengler texts by Ann Cotten and Christian Filips, presented by Vincent Sauer – In English/German

 

  • Saturday, Oct 1 – Sunday, October 2, 12:00 to 17:00, @Kasper Theatre Rixdorf

Workshop: Fictionalizing Bob, Collectivizing a Legacy 

Initiated by Alper Turan. Open to artists & practitioners whose work involves fictional world-making and/or collective speculation. – In English

Limited to 6 participants, please send a short introduction of your practice to        alper2ran@gmail.com by September 18th.

 

Presenters

 

Artur Albrecht is a theatre and film actor, director and theatre teacher. He has run K&K Volk Art and been owner operator of Kasper Theatre Rixdorf since 2007. He has also developed many programs for children’s theatre, including RIXDORF SAGA PART 1 and 2.

 

Stefan Aue is project leader at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin. He is

currently realizing the collaborative program The Whole Life. An Archive Project (2018-

2022). He holds a masters degree from the Cultures of the Curatorial program, Leipzig, and studied sociology, psychology, and media studies. He is co-editor of ArteFakte: Reflections and Practices of Scientific-Artistic Encounters (Transcript, 2014) and Dictionary of Now (Matthes & Seitz, 2019).

 

Ann Cotten is a writer and translator from Vienna, Austria. Recently she has translated books by J. Wenderoth, I. Waidner, R. Waldrop, L. Russell, A. Green. Cotten’s English language work is published by Broken Dimanche Press (I, Coleoptile, 2013; Lather In Heaven, 2016). Her most recent book in German is the SF prose collection “Lyophilia” (Suhrkamp 2019). She is currently working on her PhD “Aesthetics of Misuseability”.

 

Clémentine Deliss works across the borders of contemporary art, curatorial practice, and critical anthropology. She is Global Humanities Professor in History of Art (2021-2022) at the University of Cambridge and Associate Curator at KW Institute for Contemporary Art Berlin, where she is currently developing the “Metabolic Museum-University” with a peer group that includes BLESS, Matthias Bruhn, Iman Issa, Augustin Maurs, Tom McCarthy, Henrike Naumann, Margareta von Oswald, Manuel Raeder, El Hadj Abdoulaye Sène, Krista Belle Stewart, and Luke Willis Thompson.

 

Christian Filips lives as a poet, director, and music dramatist in Berlin. Between 2000 and 2007 he studied philosophy, musicology, and literature in Brussels and Vienna. In 2001 he received Austrian Radio’s Rimbaud Prize. Filips has been the program and archive director of the Sing-Akademie in Berlin since 2006. His works are characterized by an expanded notion of poetry that also integrates musical theater and social sculpture, as exemplified by his productions for the Volksbühne Berlin and the Berliner Ensemble, amongst others. His texts have primar­ily been published by the Swiss publisher Urs Engeler, with whom he has jointly published the series “roughbooks” for contemporary poetry since 2010, the most recent being Heiße Fusionen: Beta-Album; Gedichte und Analysen zur poetischen Ökonomie, 2007–2018 (2018).

 

Lama El Khatib writes, draws, and makes objects. Her practice examines spatial relations along/as aesthetic, political, and cultural lines. Since 2018, she works at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin.

 

Lee Plested is from Vancouver and based in Berlin, and has made contemporary exhibitions of art in a variety of historical and institutional contexts. His writing has appeared in Artforum, Canadian Art, and Art21. He is currently working on a project to animate documents of conceptual art from the archive of the Western Front, Vancouver, for their 50th anniversary next year.

 

Vincent Sauer works as an editor for the journal „Sprache im technischen Zeitalter“ (based at Literarisches Colloquium Berlin) and at the publishing house Schlaufen-Verlag. He regularly contributes articles for the newspaper „neues deutschland“ and is currently translating poems of the francophone egyptian surrealist Georges Henein.

