Cultivation
Saturday, March 19, 17:00-20:00
Zukünftiges Denkmal für den geduldeten Afghan*inenn
Organized by Rita de Matos
For the second year in a row, TIER will be hosting the Zukünftiges Denkmal für den geduldeten Afghan*inenn. This is a proposition of a citizen-driven memorial for how our western Governments, with their Border regime and War policies, have treated the citizens of what has been, for the last years, one of the unsafest countries for its inhabitants on Earth.
The National Flower of Afghanistan is the Tulip. Bodies we’ve come to see as familiar, blooming every Spring in our gardens. And so, last Autumn, through 4 planting actions and the hands of many volunteers, 1000 tulips were planted in a spot in Tiergarten. Come join us this Spring in spreading more red tulips across the city and performing this memorial into existence – as both an act of accountability and solidarity.
We will be hosting a tulip pickup at TIER on the 19th of March between 17:00 and 20:00, together with a screening of work by Frishteh Sadati and Lin Xin. The event stands in support of Simorgh_s.b.g e.V., whose school for women in Kabul remains with open doors.
Frishteh Sadati has lived in Germany for five years. Originally from Afghanistan, she started working in cinema and theater already in her home country. Through multiple experiences of migration, and being unable to complete her academic studies, she has developed her practice through a hands-on, experimental approach. She has often appeared on stage in Germany and has made two short films. Since 2017 she is the Director of the AWA Theater Ensemble, and in 2018 she founded Simorgh_s.b.g e.V. in Germany to support the education of women in Afghanistan.
Lin Xin is an essayist and film editor. Originally from China, she has lived in Berlin since 2017. She is enrolled in the department of Asian and African Studies at Humboldt University.
Rita de Matos, born in Lisbon in 1996, lives and works in Berlin. Her practice has developed from painting towards video and installations in public space, which is preceded by participatory processes. Her work has been shown in Paula Rego’s Casa das Histórias, Berlinische Galerie; Warsaw Salon Akademii; and UNFRAMED Festival in Bethanien, Berlin, KUNSTSAELE BERLIN, National Society for Fine Arts, Lisbon. She is currently studying at the HBK Braunschweig as part of the Breitz-Cortiñas class, through a 1-year grant from the Gulbenkian Foundation.
Online – Monday, December 7, 19:00
Luiza Prado de O. Martins: In Weaving Shared Soil
Hosting: Milena Bonilla
Watch here: https://youtu.be/umDdGMYUGxI
The second iteration of In Weaving Shared Soil – a project initiated this summer by artist Luiza Prado – will now move indoors at TIER, taking the shape of a living installation featuring plants and flowers associated with the works of the writers and poets Gloria Anzaldúa, Lorna Goodison, and Layli Long Soldier. By promoting this symbolic encounter between the works of women whose lives and works engage with the effects of patriarchal and colonial power structures, the garden aims to discuss issues of decolonization, care and affection, reproductive and domestic work, and community building in times of extreme political instability.
The installation will be activated through a series of conversations with invited guests; in December, Luiza will be joined by artist Milena Bonilla. The conversation will touch upon Milena’s work with plants that were collected by Rosa Luxemburg during her years in prison and whose particularities rely on their medicinal capacities in connection with mental health.
In Weaving Shared Soil will continue throughout the winter of 2020 and spring of 2021 with other guests. The project is being developed as part of the transdisciplinary project Somatic Charting, initiated by choreographer and curator Elena Basteri in collaboration with Lorenzo Sandoval and Benjamin Busch of TIER.
Milena Bonilla’s research-based practice is currently invested in epistemological colonialism and the different ways it affects organisms, language and social structures. By identifying patterns, gaps and silences within specific historical narratives, the artist draws tensions between predetermined political templates and uses of cognition. These conceptual and perceptual exercises appear weaved across the manifold manifestations of her work.
Recent venues where her work has been shown include: A Tale of a Tub, Rotterdam; Museo d’arte Contemporanea MACRO, Rome; Kadist Paris and San Francisco; Framer Framed, Amsterdam; The Mistake Room, Los Angeles; The Jewish Museum, New York; Claustro de San Agustín, Bogota; MHKA, Antwerp; Temporary Gallery, Cologne and Konsthall C, Stockholm among others.
Luiza Prado de O. Martins is an artist and researcher whose work engages with material and visual culture through the lenses of decolonial and queer theories. She is particularly interested in technologies and practices related to fertility and contraception, and their entanglements with colonial hierarchies of gender, race, ethnicity, class, and nationality. Her current artistic research project, titled “A Topography of Excesses,” examines the transmission of indigenous and folk knowledges about herbal reproductive medicine in Brazil as a decolonising practice of radical care.
Somatic Charting. The House is the Body is supported by Hauptstadtkulturfonds, with additional support from Between Bridges.
