Screening of Swoosh Lieu's film, a presentation by Chanelle Adams, and performances by Mira Hirtz and Fallon Mayanja.

Based on the narratives of the previous days, at the interaction between science and futurity, the third part of our programme looks at if and how we can create new spaces of awareness. In undetermined futures, at the junction between social experiments and fictional revolutions, scientific, sensitive, and poetic tools build new zones of care for inter-species and communal coexistence. The practices on display will offer the opportunity to experiment with other participatory forms of living collectively with change.

PROGRAMME

14:00
Presentation by Chanelle Adams

In this lecture, scholar/writer/artist Chanelle Adams inaugurates the Saturday session by offering reflections on her research practice related to healing plants, colonialism, and history. By bringing together experiences with archive and the body, Adams' imagines possible futures of care through a politics of scholarship which prioritizes lived experiences, memory, and ecologies of relating.

14:50
Screening of Caring is for/from the future by Swoosh Lieu, 2021

What if there was a care revolution that finally repealed inequality? What would our future look like? The feminist collective Swoosh Lieu imagines such a future where gender roles are broken, racist discrimination is a thing of the past, the world is decolonised and the revolution has ensured better and fairer working and living conditions, not only in the care sector, but also in public life.

15:10/15
Exploring notions of care: a performative workshop by Mira Hirtz

What defines a caring body? How do we observe and embody care?
We will experiment with gestures of care and notions of witnessing. Thus we shift our perception between ourselves, others, and other-than-human entities by simply focusing on the means that our sensing bodies offer: walking, standing, feeling, seeing, seeing again, touching, noticing. Might the focus on these everyday means create an ecology of awareness?

This workshop will serve as a performative intervention into the programme.
No prior experience of movement or performance is needed, just bring your curiosity!

16:15
Break, tea time, and cakes

16:45
Performance by Fallon Mayanja

SENSING SATELLITE (2021) is inspired by Julius Eastman's original composition The Holy Presence Of Joan D'Arc which the artist confronts with Malcolm Ferdinand's A Decolonial Ecology. This performance is a cross between fictional speculation and social experiment. It offers an intersection of possibilities for the composition of another world to come. This interstice unfolds primarily through sound: between poetic declamation, edits of political archives, and electronic music.

Biographies

Chanelle Adams is a multidisciplinary essayist, researcher, and translator. Adams is currently a doctoral student of Geography at the University of Lausanne committed to ecologies of knowledge which bring the body, history, and memory into relationship. Her research in History of Science, Science and Technology Studies, and Medical Anthropology is broadly interested in politics of the botanical and practices of healing across space and time, and more specifically between Madagascar and France. Adams’ interdisciplinary and research based works have been published and performed widely across three continents including: NPR, The Funambulist, The Drift, Bitch Media, Black Quantum Futurism, Danspace Project 2020 Platform and Stanford University, and has appeared on various academic panels in places such as Johannesburg, Athens, Brno, and Ouidah. Her 2019 work “Botany of Death” which deals with questions of colonial custodianship, care, and decay was initiated during a residency at the Visual Arts Network of South Africa. Her 2021 project “Ghost zoo” in collaboration with Belsunce Projects was developed during her research in the archives Marseille’s Museum of Natural History and Colonial Institute, supported by a Fulbright grant. She has a forthcoming Plant Zine.

Mira Hirtz is a performance artist, art mediator, and art theorist basing her work on somatic practices. She explores the value of creativity for human beings and ecologies in many different formats such as workshops, performances, video pieces and texts. She graduated from the MFA Creative Practice at TL Conservatoire London and from the MA art research at University of Art and Design Karlsruhe, where she presently teaches performative research. Furthermore she worked as an art mediator at documenta14, co-curated the program series “How do we care?” at Badischer Kunstverein 2020 and took part in Bruno Latour’s research seminar leading up the “Critical Zones” exhibition at ZKM Karlsruhe for which she is developing performative art meditation. She co-founded the Initiative for Applied Melancholy whose current project ANTHROPOS EX (https://anthropos-ex.com/) is researching the theatre of the Anthropocene.

Swoosh Lieu is a queer feminist collective (Rosa Wernecke, Katharina Pelosi, and Johanna Castell) creating at the interface of theatre, performance, and visual arts. The collective was founded in 2009 at the Institute for Applied Theater Studies in Giessen and has been working continuously in different constellations and collaborations ever since. The collective creates temporary spaces and images in real time, and at the same time thematizes their production. Through this form of performative practice, they open the space of the theatre for socio-political analogies, which, however, are always negotiated and made tangible with its means. Performances have taken place at the Dance Platform at Kampnagel in Hamburg, at the Stückemarkt of the Berliner Theatertreffen, and at the Impulse und Politik im Freie Theater festival. The projects Who Cares?! (2018) and Who Moves?! (2019) were produced as radio plays in collaboration with NDR, Who Cares?! was nominated for the Juliane Bartel Media Prize in 2018.

Artist whose work deals with sound and performance. Fallon Mayanja explores listening practices as well as electronic possibilities, in order to broaden the perceptions of the public and the listeners. Fallon’s work, which is oriented towards sound tangibility and political pedagogy, questions existing forms of communication and seeks alternative practices of reception and interaction, through sound and voice. Fallon seeks to discover areas of contact between the body - sound, sound - society and their communication by studying sound forms as sensory activation and narrative devices. Primarily using electronics and technology as tools to share, connect, feel and listen, artistic production leads to an analysis of the audible and the inaudible, the unspoken and the unspeakable, and the tangible and the unspeakable, of the sensitive, inside and outside sound. Fallon Mayanja's performances have been presented: at BétonSalon - Paris (2018), at The Place and CUNTemporary - London (2019), at Creamcake - Berlin (2019), at FRAC Lorraine (2021) or at ForumArteBraga (2021). The artist has also participated in group exhibitions in Europe and internationally: in Lisbon (2020), Mexico City (2019), Thessaloniki (2019) and Berlin (2020).

Photos by Lola Pertsowsky, Courtesy La Loge.