 

Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung is an independent curator, author and biotechnologist. He is founder and artistic director of SAVVY Contemporary in Berlin and is the artistic director of Sonsbeek20–24, a quadrennial contemporary art exhibition in Arnhem, the Netherlands. He is professor in the Spatial Strategies MA program at the Weissensee Academy of Art in Berlin. Curator of Dark’Art  Biennial 2018 in Dakar, Senegal. He is the Artistic Director of Rencontres de Bamako (2021-22), Mali. From 2023 he will take on the role of Director at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin.

 

Alper Turan is a curator and researcher based in Istanbul and Berlin. His current research and curatorial practice focus on queer strategies, methodologies, and languages, which include but are not limited to abstraction, collective speculation, appropriation, and anonymity. His recent curatorial projects include Smoothing (lines into circles) (A Tale Of A Tub, Rotterdam, 2022); How does the body take shape under pressure? (Queer Museum Vienna, 2022). He is a Ph.D. candidate at the College of Fine Arts in Hamburg (HFBK) and works as an assistant curator at Protocinema.

 

Scott Watson is former Head (2012–2018) and Professor (2003–2022) in the Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory and Director/Curator of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery (1989–2021) at the University of British Columbia. Distinctions include the Hnatyshyn Foundation Award for Curatorial Excellence in Contemporary Art (2010), Alvin Balkind Award for Creative Curatorship in British Columbia Arts (2008), and the UBC Dorothy Somerset Award for Performance Development in the Visual and Performing Arts (2005). In addition to his extensive writing on art, Watson’s fiction includes Platonic Love, Three Tales (1981) published by New Star Press and was anthologized in Writers Who Love Too Much: New Narrative 1977-1997, edited by Dodie Bellamy and Kevin Killian.

 

Andres Villarreal is a Swedish-Colombian artist, filmmaker and writer. Andres received their MFA from the Berlin University of the Arts and has previously studied Gender Studies and Sociology and has attended the Whitney ISP in New York City. Andres’ practice interrogates how discourses emerge and are cultivated within society; explores the relationship between representation and the production of reality; and deals with questions relating to time, narration, and memory. Their work is often situated in the borderland between fact and fiction.

 

Eine Aussage von Bob Dorsey (english below)

 

Der Grund, dass ich 1932 in Philedephia/Pensylvania, USA geboren wurde – ist: um zu malen.

 

Mein erstes Meisterwerk war ein Frachter – diesen Frachter portraitierte ich als ein Detail innerhalb eines monumentalen Aquarelles, das man mystischerweisen den “Philadelphia Navy Yard” nannte. Dort arbeitete von Zeit zu Zeit mein Vater, wohingegen meine Mutter 6 tage in der Woche als Sekretarin für einen entsprechenden Lohn schuftete: für den geringsten – den Hunderlohn.

 

Also mein restes Meisterwerk war jener verrostete Frachter. Meine erste interessierte Kritikerin – meine Mutter – fragte mich angesichts dieses Bildes, was dieser markwürdige senkrechte Strich, der sich seitwärts aus dem Schiff ins Wasser, dargestellt als eine Linie von sich aneinanderreihenden Suppentassen – ergross, bedeuten solle? Meine Antwort was: Das Schiff muss mal: Da knallte sie mir eine.

 

As war mein erstes Meisterwerk, fast als stünde Pavlow dahinter.

Meine Mutter, sie war somit auch meine erste Leherin – korrigierte einmal die perspektivische Haltung des Fusses meines überdimensionalen Nicolaus. Und vor dieser nostalgischen Autorität wurde ich bis heute seitdem nicht mehr heimgesucht. George Gross, mein Lehrer an der “Art students League” in New York machte schon mal unangenehmere Bemerkungen über meine Zeichnungen – Don’t tell a soul.

 

 

A statement by Bob Dorsey

 

The reason that I was born in 1932 in Philedephia/Pensylvania, USA – is: to paint.

 

My first masterpiece was a freighter – this freighter I portrayed as a detail within a monumental watercolor, mystically called the “Philadelphia Navy Yard”. There my father worked from time to time, whereas my mother toiled 6 days a week as a secretary for a corresponding wage: the lowest – the dog’s wage.

