BOOK CLUB TROPICANA is an escapist reading circle gathering weekly to discuss texts that its readers have long been waiting to embrace. Wandering through terrains that cross among others alchemy, appropriation, anthropophagy, molecular politics, boredom, the selected texts, from both critical theory and fiction, aim to invoke the germination of unprecedented thought and collective reflection. The reading circle will gather every Tuesday, starting January 21st.
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A r c h i v e
(season six - winter/spring 2013)
Occult voices - paranormal music: recordings of unseen intelligences
an audio session and presentation by Thomas Knoefel,
founder of Supposé Records
18th june 19h30
In this session Thomas Knoefel, director of the Brigade Commerz Audio Arts Archives and philosophy label Supposé will introduce the project "Occult voices - paranormal music: Recordings of unseen Intelligences 1905 - 2007".
'This CD compilation contains original recordings from ostensible paranormal phenomena such as trance speech, direct voices, xenoglossy and glossolalia, paranormal music, rappings, poltergeist manifestation and electronic voice phenomena.
Although "occult" phenomena are an integral part of cultural history, their "reality" is discussed controversially. For the recordings collected here the question was not so much whether such phenomena are "real" or "manipulated", illusion or deception, supernatural-otherwordly or simply of human nature. They are rather presented as authentic documents with their particular with their particular atmosphere and their characteristic intensity. Our goal was to demonstrate, with a phenomenological overview, the audible diversity and the width in form and content of such phenomena. Some of the audio examples could hardly be categorized because paranormal events admit different interpretations. For instance, when is a poltergeist case a case of possession, or vice versa? Or how clear and reliable is the distinction of xenoglossy and glossolalia?
Many of the tape recordings enforce themselves with astonishingly dramatic intensity - they represent the human condition under exceptional circumstances - and: they place us into the position of a witness. They mediate to our perception what was obvious to those who listened in the darkness of the seance room and comprehended what happened by purely auditive sensation.' T.K.
Thomas Knoefel is an autor (recently published, together with Boris Groys, The Politics of Immortality, 2002 and Monomania, poems, 2004) and editor of numerous original-voice recordings (including works by E.M. Cioran, Jean Baudrillard, Perter Sloterdijk, David Lynch and others).
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Archive #37
Privileging tacit sensitivity over positivistic thought, the Plant Thinking Cycle aims to stimulate affective and non-cognitive dialogues with our surroundings, promoting new modes of conviviality and sensuous thinking. Approaching plants as friends, this cycle reflects on organic materialism, posthumanism and morphogenesis as crucial matters bridging sensibility today. Plant Thinking includes an audio listening session for plants at The Barber Shop, programmed with artist Margarida Magalhães, alongside a lecture by philosopher and environmentalist Michael Marder.
Thinking With Plants lecture by Michael Marder - 13th March 19h30
'The goal of this talk is to provide an accessible introduction to the philosophy of vegetal life. Instead of treating plants as the barely animate objects of scientific investigation, I propose to consider them as partners in our practices of living and thinking. To do so, we must pay attention to four distinct but interrelated sense of “plant-thinking”: 1) the non-cognitive, non-ideational, and non-imagistic mode of thinking proper to the plants (what I like to call “thinking without the head”); 2) the human thinking about the plants; 3) how human thinking is, to some extent, de-humanized and rendered plant-like, altered by its encounter with the vegetal world; and, finally, 4) the ongoing symbiotic relation between this transfigured thinking and the existence of plants. My hope is that we will begin to intuit what it means to be (and to think) with plants.'
Listening Session for Plants - 15th March 17h (duration 2hours)
Travelling through deep humid jungles and synthesizer landscapes, this collective audition invites us to a unique sonic experience shared both by human ears and vegetable pores, exploring unaccounted-for sensibilities. This specially programmed listening session departs from plant life's greatest hits such as Roger Roger's Rhapsody in Green, stimulating a space for immersion and green empathy. This session was conceived in collaboration with Margarida Magalhães.
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Michael Marder is IKERBASQUE Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country (UPV-EHU), Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain. He is the author of numerous books and articles on phenomenology, political philosophy, and environmental thought. His latest monographs, forthcoming this year, are Phenomena—Critique—Logos: The Project of Critical Phenomenology and The Philosopher’s Plant: An Intellectual Herbarium. www.michaelmarder.org
Margarida Magalhães searches for atopic forests through the exotic touch of internet environments. She is finishing a media arts degree at Lisbon Fine Arts Academy, working with installation and video. She collects jungle sounds, ethereal landscapes and random internet imagery, in the format of cassettes or her many tumblrs.www.rawforest.tumblr.com
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Archive #36
Jon Rafman on an existential journey through the virtual worlds of Second Life and Google Street View. He will lead audiences across cyberpunk megalopolises, furry sex clubs, and vast digital expanses, while providing live critical commentary as he discusses the implications of virtual worlds for modern society. Rafman will address how it is that we can both critique and celebrate contemporary technologies and virtual worlds.
