Domestics

Online from Saturday, October 1, 19:00 Berlin/CET
TIER.cast Episode 3: Maintenance! Domestics as Institutional Becomings
Listen at http://theinstituteforendoticresearch.org/wp/projects-current/tier-cast/

This episode of TIER.cast was recorded at the physical launch event of our publication, The Endotic Reader N.2: Maintenance! Domestics as Institutional Becomings at Hopscotch Reading Room in Berlin. It features live readings by Elena Agudio, Renée Akitelek Mboya and Pol Merchan from their contributions to the publication. We hope you enjoy tuning into this special evening in celebration of the publication, and we invite you to download it for free on our website or pick up a physical copy at TIER.

TIER.cast is a long-term series of sonic encounters creating a platform for interdisciplinary intimate, process rather than goal-oriented conversations and listening sessions beginning in February 2021. In each session, the guests are invited to discuss and present with voices and sounds their past and current projects, intellectual and personal inspirations, works-in-progress, work/production methodologies, and practices.

The aim is also to address and challenge the capitalistically and individualistically driven practices of knowledge and art production, as well as the myth of the isolated genius. The interdisciplinary encounter itself is an exercise of collective knowledge-based and practical exchange, and becomes an act of collective production itself.

The sonic and non-visual format is envisioned as a soft intrusion that infiltrates into the domestic spheres, forces self-imagination for the lacking esthetics and focuses on audio imprint of the conversations/speakers. It is a journey through voices, music, noise, sound and silence.

Sound production & mix by Sara Pereira



Tuesday, September 14, 19:30
Print Launch of TERN.2: Maintenance! Domestics as Institutional Becomings at Hopscotch Reading Room
Location: Kurfürstenstraße 14/Haus B, 10785 Berlin

With readings from: Elena Agudio, Renée Akitelek Mboya and Pol Merchan.

We are glad to present for the first time printed copies of the print and digital publication The Endotic Reader N.2: Maintenance! Domestics as Institutional Becomings at Hopscotch Reading Room in Berlin. Titled after our last year’s public program at The Institute for Endotic Research, TERN.2 opens doors and windows to the myriad ideas that underpin it.

With TERN.2, we turn to the domestic sphere, which today has become an especially important site of production. In recent years we have seen the domestic sphere, often in relation to care, work as a model for institutions, which also always depend on reproductive labor. Indeed the domestic model has many problematic aspects, such as exploitation and nonrecognition of labor and rights. It is perhaps in the tension between its conflicts and possibilities where the power of the domestic lies. The domestic is also where possible paths for the reorganization of institutions can be uncovered.

Download the PDF for free here: http://theinstituteforendoticresearch.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Maintenance-Domestics-as-Institutional-Becomings-2021.pdf

With contributions from: Elena Agudio, Renée Akitelek Mboya, Benjamin Busch & Lorenzo Sandoval, Edna Bonhomme, Binna Choi, Stephanie Comilang, GeoVanna Gonzalez & Najja Moon, Helen Hester, Elaine W. Ho, Juliet Jacques, Fermín Jiménez Landa, Maria Lind, Sofia Lomba, Pol Merchan, la Sala and Daniel Tremolada. Design by Donají Marcial. Edited by Benjamin Busch & Lorenzo Sandoval.



Exhibition:
Junko Maruyama:
Diving in through the Wall
September 4 – October 2, Th, Fr & Sa 14:00-18:00 (except Sep 4)
Commencement: Saturday, September 4, 19:00-21:00

Body moves. Weather shifts. I go with the flow and leave the traces.
I made soap from used oil collected from various restaurants, the leftover which once supported our lives. I drew a picture outside with it. The rain washed it away. I drew again. With the process, I tried to capture the dialogs between material and environment, functionality and non-functionality, permanence and impermanence.

Some scientists say if human creates a life-form, it would begin with a piece of soap.  I made creatures with the soap I made. They are sculpture-like, and yet drawing-like, holding various traces—of gaining forms, of evolution that is yet to see. I call them “Manonamanamono”. The name suggests something raw and ephemeral, created or emerged at the time at the place. Between the traces, I see a dialog of organic and inorganic matter.

I move with soap and leave the traces.