 

So my remaining masterpiece was that rusted freighter. My first interested critic – my mother – asked me, in view of this picture, what was the meaning of this striking vertical line that extended sideways from the ship into the water, represented as a line of soup cups lined up next to each other? My answer was: The ship has to go. There she slapped me. As was my first masterpiece, almost as if Pavlow was behind it.

My mother – she was thus also my first teacher – once corrected the perspective posture of the foot of my oversized Nicolaus. And before this nostalgic authority I have not been haunted since. George Gross, my teacher at the “Art Students League” in New York made more unpleasant remarks about my drawings – Don’t tell a soul.

 

 



Nnenna Onuoha:

Apocalypse Where: Scenes from the Ends of the World

Part of the project Aurora: A Platform on Ecology, Interdependence and Mutual Aid

Workshop: Tuesday September 13, and Wednesday, September 14, 16:00-20:00

 

In part one of the workshop, we will review apocalyptic imaginaries in disaster movies, novels, songs etc. Tracing how and where popular culture envisions the ends of the world, we will examine possible geographical empathy gaps in who matters, and whose survival is tied to the fate of humanity. In part two, we will turn to the present: outside the world of fiction, where might some of these crises already be unfolding and what is our perception of and action towards them?

We recommend coming to both days of the workshop; Limited places for the workshop are available. Registration is required at auroraplatformtier@gmail.com

Nnenna Onuoha is a Ghanaian-Nigerian researcher, filmmaker and artist based in Berlin, Germany. Her films and videos centre Afrodiasporic voices to explore monumental silences surrounding the histories and afterlives of colonialism across West Africa, Europe and the US, asking: how do we remember, which pasts do we choose to perform and why? Nnenna is currently a doctoral researcher in Media Anthropology at Harvard University and Global History at the University of Potsdam.

***************

 

Aurora. A Platform on Ecology, Interdependence and Mutual Aid
June–November 2022
A project assembled by The Institute for Endotic Research with MELT (Ren Loren Britton & Isabel Paehr), Linda Zhang & Dr. Biko Mandela Gray, Nnenna Onuoha, Shoufay Derz, mordo (Aline Baiana, Camila de Caux & Eric Macedo), Ana Alenso & Andrea Acosta, and Romuald Krężel.

For Nzeyimana this is umwaku: a piece of information, some news, or a comment, actual or false, that is troubling to the mind. The notion of umwaku is of an animistic origin. What makes such comment stirring is not so much its unsolicited delivery, but its pre-emptive, anticipatory resonance to a possibly feared, relatively undesired image of the oneself.
—Christian Nyampeta
Life did not take over the world by combat,
but by networking.
—Lynn Margulis

 

“Aurora. A Platform on Ecology, Interdependence and Mutual Aid” is an interdisciplinary project initiated by TIER. It departs from the notion of mutual aid, as a way to understand connections between ecology and interdependence. Aurora, which stands for dawn, is among the most common symbols for hope. The project goes beyond criticism, proposing actionable strategies for imagining better futures.

Zoologist and political scientist Piotr Kropotkin used the term mutual aid starting in 1880 to describe a model in which nature, in many observed cases, functions through collaborative entanglements. This perspective was confronting the one based on competition, proposed by the Neo-Darwinists, who sought a model of nature that justified the exploitative and competitive logic of capitalism from a scientific point of view. This capitalist model based on perpetual extraction is arguably one of the main reasons for the climate collapse.

Instead, the mutual aid model looked for a system that understands how all entities are entangled, and how species developed through collaboration in many cases. Scientist Lynn Margulis expanded on this model analyzing how symbiosis is at the basis of all life on Earth, and how this process is based on interdependence. Can the notion of mutual aid (understood both from biology and from politics) offer the tools to face the climate crisis and the developing collapse? By placing focus on interdependence, could it be possible to anticipate strategies against the climate collapse, learning from historical processes inscribed in the colonial program? What role does machine learning play?