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Oculto #∞
A meeting between Kool Aid Man (AKA Jon Rafman) and Vitos Flores (AKA Silvestre Pestana)
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Archive # 35
Marx Selvagem
apresentação e lançamento do livro de Jean Tible
23 Janeiro 19h30
'Marx selvagem produz um diálogo-encontro entre o filósofo revolucionário europeu Karl Marx e as lutas-cosmologias ameríndias. Propõe apreender como o perspectivismo amazónico de Eduardo Viveiros de Castro e o discurso cosmopolítico de Davi Kopenawa interpelam o pensamento de Marx. Como as resistências Yanomami e outras formas de pensar e estar no mundo (sem, por exemplo, a distinção "ocidental" natureza/cultura) dialogam com ideias-práticas como fetichismo da mercadoria, abolição do Estado, luta de classes, produção, capitalismo, universal, mundo/s.' JT.
Jean Tible, investigador e ativista da universidade nómada e do Partido dos Trabalhadores, nasceu no Rio de Janeiro em 1979. Jean Tible é Doutor em Sociologia pela Unicamp, leccionando relações internacionais na Fundação Santo André e autor de Marx Selvagem editado por Annablume, São Paulo, em 2013.
foto: Cláudia Andujar, Índios Aharaibus, norte do Rio Negro, Amazonas 1971
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Archive #34
How On Earth?
Cartography & Curatorial Practice in the Archipelago
Anna-Sophie Springer and Etienne Turpin
discussion for the launch of SCAPEGOAT: Architecture | Landscape | Political Economy Issue 05 – Excess (Summer/Fall 2013) – edited by Etienne Turpin
thursday 12th December 19h30
While geologists and stratigraphers debate the scientific merits of the Anthropocene thesis, culture workers remain precariously exposed to experiences of the planetary upheavals characteristic of our all-too-human epoch. If, as Peter Sloterdijk has suggested, our planet of terrestrial globalization has become a world interior of capital, what are the cartographic and curatorial practices that might respond to the ecologies of excess in this world interior?
This thursday at The Barber Shop, Scapegoat editor Etienne Turpin will present the project of “Excess” in relation to a series of cartographic assemblages that describe the globalized condition of the Anthropocene. Independent curator and Scapegoat contributor Anna-Sophie Springer will then discuss contemporary curatorial practice in relation to historical and geographical images of the archipelago. These presentations will be followed by a moderated discussion of the aesthetics of the Anthropocene, legacies of colonial cartography and collecting, and recent trajectories in artistic and curatorial practice that address our planetary construction site.
In both the presentation and discussion, we will consider the provocation of Michel Serres, who has suggested, “All possible encounters have been accomplished, undertaken, ended, foreclosed. The cycle is completed, the map of the earth has covered the earth. Space is inscribed upon the charts. The globe is perceived as a ball in a net of latitudes and longitudes.” With this event, we want to introduce several new perspectives on the relationship between the map and the territory; we hope the Lisbon launch of Scapegoat 05 will provoke a discussion about how artistic and curatorial practices can navigate our planetary excesses to co-produce worlds of pleasure, passion, and conviction.
Etienne Turpin directs anexact office in Jakarta and is a founding editor of the journal Scapegoat. Anna-Sophie Springer is a writer, editor and curator and co-directs the independent press K. Verlag in Berlin.
Etienne Turpin directs anexact office in Jakarta and is a founding editor of the journal Scapegoat. Anna-Sophie Springer is a writer, editor and curator and co-directs the independent press K. Verlag in Berlin.
'I imagine the museum as an archipelago.' —Édouard Glissant
Description of Scapegoat 05 – Excess
Ours is unquestionably a time of excess. While currencies and commodities continue to circulate, reifying segregation and inequality throughout the global political economy, excess leaks out in all directions, sometimes fostering movements of resistance, other times permitting improvisational opportunism among often neglected actors, and still at other moments irrevocably damaging ecologies and environments which we humans precariously but ruthlessly inhabit. The pleasures and perils of excess cross divisions of class, race, gender and sexuality, while also reinforcing aspects of these and other identities.
Can we design for, or among, the excesses of contemporary culture? How do practices of architecture and landscape architecture, as well as adjacent practices of art, curation, philosophy, and typography, suggest ways to amplify, capture, or redirect excess?
In Excess—Scapegoat’s sixth edition—we explore the productive, resistant, and imperiling aspects of excess as an attempt to advance our project of emboldening theoretical and historical modes of inquiry, scholarly research, and design practice. It is a vast conceptual terrain, but one that offers many compelling perspectives.
Scapegoat: Architecture | Landscape | Political Economy is an independent, not-for-profit, bi-annual journal designed to create a context for research and development regarding design practice, historical investigation, and theoretical inquiry. As a mytheme, the figure of the scapegoat carries the burden of the city and its sins. Walking in exile, the scapegoat was once freed from the constraints of civilization. Today, with no land left unmapped, and with processes of urbanization central to political economic struggles, Scapegoat is exiled within the reality of global capital. The journal examines the relationship between capitalism and the built environment, confronting the coercive and violent organization of space, the exploitation of labour and resources, and the unequal distribution of environmental risks and benefits. Throughout our investigation of design and its promises, we return to the politics of making as a politics to be constructed.