Online – Friday, November 20, 19:00
Luiza Prado de O. Martins: In Weaving Shared Soil
Hosting: Pati Sayuri
Watch here: https://youtu.be/8KVes6YPSww
The second iteration of “In Weaving Shared Soil” – a project initiated this summer by artist Luiza Prado – will now move indoors at TIER, taking the shape of a living installation featuring plants and flowers associated with the works of the writers and poets Gloria Anzaldúa, Lorna Goodison, and Layli Long Soldier. By promoting this symbolic encounter between the works of women whose lives and works engage with the effects of patriarchal and colonial power structures, the garden aims to discuss issues of decolonization, care and affection, reproductive and domestic work, and community building in times of extreme political instability.
The installation will be activated through a series of conversations with invited guests; in November, Luiza Prado will be joined by visual artist Pati Sayuri. The conversation will touch upon Sayuri’s work with indigo plants and dyes, as well as human and non-human practices of migration, rooting, and making.
“In Weaving Shared Soil” will continue throughout the winter of 2020 and spring of 2021 with other guests. Initiated by dance curator Elena Basteri, Lorenzo Sandoval and Benjamin Busch (The Institute for Endotic Research), the transdisciplinary project Somatic Charting. The House is the Body develops around the theme of somatics.
In this long-term project, The Institute for Endotic Research will become home to a small garden of plants associated with revolutionary anti-fascist movements. In promoting this encounter, the garden means to nurture discussions around matters of decolonisation, care and affect, reproductive labor and community-building in times of extreme uncertainty and instability.
Pati Sayuri is a Japanese Brazilian Artist based in Weimar (Germany) and São Paulo (Brazil). Her practice is situated at the intersection of the fields of arts, textiles and agriculture, through researches in Shibori and Japanese Indigo dyeing, both traditional Japanese handmade fabric-dyeing techniques. The core of Sayuri’s work is informed by her independent and intimate investigations into her own ancestral heritage, and an interest in processes of the making and developing of color compositions.
Luiza Prado de O. Martins is an artist and researcher whose work engages with material and visual culture through the lenses of decolonial and queer theories. She is particularly interested in technologies and practices related to fertility and contraception, and their entanglements with colonial hierarchies of gender, race, ethnicity, class, and nationality. Her current artistic research project, titled “A Topography of Excesses,” examines the transmission of indigenous and folk knowledges about herbal reproductive medicine in Brazil as a decolonising practice of radical care.
Somatic Charting. The House is the Body is supported by Hauptstadtkulturfonds, with additional support from Between Bridges.
Online – Thursday, July 2, 19:00
Berlin Launch of the Agropoetics Reader
With Benjamin Busch, Binta Diaw, Alex Ungprateeb Flynn, Ayesha Hameed, Arlette-Louise Ndakoze, Lorenzo Sandoval, Cleo Wächter and the Agropoetics team Elena Agudio, Lynhan Balatbat-Helbock, Marleen Boschen, and Onur Çimen
Use this link to join: https://meet.jit.si/
The AGROPOETICS READER unfolds as a collection of texts that informed, grounded, and nourished SAVVY Contemporary’s Soil Is an Inscribed Body: On Sovereignty and Agropoetics (2019), a yearlong exhibition and research project curated by Elena Agudio and Marleen Boschen. The project was conceived in the framework of The Invention of Science, SAVVY Contemporary’s 2019–2020 programme, devoted to questioning the presumed universality and objectivity of the scientific canon. In this context of reflections and cogitations about the epistemic violence perpetrated by the West against other forms of knowledges, Soil Is an Inscribed Body examined anti-colonial struggles of past and current land conflicts across the world in order to address the invasiveness of neo-agro-colonialism and its extractivist logics.
Invited to contribute to the exhibition and to present an artistic position, The Institute of Endotic Research (TIER) proposed to co-edit a publication together with the curators. The path was longer than expected, the diverted tracks were not few (including a pandemic), but here – for the use of readers and many other agropoets – you can find a materialisation of this collaboration. You can linger on a selection of sources that inspired this research and exhibition, retrace the discussions that appeared along the way of its realisation, and engage with the ideas that grounded and sprouted from the project. At the same time, interwoven, you also encounter texts and materials suggested by TIER in dialogue with the curators.
ACROPOETICS READER
WITH CONTRIBUTIONS BY Bengi Akbulut, Yemisi Aribisala, Marwa Arsanios, Luis Berríos-Negrón, Filipa César, Marisol de la Cadena, Ayesha Hameed, INLAND, Mijo Miquel, Asuncíon Molinos Gordo, Huying Ng, Maria Ptqk, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Bouba Touré, Mirellle and Jennifer in conversation with Alex Ungprateeb Flynn, Hervé Yamguen, and the editors Elena Agudio, Marleen Boschen, and Lorenzo Sandoval.
