Cultivation
Friday, February 22, 19:00
Re-Landscape
First in a series of interventions by Kanako Ishii
“Re-Landscape” is a long-term curtain project by Kanako Ishii that captures memories of views from windows that change as time goes on, through processes such as urban development, natural disaster, war damage or leaving one’s own place. In her ongoing intervention at The Institute for Endotic Research, Ishii’s curtains will be layered one after another in the storefront window to represent the four seasons. It will develop through a walk based on research about the neighborhood, especially regarding the history of the Bohemian refugees who fled to Rixdorf in the 18th century, and will eventually become a situated visual archive.
Kanako Ishii (b. 1984) is a Japanese visual artist born in Tokyo who spent her early childhood in Frankfurt am Main. Since 2012 she is based in Berlin. Ishii has held solo exhibitions at Künstlerhaus Bethanien (2018), Japanese-German Center Berlin (2015), Goethe-Institut Tokyo (2014), among others. http://kanakoishii.com
Photos by Benjamin Busch
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.
Monday, December 17, 19:00
Hands.on.matter: Fermentation and Kombucha feat. Alanna Lynch and Lena Ganswindt
Bimonthly program organized by Sandra Nicoline Nielsen and Tim van der Loo
PROGRAMME:
On the 17th of December we invite you to a anti-capitalistic celebration of Christmas by bringing our hands on diy production of fermentation and kombucha. The event consists of a presentation by the Berlin Art Prize 2018 awarded artist Alanna Lynch, who invites us into her fascinating universe of bio-materials. The talk is followed by a workshop facilitated by Tim van der Loo and Sandra Nielsen where we together make candy from scoby.
The event will also display an exposition by Irina Hefner showing the design process of a kombucha shirt, Lena Ganswindt showing samples of kombucha as a textile material in different colors and shapes, including some of the works by Alanna Lynch.
HANDS.ON.MATTER is an explorative collective of multidisciplinary creatives focusing on the matter of material by a questioning of resources, consumption, sustainability and culture through a bimonthly series of talks, workshops and expositions.
PHILOSOPHY: Hands.on.matter believes in taking a step back and rediscovering the kosmos of matter one material at the time, zooming in on compositions and zooming out on flows. The aspiration is to build new structures and (re)discover designs for a more sustainable and circular future. Hands.on.matter seeks to host thought provoking and desirable templates in the interdisciplinary field between design, art and architecture in the context of everyday life. Hereby Hands.on.matter invites local residents, entrepreneurs, artists and designers to participate.
ALLANA LYNCH: Alanna Lynch (b.1978) is a Canadian artist and researcher based in Berlin. She works with living organisms, biological materials and performance, examining the politics of affect and questions of agency. She explores the aesthetics of disgust and fear, with a focus on embodied knowledge and non-conscious forces. Working with difference, the visceral body and with ideas of contagion and care, she combines past studies in biology and psychology with experiences in activism. This shapes her perspectives, coming from art and science as well as from privileged and more marginal positions. She has exhibited and performed internationally and she is a founding member of the artist collective Scent Club Berlin. She was awarded the 2018 Berlin Art Prize.
LENA GANSWINDT: Lena Ganswindt is a textile design engineer with a focus on material design that is fully ecological and biodegradable. She graduated from Hochschule Niederrhein in Textile Design-Engineering in 2016 and is currently doing her master project in the course Textile and Surface Design at Kunsthochschule Weißensee. In her project she works with bacterial cellulose and experiences how designers co-perfom with living materials.
TIM VAN DER LOO: Tim van der Loo (co-founder of H.O.M) is an experimental multidisciplinary designer located in Berlin where he is working in between the fields of textile, furniture and illustration. He studied at the Design Academy Eindhoven were he graduated in 2016 and is currently doing a master in Textile and Surface design at Kunsthochschule Weißensee Berlin. His work engages with sustainable material, contrast, and tactility to generate playful objects
SANDRA NICOLINE NIELSEN: Sandra Nicoline Nielsen (co-founder of H.O.M) is a Techno-Anthropologist (Msc.) from Aalborg University, Denmark. She explores how socio-material practices supports transitions into new economies, and has in her Master’s thesis been working with social structures of Circular Economy in Berlin.
