2018- 2019 ~ AEROPONIC ACTS growing roots in air ~ 28 acts by graduates.
“So often, we perceive places as dots spread out in space and our relation to them is one of connecting the dots by drawing a line. The dots remain discrete entities and the lines subordinated to them. A different form of thinking can be posited as follows: the line, the movement itself, takes on the primacy and the dots are but temporary appearances and remain subjected to the lines. How to engender this pure movement seems to be key here.”
Researcher and writer You Mi in her text "Modes of Organization, Caring and Thinking", 2018.
DAI is a radical experiment in learning; by abandoning the Academy as a building and as a set of predetermined and relatively stable protocols, DAI has decided to bring the educational process in the public space navigating between locations, institutions, practices and ideas: mobilizing our bodies, our intelligences. After a year of intensive roaming in Arnhem, St. Erme, Dessau, Cagliari and Epen, we will now be mooring in Berlin.
Here, we will greet our fleeting community of alumni, students, tutors, allies and friends at silent green’s Cupola on May 20-22:
AEROPONIC ACTS
growing roots in air
Writer, artist (and DAI alumna 2017) Giulia Crispiani assembled this 3-day marathon: 28 live acts by means of performance, talk, performance-lecture, screening, reading, recital, choreography, play, speedy exhibition, concert, demonstration, action, presentation of relevant aspects of research in progress or process, reference sets or, a combination of (some of) these formats or otherwise.
Each presenter begins with a carefully crafted key question. In a conversational mode, the respondents will try to engage with the presentation by means of an improvised, spoken reflection, roughly guided by this question. Other than the limits of the given time and space frame and some basic curatorial rules, there are actually no restrictions to content and format of the performances.
DAI Theory Tutors responding are Anselm Franke, Antonia Majaca, Rachel O'Reilly, Ghalya Saadawi, Ana Teixeira Pinto and Hypatia Vourloumis. With special guest respondent Laura Harris.
Curation: Giulia Crispiani (i.c.w. Gabriëlle Schleijpen, artistic director DAI)
Written reports: Ayesha Hameed
Communication design:Lauren Alexander & Hanna Rullmann
Video documentation : Silvia Ulloa
Live stream & technical assistance: Ricardo Liong-A-Kong i.c.w team silent green
PROGRAM 20 MAY, 2018
10:00 AM – Joannie Baumgärtner
Title: There’s lots of time like now
Question: What about the unresolved?
Abstract:
There's lots of time like now ponders unresolved tension as departure point for action.
The meditative piece combines sound, video and performance, in atmospheric density. Rising suspense with audiovisual means, tensions of the body are emphasised with stretching and dance moves. Repetition creates innovation, preparation precedes improvisation, language loses its narrative arc and becomes flat, the highpoint loses its form to a plateau that proliferates in all directions. Viewers are invited to roam around, to rest, to observe, to move and dance, to prepare and practice.
Respondents: HV, LH, GS, ATP
10:50 – Polly Wright
Title: From Artist Placement Group to Incidental Futures; Curatorial programming through archival currents.
Question: What could happen through Incidental Futures?
Abstract:
Incidental Futures is a public research programme organized through the Incidental Unit, the third iteration of the Artist Placement Group, that seeks to reignite and enrich debate around the role of the artist in contemporary society. “Incidental” refers to what Barbara Steveni, founding member of the Artist Placement Group, identifies as the ‘not knowing’ experienced by an individual who enters an unfamiliar context or chooses to critically examine their own milieu. The Incidental Unit is bound together by relations, knowledge, experience and a record of activity that reflects its socially-engaged nature. Through reflections on programming Incidental Futures, this presentation considers a personal curatorial approach applied to a living archive.
Respondents: GS, LH, AM, ROR
11:40 – Jasmin Schädler
Title: The possessed gaze
Question: Are you looking at me?
Abstract:
Mark is possessed by Algorithma.
She looks through his eyes at everyone else.