Born in Japan, Junko Maruyama currently lives and works in Berlin. Having studied sculpture in the City University of New York, Hunter Collage, the artist works across various medias such as drawing, sculpture, installation, performance and animation. Her works examines the notions of circulation and rebirth, often recycled materials, in particular fluid and variable materials such as ice cream, plastics and soap. By circulating the different states of matters of materials, the artist explores the existence and non-existence of the borders in between.
She has shown her works in various exhibitions such as Alive and (Gallery Paris, Yokohama) 2021; A Story Begins from Flowers and the Sea (Kodomo Museum, Chiba) 2020; Bunkamura Gallery Selection (Bunkamura Gallery, Tokyo) 2019; Re: (F1969, Busan) 2018; Echigo Tsumari Art Triennale (Hoshitouge, Niigata) 2015, 2006; 5 rooms (Kanagawa prefectural Hall Gallery, Kanagawa) 2016, among many. Her notable awards and achievements include Free Art Free Semi-Grand Prix, Charitable Trust Oki Memorial Artist Grant, Taipei/Yokohama Artist Exchange Program Judge Special Award, Asahi Shimbun Cultural Foundation Grant, and Arts and Culture grant from Nomura Foundation.
She is currently working at Künstlerhaus Bethanien for international residency program, with the support by Overseas Study Program for Artists Fellow, Agency for Cultural Affairs, Government of Japan.

Titled Maintenance! Domestics as Institutional Becomings, acknowledging the work of Mierle Laderman Ukeles, our series of solo exhibitions and online events for the next months will address the domestic from different vantage points related to institution-making. We are preparing a reader on the topic that will be launched soon as well. During this new program of exhibitions, the previous interventions will remain at TIER. In that way we’ll keep working on the space as an editorial device to be renegotiated, and an ecology of artworks, underlining its conception as an inner garden based on principles of cultivation.

Photos by Benjamin Busch



Exhibition:
Sofia Lomba: Bondage Bodies
Thursday, June 17 – Saturday, August 21
Commencement: Thursday, June 17, 16:00-21:00 (RSVP by clicking here)

Covid notice: For June 17, RSVP here. For later dates, please register for a visit on a Thursday, Friday or Saturday, 14:00-18:00 by emailing us at theinstituteforendoticresearch@gmail.com. Please remember to bring an FFP2 mask.

 

bondage
/ˈbɒndɪdʒ/
noun

  1. the state of being a slave
  2. sexual practice that involves the tying up or restraining of one partner
  3. when someone belongs to someone else
  4. when someone or something controls your life
  5. the state of being under the control of a force or influence or abstract power play
  6. the state of being under the control of another person play

 

Sofia Lomba’s Bondage Bodies installation is a body-based research anchored in gender, identity, body transformation and the domestic.

“There are not two sexes, but a multiplicity of genetic, hormonal, chromosomal, genital, sexual, and sensual configurations. There is no empirical truth to male or female gender beyond an assemblage of normative cultural fictions” Paul B. Preciado “Testo Junkie”.

As a reaction to the violence witnessed in the world, early twentieth century modernist poet Yi Sang wrote “I believe that humans should be plants”, while Wohlleben (2016) considered the forest a social network similar to a human family in the way its trees communicate, share nutrients and support each other.

Luce Irigaray’s philosophical reflections on plant being as not self-centred, in an effort to deflect and rethink the anthropocentrism of western societies, also reverberate strongly with Yeong-hye’s (The Vegetarian by Han Kang) efforts to become a plant as a strategy to resist violence and patriarchal control.

Unfolding these thoughts, Sofia Lomba created a new series of drawings. Spongy bodies inside and outside of orifices. Bodies giving birth to themselves or others and having no clear differentiations between protuberances and invaginations. Bondage bodies, hugging bodies, bodies turning inside out.

 

Sofia Lomba (b.1984, Porto) lives in Berlin. Her artistic practice forms itself through drawing and performance. In a trance of repetition, she creates series of drawings around, inside and about body, producing images that are placed somewhere between flower studies and genitalia, between plants and flesh. Blurring autobiography and art, having her own body as the protagonist, she explores gender and identity issues, body transformations, pregnancy, sexuality and its representations.The way of presenting these artworks is always underlining the fragility of their subject matters. Further in their aesthetic, they would recall taxonomies of some kind. Her drawings have been shown at Bauhaus ReUse Berlin, General Public in Exile at Meinblau and TIER.space. She has been collaborating with Discoteca Flaming Star, performing live at District Berlin, FFT Düsseldorf, Ausland Berlin, Savvy Contemporary, Teatro del Barrio Madrid, Arthur Boskamp Foundation and in the film Ingrid (2003 – so far) presented in Friends with Books at Hamburger Bahnhof. Lomba has also collaborated with Graw Böckler for CTM Festival in Berghain and Wojciech Kosma as part of The Family at Galerie Kamm. She will be a fellow in residence in the Akademie Schloss Solitude in 2022.

