Cultivation
Thursday, August 9, 19:00
Contorting Metaphysical Hijinks
Encounter with Amir George
Curated by GeoVanna Gonzalez
A short film program featuring the work of Amir George. The films navigate the complexities of life through narratives of power, love, joy, trauma and self. The program is an amalgamation of spiritual stories juxtaposing sound and image, fragmented vignettes that conjure the secret life of objects both found and collected that reside in a world within a world.
Amir George is a filmmaker and curator, based in Chicago. George is the founder of The Cinema Culture, a grassroots film programming organization, and co-founder, with curator Erin Christovale, of Black Radical Imagination, a touring experimental short film series. As an artist, George creates spiritual stories, juxtaposing sound and image into an experience of non-linear perception. George’s films have screened at institutions and film festivals including Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, Anthology Film Archives, Glasgow School of Art, The Museum of Contemporary Arts Los Angeles, Ann Arbor Film Festival, Trinidad and Tobago International Film Festival, BlackStar Film Festival, Afrikana Film Festival, and Chicago Underground Film Festival, among others.
GeoVanna Gonzalez is a Berlin / Miami-based artist and curator. She was born and raised in Los Angeles, California where she received her BFA at Otis College of Art and Design. Since 2014 she has collaborated with Coven Berlin, a queer feminist collective which produces exhibitions and events that focus on body politics, gender, labor, and art. As a curator, her most recent group exhibition is Augmented Sunrise Beneath The Skin, on view at Gr_und until August 12, 2018. She previously curated the international group show, A New Prescription For Insomnia at Horse and Pony Fine Arts in Berlin. In 2016, GeoVanna was the Project Manager for the Berlin Art Prize. She is also the Co-founder of READ WHAT YOU WANT!, a reading club established in 2014.
Video still by Amir George. Photos by Benjamin Busch.
Friday, July 20, 19:00-21:00
Ana Alenso:
green and yellow
boom and bust
Ana Alenso builds an allegorical cosmos showcasing the economic, social and ecological risks and disequilibria implicit in natural-resource extractive industries, with a particular focus on those pertaining to hydrocarbons. During the cultivation phase of TIER.space, she will create a sculptural intervention that combines plants, water and industrial elements. Objects such as an oil barrel and glass water bottles—familiar shell-like traces of destructive global consumerist traffic—are brought in conversation with living plants. Light, heat, growth, moisture, will transform the sculpture over the course of the following months.
The opening of this project will be accompanied by an installation of works: La enfermedad holandesa tropical and The future of oil, both of which are related to the speculative and metaphorical contents found within certain political economy phenomena, most specifically those associated with boom-and-bust cycles, the Dutch disease and the resource curse. Such phenomena occur predominantly in natural-resource-rich nations where corruption and violence become commonplace, paving the way for authoritarian regimes to rise to power. An example of this paradox manifests itself within the artist’s native country, Venezuela, which has the world’s second largest oil reserve, and yet is submerged in one of the worst humanitarian and economic crises of recent history.
More info: www.anaalenso.com
Photos by Benjamin Busch
Thursday, June 14, 19:00
Manuel Ángel Macía: On Pharmacoloniality
An instance of Manuel A. Macía‘s broader research programme on pharmacoloniality, this lecture-performance takes the form of a listening session on Latin American popular music. Turning to the aural spectrum, the session explores and elaborates Puerto Rican Acoustemologist Julio Ramos’ concept of pharmacoloniality. The concept denotes an inverse process of ‘colonisation’, whereby Latin American substances—sugar, tobacco, coffee, cocaine—intervene to stimulate European rationality and co-produce the rhythm of modern temporality.
The event obliquely addresses the propositions of TIER.space, tackling the psychopolitics of cultivation; healing and self-care through narcosis; and the coloniality of sense.