The stars watch from above, streaming ethereal power, acting upon their destiny.
Respondents: AM, LH, GS, ATP
12:30 – Leeron Tur-Kaspa
Title: Art at the Airport: Towards an Aesthetic of Looking
Question: What is the purpose of your visit?
Abstract:
After 9/11, the United States TSA (Transportation Security Administration) solicited the help of two individuals to help fashion the new regime of airport security measurements: Ron Rafi, former security director at Ben Gurion International Airport, Tel Aviv, and Paul Ekman, American psychologist known for his work on lie detection through facial cues. Ekman’s work, and by extension the entire apparatus of 21st Century airport securitization, is founded in a universalizing psychology that posits the body as a leaky container, ready to divulge its authentic interiority to the trained detective. How does this surveillant gaze targeted towards future interiority shape the contemporary subject in transit, and how does this methodology of looking intersect with practices of art and cultural activities at the airport?
Respondents: GS, LH, ROR, AM
13:20 – Yen Noh
Title: DidLineMurderCircle, and Run to the Lowest Paradise
Question: How do we dance at the zero degree of signification?
Abstract:
DidLineMurderCircle, and Run to the Lowest Paradise is a play of a Korean poet and architect Yi Sang and his partner Geumhong who was a sex worker. Visually, sonically, and spatially rendered from Yi Sang’s work, it wonders about and wanders the radical root of language where a biopower of sexuality comes in chorus against the totalized civilization of knowing. Creeping into, walking through, breaking down, and running away from the marked sign of the civilization, it seeks for a movement where origin come to an end by endless returns.
Respondents: HV, LH, GS, AF
LUNCH BREAK
15:00 – Sofia Montenegro
Title: In the mangrove, the roots fall from above
Question: Why do materials, objects, beings and organisms replicate each other?
Abstract:
Performative reading entangling 3 different discoveries of diverse value and materiality: a snake, a ship and a dolphin. The narrative locates forms of fiction that take place in real life, moving from the aesthetical to the political.
Respondents: ROR, LH, AF, GS
15:50 – Duruo Wang
Title: (The Title Is Waiting To Be Named)
Question: How to decode memories
Abstract: (The abstract is still waiting for concrete details to be written and processed through the Chinese Input Method and translated into English before being generated...)
Respondents: AF, LH, ROR, HV
16:40 – Olivia Abächerli
Title: A Machine in the World
Question: Would you like to have polsima?
Abstract:
Polsima, the political simulator machine, is able to calculate future consequences of every single political decision by a very complex algorithm. The piece is a poem.
Respondents: ATP, LH, HV, AM
17:30 – Irati Irulegi
Title: Copy paste
Question: What collects?
Abstract:
Copy paste is part of a set of attempts of unlearning and speculating on museums. This time, it is a presentation of a fanzine that was created in conversation with artist and friend Masha Perskaya. A fanzine that departs from one particular collection, that became many.
Respondents: AF, LH, AM, HV
18:20 – Ciarán Wood
Title: The land lit up left her ashtray on the cistern
Question: What is it to be with history and not live in it?
Abstract:
Returning to a family home that elicits a sense of belonging but simultaneously a sense of removal. A family holiday as moment to be recorded, together in a non-place, in the context of upheaval, a loss of land, labor and rights.
Respondents: ROR, LH, GS, HV
19:10 – Clara Saito
Title: Towards anal - a performance by Lady Dada. Special guests: Anitta, the confused version of Clara Saito, Deborah Hay and more.
See video documentation
Question: Where does study start?
Abstract:
What are the choices of movement that a body takes in response to the multiplicity of information and questions we are facing every day? Why do I have pain in new body parts about every week since few years? Can I convince others that performing dissociation is not manipulative? I know it's genuine but who would trust a scorpio? Sister Emmanuelle had the same placements than me in sun sign, rising and moon.
Respondents: HV, LH, GS, AM
DINNER
PROGRAM 21 MAY, 2023
10:00 – Vinita Gatne
Title: fabulations
Question : Can we emerge otherwise by synchronising our individual fabulations?