Titled Maintenance! Domestics as Institutional Becomings, acknowledging the work of Mierle Laderman Ukeles, our series of solo exhibitions and online events for the next months will address the domestic from different vantage points related to institution-making. We are preparing a reader on the topic that will be launched soon as well. During this new program of exhibitions, the previous interventions will remain at TIER. In that way we’ll keep working on the space as an editorial device to be renegotiated, and an ecology of artworks, underlining its conception as an inner garden based on principles of cultivation.

Photos by Benjamin Busch



Pol Merchan: Pirate Boys, featuring Del LaGrace Volcano
Commencement: Monday, April 19, 16:00-21:00
Conclusion: Saturday, June 5, 16:00-21:00 (RSVP by clicking here)
Monday, April 19 – Saturday, June 5. Thu, Fri and Sat 14:00-18:00 (appointment required)

Covid notice: Please register for a visit on a Thursday, Friday or Saturday, 14:00-18:00 by emailing us at theinstituteforendoticresearch@gmail.com. For June 5, RSVP here. Bring a negative rapid test (not older than 24 hours) or proof of complete vaccination (minimum 14 days since final dose), and an FFP2 mask. If you cannot come to the space, write us to request a private video link.

For those not in Berlin, we will host Pirate Boys at http://tier.space on the day of the commencement (April 19), and it will be possible to request a private viewing by writing us at theinstituteforendoticresearch@gmail.com.

Kathy Acker’s writing, and a seminal portrait of her taken by intersex photographer Del LaGrace Volcano, provide a lens through which to explore trans subjectivity and the queering of cinema. Pol Merchan’s hybrid doc fluidly moves from the documentation of the punk era to a more performative exploration of gender.

The portrait entitled Twirl of the punk writer Kathy Acker (New York, 1947 – Tijuana, 1997) is the starting point for a conversation with the photographer Del LaGrace Volcano (California, 1957) about gender identity and body transformation. Kathy Acker’s work was associated with the anti-formalist movement and with the punk movement of the 70s and 80s. Her novels were constructed using the cut-up technique, pastiche, and appropriation, and were inhabited by outlaws, rebels, and pirates. The film uses experts of the novel “Pussy, King of the Pirates” published in 1996 by Grove Press.

Pirate Boys is a hybrid film shot with Super 8 and with a cast formed by transgender, intersex, and genderqueer subjects. The film is set in the Tuntenhaus (House of Faggots), a Berlin squad first occupied in 1981, inhabited by queer men. Searching for queer traces in the form and content of Kathy Acker’s writing, this film aims to present new ways of experiencing the plasticity of the literary and the filmic body. The physical presence of the celluloid is exposed in all its fragility, inviting the viewers to look at the film with a tactile eye.

Pol Merchan (Lleida, Spain, 1980) is an artist, filmmaker, and film programmer for the Xposed Queer Film Festival Berlin. His audio-visual work explores visual semantics and film practices, deconstructing techniques of conventional filmmaking. Merchan uses the camera as an extension of his eye and body, making intimate works that emphasize the body as its own language. Working across film, photography, and text, his art practice addresses transgenerational connections and the archiving of oral history. His film Pirate Boys was supported by the Xposed Queer Short Film Fund and nominated for the LICHTER Art Award, at Lichter Filmfest Frankfurt International. Merchan’s work has been exhibited internationally in art institutions and at numerous Film Festivals such as Museo Reina Sofía Madrid, Centre de Cultura Contemporànea de Barcelona, Centre d’Art La Panera, Azkuna Zentroa, Berlinische Galerie, Institute of Contemporary Arts London, Anthology Film Archives NY, Los Angeles Filmforum, Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival, Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, Ann Arbor Film Festival, and Festival Internacional de Cine Guanajuato. His work is distributed by Hamaca Media & Video Art and is part of the collection of Leandre Cristòfol Foundation and Museu d’Art Jaume Morera.

The international photographer Del LaGrace Volcano has over a thirty-year period made a consistent subject of gender variance, sexual connectedness, and body mutations. Self named as a ‘part-time gender terrorist,’ and intentional mutation, Volcano’s photography has staged the constructedness of gender and the rich diversity of body morphologies available to those who are really willing to look, in ways that have resonated deeply with—and moreover that have often preceded, influenced and crucially brought together—emerging lesbian, queer, trans and intersex theories. Volcano is exceptional as a photographer and thinker in being concerned to show gender/sex as both highly performative and intimately embodied. Herm’s work has thus spoken across nature/nurture debates in trans, intersex and queer studies. In herm’s own gender journey, gender is not so much transformed as transmogrified as I have argued elsewhere, that is, metamorphosed constantly, its strangeness repeatedly elucidated. More than any other artist, Volcano’s oeuvre has presented queer, trans and intersex people as subjects rather than objects, since images are created through looks of identification, affiliation and desire exchanged between the sitter and the photographer. Volcano has approached photography knowingly as a kind of mirror—a hard plastic surface for identification and love. —Dr. Jay Prosser