Photos by Benjamin Busch
Monday, October 15, 19:00
Hands.on.matter: Mycelium and mushrooms. feat. Jessica Langley
Bimonthly program organized by Sandra Nicoline Nielsen and Tim van der Loo
This event will take place at TIER.space and starts with the launch of the event series Hands.on.matter (Sandra Nicoline Nielsen, DK & Tim van der Loo, NL).
^^ Interdisciplinary artist and amateur mycologist Jessica Langley (Colorado, US) presents her work with mushrooms as material input in paper production and shares some of her insights into mycelial properties.
^^^ We will put our hands on mycelium by doing a workshop on how to easily grow our own mushroom culture from the mushrooms we buy in supermarkets. We will provide the needed material.
^^^^ Mushroom snacks will be served as part of the event.
Hands.on.matter is an explorative collective of multidisciplinary creatives focusing on the matter of material through a questioning of resources, consumption, sustainability and culture by generating bimonthly series of expositions, talks and workshops. Hands.on.matter believes in taking a step back and rediscovering the kosmos of matter. We will be building new structures by searching deeper into the essence of material, zooming in on compositions and zooming out on flows. We will discover how design for a more sustainable and circular future can be rediscovered. Hands.on.matter seeks to host thought provoking and desirable templates for design, art and architecture, in the context of everyday life by including local residents like neighbours, entrepreneurs, artists and designers. Every event will be composed of an assembly of expert presentations, hands-on workshops, design showcases as well as refreshments within the given topic of the month. On the 15th of October we will celebrate the decay followed by autumn’s coming by bringing our hands on mushrooms and mycelium. This will be the building block for discovering new materials, forms of assembly, autonomous cultivation and taste.
Jessica Langley (b. 1981, USA) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work considers how cultural symbols of nature and certain representations of landscape are experienced both directly and through the mediated and sublimated image. Using foraged materials, fresco, digital print, sculpture, and collage she is exploring abstraction as a form which dehumanizes place and investigating how the analogous dichotomy of abstraction/representation and the objective/subjective perspectives complicate this relationship. Langley has recently relocated to Colorado where she is the treasurer of the Pikes Peak Mycological Society. She has exhibited her work internationally in such cities as Belfast, Berlin, Mexico City, New York, Reykjavík, and Santa Cruz, as well as being featured in the Pittsburgh Biennial and the Queens International. She has been an artist-in-residence in numerous programs including Skaftfell Center of Visual Art in Iceland, Askeaton Contemporary Art in Ireland, the SPACES World Artist Program in Cleveland, and the Digital Painting Atelier at OCAD-U in Toronto. She was a recipient of the J. William Fulbright Scholarship and the Leifur Eiriksson Foundation Scholarship for research in Iceland, and she earned her MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2008. She is an amateur mycologist, and her artwork and writings have been published in the New York Mycological Society Newsletter, New American Paintings, NPR, Hyperallergic, and Temporary Art Review. She is co-founder of Ortega y Gasset Projects, an artist-run-gallery in Brooklyn, NY; The Stephen and George Laundry Line, a project space in Queens, NY; and The Yard, a site for public art in Colorado Springs.
Tim van der Loo (b. 1991) is an experimental multi disciplinary designer located in Berlin where he is working in between the fields of textile, furniture and illustration. He studied at the Design Academy Eindhoven were he graduated in 2016 and is currently doing a master in Textile and Surface design at Kunsthochschule Weißensee Berlin. His work engages with sustainable material, contrast, and tactility to generate playful objects.
Sandra Nicoline Nielsen (b. 1988) is a Techno-Anthropologist (Msc.) from Aalborg University, Denmark. She explores how socio-material practices supports transitions into new economies, and has in her Master’s thesis been working with social structures of Circular Economy here in Berlin.
Photos by Benjamin Busch
Thursday, September 27, 19:00
Luis Berríos-Negrón
Anarchive: memory #02 ‘A Crème de Menthe, a Rusty Nail. Why Intransitive?’