The Institute for Endotic Research (TIER) seeks to combine these views and methodologies to produce a platform together with other institutions and collaborators, who work in a critical position between art, activism and science: how can we think and work within ecology from a decolonial perspective, and with the logic of mutual aid? Which kind of speculative fictions are possible to foster the imagination of alternative, more sustainable ways of coexistence among humans, nonhuman lifeforms and nonliving entities based on interdependence?

The platform “Aurora will be presented from June to November 2022. Every month, there will be a new artistic installment at TIER, working as a spatial setting for hosting a workshop led by the invited contributors.

All events are free of charge. Limited places for the workshops are available. Registration for the workshops is required at auroraplatformtier@gmail.com

MELT (Ren Loren Britton & Isabel Paehr): Conspiring Timelines: Shimmering Temporalities
Workshop: Thursday, June 2 & Friday, June 3, 16:00-20:00
Spatial Setting: June 4–18, Th, Fr & Sa 14:00-18:00

Linda Zhang and Dr. Biko Mandela Gray: Phenomenology of the Road: Tracing the Materiality of Loss
3D Scanning Workshop: Friday, July 15, 16:00-20:00 & Saturday, July 16, 14:00-18:00

Shoufay Derz: Towards the Unknown: Rituals of Alienship
Workshop: Tuesday, September 6, Wednesday, September 7 & Thursday, September 8

Nnenna Onuoha: Apocalypse Where: Scenes from the Ends of the World
Workshop: Tuesday, September 13 & Wednesday, September 14

mordo (Aline Baiana, Camila de Caux & Eric Macedo): Merographic Relations: Steps to an Ecology of the Partial
Workshop: Friday, September 23 & Saturday, September 24

Romuald Krężel: Microclimate
Workshop: October (dates tbc)

Ana Alenso and Andrea Acosta: We are Satellites, Experimental Observations in Semi-Industrial Territories.
Workshop: November (dates tbc)

 

Design by Lilia Di Bella/Archive Appendix

Aurora. A platform on ecology, interdependence and mutual aid is supported by:

 



Shoufay Derz: Towards the Unknown: Rituals of Alienship

Part of the project Aurora: A Platform on Ecology, Interdependence and Mutual Aid

Wednesday, September 7 and Thursday, September 8, 15:00 – 19:00

Location: Meeting at TIER, followed by an excursion to Volkspark Hasenheide. The exact location pin will be shared with registered participants.

Participants are invited to take part in the relational project “Ritual of Eels, loving the alien. This workshop invites acquaintances and strangers to become green creatures in the midst of various parks, gardens and uncultivated green spaces. The project is an ongoing collaboration and social gathering of green creatures, of which there are more than 100 so far. They first appeared in performances at Gulgadya Muru, the grass tree trail at Manly Dam Reserve in Sydney. From the sacred waters of the Gayamaygal people to the parks of Berlin and the lava beds of Lanzarote, these aliens/eels continue to gravitate to verdant realms and watery depths. For the artist, the figure of the alien, conjured in the work’s title and her sitters’ green faces, stands as a metaphor for transformation and our shared unknowns. The potentials of disappearance and transformation are shared, mirrored between the landscape and green faces. Engaging in a conversation about belonging, alienation and the possibilities of kinship with others and planet earth, her latest work proposes rituals for the end of the world so that together we can imagine other possibilities.

This workshop will involve green face painting, performing on camera, conversing and eating. Please wear black clothing and optionally bring any food you’d like to share during the picnic. QTBIPOC communities are strongly encouraged to join.

Limited places for the workshop are available. Registration is required at auroraplatformtier@gmail.com

Shoufay Derz is an Australian artist, researcher and educator of Taiwanese and German descent currently living in Berlin. Derz’s work explores the limits and possibilities of language and the ambiguities we confront when attempting to visually articulate the edges of the known. Deeply engaged with poetic potentiality her projects attempt to connect the silences in language with holes in social, structural and geological landscapes to contemplate the voids in time and also the uncertainties of future landscapes. http://www.shoufay.com/

 

**********************

 

Aurora. A Platform on Ecology, Interdependence and Mutual Aid
June–November 2022
A project assembled by The Institute for Endotic Research with MELT (Ren Loren Britton & Isabel Paehr), Linda Zhang & Dr. Biko Mandela Gray, Nnenna Onuoha, Shoufay Derz, mordo (Aline Baiana, Camila de Caux & Eric Macedo), Ana Alenso & Andrea Acosta, and Romuald Krężel.