Titled Maintenance! Domestics as Institutional Becomings, acknowledging the work of Mierle Laderman Ukeles, our series of solo exhibitions and online events for the next months will address the domestic from different vantage points related to institution-making. We are preparing a reader on the topic that will be launched soon as well. During this new program of exhibitions, the previous interventions will remain at TIER. In that way we’ll keep working on the space as an editorial device to be renegotiated, and an ecology of artworks, underlining its conception as an inner garden based on principles of cultivation.

Due to covid restrictions, please register for a visit in advance for a Thursday, Friday or Saturday, 14:00-18:00 by emailing us at theinstituteforendoticresearch@gmail.com.

RSVP for the conclusion on June 5 by clicking here

Photos by Benjamin Busch



Saturday, April 17, 14:00-18:00
Conclusion: Stephanie Comilang: Yesterday in the Years 1886 & 2017

Due to covid restrictions, please register for a visit in advance for a Thursday, Friday or Saturday, 14:00-18:00 by emailing us at theinstituteforendoticresearch@gmail.com. To reserve a time to visit the exhibition closing on April 17, click here. We ask you to bring the results of an antigen test from the same day (you can check all the multiple free testing places here). Please remember to bring an FFP2 mask, too.

Stephanie Comilang’s exhibition at The Institute for Endotic Research takes a hybrid format, with the film Yesterday in the Years 1886 & 2017 being screened online at http://TIER.space for the duration, accompanied by a series of online encounters, and a video installation in the physical space of TIER.

Comilang’s two-channel video installation follows two protagonists whose histories interlace with Filipino nationalism and Spanish colonial rule. Yesterday, In The Years 1886 and 2017 is a two-channel video projection installation. The two protagonists José Rizal and Lourdes Lareza Müller occupy a channel each; projected adjacent to one another, they inhabit the same space while remaining distinctly separate. José Rizal (1861-1896) was a Filipino nationalist, considered a national hero for his advocacy and thinking that led to the Philippine revolution against Spanish rule. While he worked as an ophthalmologist he was well known for his literary works. While living in Berlin he completed his book Noli Me Tángere (Touch Me Not) in 1887, a book that many have credited for its proposition of nationalism and resistance to Spanish colonial rule through its formulation of the idea of an ‘imagined community’ in the Philippines. Lourdes Lareza Müller is the other protagonist in Yesterday, In The Years 1886 and 2017. Having migrated to Germany in 1968, she worked as an archivist at one of Europe’s largest libraries, Berlin’s Staatsbibliothek, for 28 years. The thread that ties these two figures is their chosen life in Berlin, away from the Philippines. The disembodied feminine voice remains unidentified throughout but narrates from a distant future. She hovers and is distinctly non-human and speaks of inhabiting both Rizal and Lareza Müller in human form. Positioned as a third protagonist, she speaks of a connectedness through adaptation, bodies as archives, and entangled narratives of possible futurities. While this film speaks to a specific place, particular people, the role of the disembodied narrator, casts a wider net of questions around mobility, a rearrangement of geographic concepts of centre/periphery, and the disruption of historical linearity and continuity.

Stephanie Comilang is an artist living and working between Toronto and Berlin. Her documentary based works create narratives that look at how our understandings of mobility, capital and labour on a global scale are shaped through various cultural and social factors. Her work has been shown at Transmediale Berlin, Ghost : 2561 Bangkok Video & Performance Triennale, S.A.L.T.S Basel, Tai Kwun Hong Kong, International Film Festival Rotterdam, and Asia Art Archive in America, New York. She was awarded the 2019 Sobey Art Award, Canada’s most prestigious art prize for artists 40 years and younger.

Titled Maintenance! Domestics as Institutional Becomings, acknowledging the work of Mierle Laderman Ukeles, our series of solo exhibitions and online events addresses the domestic from different vantage points related to institution-making. We are preparing a reader on the topic that will be launched soon as well. During this program of exhibitions, the previous interventions will remain at The Institute for Endotic Research (TIER). In that way we’ll keep working on the space as an editorial device to be renegotiated, and an ecology of artworks, underlining its conception as an inner garden based on principles of cultivation.

The online presentation and exhibition by Stephanie Comilang are presented in partnership with the Embassy of Canada as part of Canada’s culture program as Guest of Honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2021.

TIER logoCanada logoFFB logo
Photos by Benjamin Busch


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