…will be an open reenactment and collective planting. I have asked performance artist Callum Harper to reenact with me a dialogue between video artist Paul Ryan and anthropologist Gregory Bateson. In doing so, we will then review with you the moment where Ryan and Bateson come to discuss Ryan’s notion of ‘intransitivity’, one I feel presents significant possibilities for ‘art as research’. We will set the enactment around a table I will be installing with Lorenzo and Ben (co-directors of TIER), using some existing materials and props from previous exhibitions by Lorenzo and TIER. The ‘intransitive table’ will become another social pedestal where, during the reenactment, we will plant seeds and cutlings of medicinal plants (datura, rosemary, brugmansia) harvested in the ANARCHIVE and place them unto the table. The table will therefore become a sort of ‘wardian case’ for new plants to be be incubated and grown at TIER to be later transplanted back to the ANARCHIVE in Denmark by caravan in the summer of 2019.
In regards to ANARCHIVE… Jacques Derrida states in Archive Fever that — “If repetition is thus inscribed at the heart of the future to come, one must also import here, in the same stroke, the death drive, the violence of forgetting, superrepression (suppression and repression), the anarchive, in short, the possibility of putting to death the very thing, whatever its name, which carries the law in its tradition: the archon of the archive, the table, what carries the table and who carries the table, the subjectile, the substrate, and the subject of the law.”
I take forth this dimension of memory proposed by Derrida to be one of a series of works dedicated to the deposition of ‘greenhouse’, as display of natural history, and as superstructure to secure food and survival. Following works such as Earthscore Specularium (2015), Looming Greenhouse (2014), and Immediate Archæologies Two (2008), ANARCHIVE takes the form of a medicinal garden that I am growing in collaboration with my partner, curator Maria Kamilla Larsen and our daughter Freia Pilar from Aug.2018 to Oct.2019 in Denmark. ANARCHIVE, is about questioning the future of natural history. It is about forgetting and remembering global warming as spectral and physical trauma. It is not about dissociating an innovative future of ‘greenhouse’, but about remediating the superreppressed colonial memory within the greenhouse: as traumatic experiences we never lived nor desired; strengthening biodiversity; and resisting the counter-intuitive counter-intelligence that is now amongst us. ANARCHIVE is the final component of my doctoral work at Konstfack / KTH titled ‘Breathtaking Greenhouse Parastructures’ to be disputed and published in the fall of 2019.
Luis Berríos-Negrón (Puerto Rico, 1971*) explores unforeseen forms and forces of global warming through ‘social pedestals’. Most recent exhibitions include ‘Impasse Finesse Neverness’ (Museum of Ethnography and Archeology of Bahia, 2017), ‘Collapsed Greenhouse’ at ‘Undisciplinary Learning’ (District, Berlin, 2016) and ‘Earthscore Specularium’ (Färgfabriken Konsthal, Stockholm, 2015). Previous exhibitions include the 3rd Biennial of Art of Bahia (2014), the 10th São Paulo Biennial for Architecture (2013), as core-collaborator with Paul Ryan at Documenta13 (2012), and “Future Archive” at the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (2012). He is the founder of the Anxious Prop art collective and the Paramodular environmental design group. He is doctoral candidate and tutor at Konstfack and KTH Royal Institute of Technology, holds a Bachelor of Fine Art from Parsons New School, and a Master of Architecture from M.I.T. Berríos-Negrón lives and works between Copenhagen, Stockholm, and Berlin.
Callum Harper (Australia, 1993) works with notions around LGBT culture, and combines discourse around reality and online life to create dialogue around the disparate differences of communication IRL vs URL. Primarily working with text, video and performance, Harper travels to varied destinations of contrasting political values toward LGBT citizens, and internalises locals opinions and his personal experiences on acceptance and daily life. The amalgamation of this collected experiential information and research data informs the medium and personal responses to experiences within differing contexts. Harper holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Monash University in Caulfield, Australia, and a Master of Fine Arts from Konstfack in Stockholm, Sweden. http://callumharper.squarespace.com/
‘OUTCOMES of Anarchive: memory #01’ Herlev DK (2018)
‘Like Yeah…’ by Callum Harper (2015)
‘Immediate Archaeologies Two’ Dresden DE (2008)
‘Tear do Terreiro / Looming Greenhouse’ Salvador da Bahia BRA (2014)
‘Earthscore Specularium’ Färgfabriken Stockholm SE (2015)
‘Collapsed Greenhouse’ District Berlin DE (2016)
‘Impasse Finesse Neverness’ Salvador da Bahia BRA (2017)
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