For Nzeyimana this is umwaku: a piece of information, some news, or a comment, actual or false, that is troubling to the mind. The notion of umwaku is of an animistic origin. What makes such comment stirring is not so much its unsolicited delivery, but its pre-emptive, anticipatory resonance to a possibly feared, relatively undesired image of the oneself.
—Christian Nyampeta
Life did not take over the world by combat,
but by networking.
—Lynn Margulis

 

“Aurora. A Platform on Ecology, Interdependence and Mutual Aid” is an interdisciplinary project initiated by TIER. It departs from the notion of mutual aid, as a way to understand connections between ecology and interdependence. Aurora, which stands for dawn, is among the most common symbols for hope. The project goes beyond criticism, proposing actionable strategies for imagining better futures.

Zoologist and political scientist Piotr Kropotkin used the term mutual aid starting in 1880 to describe a model in which nature, in many observed cases, functions through collaborative entanglements. This perspective was confronting the one based on competition, proposed by the Neo-Darwinists, who sought a model of nature that justified the exploitative and competitive logic of capitalism from a scientific point of view. This capitalist model based on perpetual extraction is arguably one of the main reasons for the climate collapse.

Instead, the mutual aid model looked for a system that understands how all entities are entangled, and how species developed through collaboration in many cases. Scientist Lynn Margulis expanded on this model analyzing how symbiosis is at the basis of all life on Earth, and how this process is based on interdependence. Can the notion of mutual aid (understood both from biology and from politics) offer the tools to face the climate crisis and the developing collapse? By placing focus on interdependence, could it be possible to anticipate strategies against the climate collapse, learning from historical processes inscribed in the colonial program? What role does machine learning play?

The Institute for Endotic Research (TIER) seeks to combine these views and methodologies to produce a platform together with other institutions and collaborators, who work in a critical position between art, activism and science: how can we think and work within ecology from a decolonial perspective, and with the logic of mutual aid? Which kind of speculative fictions are possible to foster the imagination of alternative, more sustainable ways of coexistence among humans, nonhuman lifeforms and nonliving entities based on interdependence?

The platform “Aurora will be presented from June to November 2022. Every month, there will be a new artistic installment at TIER, working as a spatial setting for hosting a workshop led by the invited contributors.

All events are free of charge. Limited places for the workshops are available. Registration for the workshops is required at auroraplatformtier@gmail.com

MELT (Ren Loren Britton & Isabel Paehr): Conspiring Timelines: Shimmering Temporalities
Workshop: Thursday, June 2 & Friday, June 3, 16:00-20:00
Spatial Setting: June 4–18, Th, Fr & Sa 14:00-18:00

Linda Zhang and Dr. Biko Mandela Gray: Phenomenology of the Road: Tracing the Materiality of Loss
3D Scanning Workshop: Friday, July 15, 16:00-20:00 & Saturday, July 16, 14:00-18:00

Shoufay Derz: Towards the Unknown: Rituals of Alienship
Workshop: Tuesday, September 6, Wednesday, September 7 & Thursday, September 8

Nnenna Onuoha: Apocalypse Where: Scenes from the Ends of the World
Workshop: Tuesday, September 13 & Wednesday, September 14

mordo (Aline Baiana, Camila de Caux & Eric Macedo): Merographic Relations: Steps to an Ecology of the Partial
Workshop: Friday, September 23 & Saturday, September 24

Romuald Krężel: Microclimate
Workshop: October (dates tbc)

Ana Alenso and Andrea Acosta: We are Satellites, Experimental Observations in Semi-Industrial Territories.
Workshop: November (dates tbc)

 

Design by Lilia Di Bella/Archive Appendix

Aurora. A platform on ecology, interdependence and mutual aid is supported by:

 

 



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