IN COLLABORATION WITH The Institute of Endotic Research (TIER)
EDITORS Elena Agudio, Marleen Boschen, and Lorenzo Sandoval
CO-EDITORS Onur Çimen and Cleo Wächter
DESIGN BY Cleo Wächter
THE READER CAN BE DOWNLOADED FOR FREE HERE:
https://www.savvy-
http://
Friday, February 28, 21:00–02:00, Madrid
Launch of the Agropoetics Reader + Independent Spaces United! Party
With Elena Agudio (SAVVY Contemporary) + Lorenzo Sandoval (TIER) + Fernando García Dory (INLAND) + Obrera Centro
The Agropoetics Reader unfolds as a collection of texts that informed, grounded, and nourished SAVVY Contemporary’s Soil Is an Inscribed Body: On Sovereignty and Agropoetics’ (August 30th–October 6th, 2019), an exhibition and research project curated by Elena Agudio and Marleen Boschen. The project was conceived in the framework of The Invention of Science, SAVVY Contemporary’s 2019–2020 programme, devoted to questioning the presumed universality and objectivity of the scientific canon. In this context of reflections and cogitations about the epistemic violence perpetrated by the West against other forms of knowledges, Soil Is an Inscribed Body examined anti-colonial struggles of past and current land conflicts across the world in order to address the invasiveness of neo-agro-colonialism and its extractivist logics.
Invited to contribute to the exhibition and to present an artistic position, The Institute of Endotic Research (TIER) proposed to edit a publication together with the curators. The path was longer than expected, the diverted tracks were not few, but here—for the use of readers and many other agropoets—you can find a materialisation of this collaboration. You can linger on a selection of sources that inspired this research and exhibition, retrace the discussions that appeared along the way of its realisation, and engage with the ideas that grounded and sprouted from the project. At the same time, interwoven, you also encounter texts and materials suggested by TIER in dialogue with the curators. The reader has contributions by: Elena Agudio & Marleen Boschen, Lorenzo Sandoval, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Filipa César, Bouba Touré, Mirelle/Jennifer/Alex Ungprateeb Flynn, Marwa Arsanios, Benji Akbulut, Marisol de la Cadena, Mijo Miquel, Ayesha Hameed, Hervé Yamguen, Maria Ptqk, Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, Luis Berríos-Negrón, Huying Ng, INLAND, Asuncíon Molinos Gordo and Yemisi Aribisala; and it is designed by Cleo Wächter.
The reader will be introduced by Elena Agudio (SAVVY Contemporary) + Lorenzo Sandoval (TIER) + Fernando García Dory (INLAND), with a screening by Barbara Marcel.
There will be some prints at the launch, but the publication is freely distributed as a PDF. Please find it here: http://
The launch of the reader will be followed by a party co-organized with Obrera Centro and INLAND, where Changorama DJ will play some good electrocumbia.
Address in Madrid:
CAR – Centro de Acercamiento a lo Rural
Calle Buen Gobernador, 4, 28027 Madrid, Spain
The Berlin launch will take place at TIER on March 30th, together with the launch of the publication Objects Before and After the Wall.
Saturday, January 25, 19:00
Radicalizing speculation: emancipatory imagination in an age of future fatigue
Hosted by Jorge Vega, with Edna Bonhomme and guest TBA
Octavia Butler called Science Fiction ‘the freest genre in existence,’ based on the author’s perceived freedom to define their own limits or boundaries, especially those that transcend the limits or boundaries of contemporary society. The power of speculative fiction lies in its capacity to conjure what Ursula K Le Guin identified as ‘realism of a large reality.’
More often than not, speculation is tied to the future. And the future as territory is subject to the same historical dynamics of colonization, exploitation, appropriation, co-optation, and commodification: at best to sell technoscientific solutionism and humanize market narratives, at worst to normalize – in its mass media incarnation – the state of emergency and its ideologies of self-alienation and collective nihilism.
When can speculation transcend its aesthetic and recreational consumption, into the realm of transformative change? Whose voices and which values set the metaphorical conditions that can guide our escape from Mark Fisher’s capitalist realism or realize Angela Davis’ vision of Critical Resistance? And how, both as an artistic and political practice, might speculative fiction become what adrienne maree brown called a “way to practice the future together”?
In this discussion circle we’ll invite researchers and practitioners rooted in speculative practices and future narratives to shed light on how they approach and understand Speculative Fiction, especially that framed by narratives from Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC), and generally responding to the need for alternative visions of futures built on transformative change, multi-species emancipation, planetary healing, and restorative justice.
This discussion circle is invited by Luiza Pado de O. Martins as part of her residency at TIER, In Weaving Shared Soil.
Edna Bonhomme is an activist, historian, writer, curator, and lecturer whose research interrogates disease, gender, surveillance, and embodiment. Edna earned a PhD in history of science at Princeton University with a dissertation that examined plagued bodies and spaces in North Africa and the Middle East. She is also co-host of the podcast Decolonization in Action. Her creative work is guided by diasporic futures, herbal healing, and bionic beings. Follow her on Twitter @jacobinoire
Jorge Vega. Born in Puerto Rico (1987). For the past 8 years has worked as an ethnographer and design researcher, in places like São Paulo, Lyon, Guangzhou, and Jeddah. The output varied, but most projects have involved understanding emerging systems and behaviors, often demystifying the technologies and cultural context underpinning them. Speculative fiction and narratives and symbols pertaining to the social imaginary of the future underpin his work.
He is currently focused on artistic and projects under ‘Peripheral Intuitions,’ an ongoing collaboration with artist Chaveli Sifre. They mix artistic interventions, immersive spaces, and education guided by the senses as a way to break from logic-driven oppression while championing cultures in flux and marginalized subjectivities as agents for collective change.