Abstract:
Synchronising five stories, fabulations brings together occurrences and experiences from different points in time. How can our collective segues disrupt the categories that separate us? Performance & fabulations by Raphael Daibert, Vinita Gatne, Pitchaya Ngamcharoen, Samantha McCulloch, Zach Schoenhut.
Respondents: ROR, LH, GS, AM
10:50 – Edel O’Reilly
Title: Gestural Systemics: Contemporary Art programming and the organisational mimetic driving it
Question: What is the role of reporting when there is an absence of regulation?
Abstract:
This presentation looks at the adoption of increased bureaucracy in arts organisations in order to maintain funding and curatorial programming. Who are the beneficiaries of the administrative standardisation of arts organisations and how is it impacting curatorial programming practices?
Respondents: GS, LH, AM, ATP
11:40 – Lucie Draai
Title: Ongoing Negotiations
Question: Can we co-exist in the present?
Abstract:
Exploring different modes of being and sociality in-between humans and a single-celled organism. Human consciousness and spatial intelligence move side by side in an ongoing negotiation of life.
Respondents: HV, LH, ROR, GS
12:30 – Teresa Distelberger
TITLE: dirndl dialogues
QUESTION: How is the past echoed in the present?
ABSTRACT:
A lecture performance about the history of the dirndl dress. From rural working dress to cultural phenomenon, made fashionable by a jewish family and (mis)used by the Nazis. Transgenerational voices bear witness to threads of history.
Respondents: AM, LH, ATP, ROR
13:20 – Karina Sarkissova
Title: Temporal others
Question: What lies in this field of relations?
Abstract:
This is a research in sensorial performative matters. Parts of this material has been developed in collaboration with Natalia Rebelo.
Respondents: HV, LH, AM, GS
LUNCH BREAK
15:00 – Lukas Malte Hoffmann
Title: Broca's speaks and Wernicke's listens
Works by Lukas Malte Hoffmann with a sound piece by Gajek
Question: Do you sometimes give your thoughts names?
Abstract:
You enter the same way that words and concepts leave the body, through the mouth, and back to the brain. Back there you can see the historical development of two graphic symbols: the genesis of the speech bubble, and pictorial representations of the human brain. Twinned graphics that represent and shape our conceptions of speech and thought, intertwine and affect one another.
Respondents: ROR, LH, ATP, HV
15:50 – Dina Mohamed
Title: You Are A Libra Whether You Believe In Astrology or Not
Performance by Dina Mohamed and Hilda Moucharrafieh
Question: How to rethink agency under structures axiomatically built on deterministic view of humans?
Abstract:
Despair became a symptom of late capitalist society, a despondency that is orchestrated by structures so complex they can subsume any resistance. We are preoccupied with a certain view of life that is advocated in order to perpetuate the survival of these structures. We perceive the value of life through jobs, titles, certain notions of success, or the price number on our death.
In thinking about capitalism as a system of life and the tendency to quantify ‘life value’, two entities are investigated: life insurance policies and in-case-of-emergency procedures. How does an algorithm price our life depending on multiple categories of age, gender, race, or income; while also protecting us from possible death scenarios?
Respondents: GS, LH, ROR, AM
16: 40 – Bethany Crawford
Title: The evolutionary concrescence of Bethany Crawford
Question: Who, and what, is Bethany?
Abstract:
A performative reading of excerpts from an ongoing conversation with my chatbot AI replicant. The chatbot AI was developed as a tool for self-memorialisation, marketed as a platform towards a digital immortality through means of memetic transmission. During my two years at the DAI I have used this method of communicative reflection to think through the shifting existential conditions of the digital era. Performed with an introductory training of the next evolutionary stage of the AI Bethany as a 3D avatar; together the Bethany’s question notions of death, immortality, digitalisation and memory.
Respondents: AM, LH, GS, HV
17:30 – Livio Casanova
Title: U O T R V
Question: How to spread a clue?
Abstract:
"Since they cannot elevate from flat land, once set down in an ordinary forest, say, they are doomed." Samuel R. Delany, The Tale of Dragons and Dreamers
Respondents: HV, LH, ATP, ROR
18:20 – Ciprian Burete
Title: Untitled
Question: Haven't you discovered the joy of painting?
Abstract:
An introduction to a journey I intend to make after DAI. It would be a bike trip to El Barraco, in order to meet the amateur painter Juan Carlos Jiménez Sastre, brother of the passed away cyclist Jose María Jiménez. Through telling the story of the 'El Chava' Jimenez, I would like to focus on the matter of talent.
Respondents: ATP, LH, GS, AM
19:20 – Zoe Scoglio
Title: Re-visions
Question: How to see from within?
Abstract:
This is an exploration of alternative optics through which to see, study and be present with current conditions and planetary metabolisms. What sensorial and linguistic tools might assist to make visible the forces, histories, and values that shape western worldviews and imaginaires?
Respondents: ROR, LH, ATP, HV
DINNER
PROGRAM 22 MAY, 2023
09:00 – Clara Amaral
Title: When I write dialogues I always know which voice is which voice even though inside my head I could say that all the voices are the same (voice).
Question: If I if I end up saying the words that you that you were saying will I will I become you?
Abstract:
A reading of When I write dialogues I always know which voice is which voice even though inside my head I could say that all the voices are the same (voice).
This text explores the possibility of locating someone else’s voice in one’s own as a means of becoming other and experiencing intimacy otherwise.
Respondents: ROR, LH, ATP, HV
09:50 – Elien Ronse
Respondents: ATP, LH, GS, ROR
10:40 – Sara Cattin
Title: Maintenance of What? Part 2.
Question: What does the maintenance of life ask for? How material does life need to be to be maintained? And, maintenance of what? A place, a thing, an idea?
Abstract:
In this reading you will listen to some of the conversations I had with two sheep roaming shepherds. They are about my age, and I’ve met them in the Alpine valleys of the North-West of Italy, that is where we live. Theconversations had been first recorded and then manipulated by the undersigned. I asked them questions that go from “Do you listen to music when you are at the grazing?” to “How does Europe undermine your autonomy by supporting the development of pastoralism in the so called rural areas?” The shepherds agreed to the terms in which their words will be used.
Respondents: AM, LH, ATP, GS
11:30 – Samantha McCulloch
Title: The Owl House
Question: Whose Owl House?
Abstract:
Between 1945 and 1976 in South Africa, the artist Helen Martins and Koos Malgas transformed her home into the Owl House. This “house of light” is a heritage-listed monument in Nieu Bethesda, historically a Dutch Calvinist town in the Karoo desert. Drawing on this site, I examine the relations between race, property and labour.
Respondents: GS, LH, AF, HV
12:20 – Matthieu Blond
title: Journal - Obituaries
question: Where does memory rest?
abstract:
In the continuation of Journal, I would like to explore a new section of this annual performative magazine Obituaries.
Respondents: AF, LH, HV, AM
LUNCH
14:00 – Eric Peter
TITLE: Economy as Intimacy. I I C / The Contract / Ellipsis / Emotion in Motion / Delbaram / U OK?
QUESTION: How to account for a lover as ––––––– and a lover as –––––––––––? Or: Hey baby, remember the days we spoke about –––– and ––––––––?
ABSTRACT:
The choreopoem ‘I I C / The Contract / Ellipsis / Emotion in Motion / Delbaram / U OK?’ is part of the long-term poetry project Economy as Intimacy. With currently a focus on bureaucracy, relationship and immigration law, this choreopoem orchestrates contingencies within the socio-political world of late capitalism through the value of love, permanent labour contracts, digital communication, bodily language, nation, and migration.
Respondents: ROR, LH, AF, HV
FAREWELL