This session is included in the cycle Let's Get Critical: Thought Circulation and its Modes of Production taking place at The Barber Shop since October 2013.
+ info: http://www.scapegoatjournal.org
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Francesc Ruiz: Aloha from Homolulu!
Friday 29th and Saturday 30th
17h30 to 20h30
"How to draw male-to-male romance" workshops held by a yaoi prosumers community in Vauxhall. Temporary tattoos celebrating Spartacus guide global mission. The legacy of Italian fumetti erotici and their hidden heroes in Latin America. Comics as a revolutionary tool. News stands as the pre-Internet. Sexually transmitted diseases and anti-graffiti policies in Philadelphia. Egyptian comics, détournements and dérive inspired distribution in Downtown Cairo. The spectrum of homoeroticism in Tokyo's manga subcultures. Porn parodies.
Francesc Ruiz will display at The Barber Shop a temporary library comprising examples of his work as an investigator of comics as an expanded medium, a practice that he has developed through context related installations, specialized bookshops or other distribution systems, exploring LGTB culture, censorship and alternative genealogies to the social history of comic books.
Friday at 7pm, Francesc Ruiz will do a guided tour through his publications and introduce us to other works as well as some of his latest obsessions - Come to the Barber Shop At Your Own Risk!
This session is included in the cycle Let's Get Critical: Thought Circulation and its Modes of Production.
Francesc Ruiz (Barcelona, 1971) has exhibited at Weserburg Museum (Bremen), Gasworks (London), Contemporary Image Collective (Cairo), Creative Time (new York), Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia (Madrid), MOCA (Los Angeles), Centre d'Art La Panera (Lleida), among other institutions.
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Archive#32
Let's Get Critical:
Thought Circulation and its Modes of Production #1
Browning the Future: Creeping Khaleej
Presentation by THE STATE (Rahel Aima, Ahmad Makia)
Tuesday, 15th October 19h30
Browning the Future: Creeping Khaleej explores THE STATE’s practice, as rooted in the cultural production of the Arabian Gulf. The discussion will cover the future weird & its technological transmogrifications, reverse skeuomorphs, the Pan-Arabian hangover, ethnifuturisms, Khaleeji swag, the sensuous architecture of the printernet, and post2colonial vernaculars. The central questions: can cultural production have terroir? What does it mean to be an artist, writer or cultural practitioner «from» Dubai? And what is the future of futurism?
THE STATE is a publishing practice based out of Dubai, U.A.E. It investigates South-South reorientations, alternative futurisms, transgressive cultural criticism, and the transition from analogue to digital. Rahel Aima is a writer and an editor of THE STATE. Her research focuses on the intersections of magic, radical politics and non-western futurisms. Ahmad Makia is an editor at THE STATE, and is based in Dubai. He is currently researching 3jami politics, and is on the lookout for someone to pay off his student loan.
info: http://thestate.ae
Let's Get Critical:
Thought Circulation and its Modes of Production
is a cycle of events about the production and distribution of critical thought, which intends to incite debate about research methodologies, ephemeral practices and writing as vital modus operandi. Departing from the desire to galvanise the local critical mass, and with the aim of creating a spectre of resonance on the surrounding context and practices, this ongoing cycle of events will comprise a series of seminars, workshops, lectures and a book club, programmed by The Barber Shop from October 2013 onwards.
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Archive # 31
Global Spanning and Measures of the Undecidable
presentation by Natasha Ginwala and Vivian Ziherl
19th September, thursday 19h
Landings (Natasha Ginwala and Vivian Ziherl) will present a lecture-screening in which a series of figures are held apart-together exploring the terrain of infrastructural suspension. An itinerary of temporal alignments emerge across hyper-real circuits of resource fluidity, laser detection of "bare earth construct", Tantong Gyalpo's 13th century chain-link bridges throughout the Himalayan region, and Duchamp's 1,200 Coal Bags imaged alongside Imamura's 1989 film Black Rain. These readings encounter states of essential linkage whereby the limit conditions of the body as infrastructure are brought into conversation with Spivak's notion of the planetary subject.
Natasha Ginwala is an independent curator, researcher and writer. She is an advisor and part of the artistic team of the 8th Berlin Biennale (2014). Recent projects include “Landings” (Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art and Partner Organizations); “The Museum of Rhythm” — a segment of Taipei Biennial 2012; “Kunstvlaai: Festival of Independents”, 2012 edition (INexactly THIS). her recent writing has appeared in publications such as Afterall Online, Art Agenda, e-flux journal, Manifesta Journal, Mint (The Wallstreet Journal), Pages Magazine, Scapegoat, among others.
Vivian Ziherl is Curator at If I Can't Dance, I Don't Want to Be Part Of Your Revolution. Independent projects include “Landings” (Witte de With Centre for Contemporary Art & other partner organizations) and “StageIt!” (Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam). Vivian is editor of "The Lip Anthology", Macmillan Art Publishing and Kunstverein Publishing in collaboration with Grazer Kunstverein. She has been a contributing editor of Discipline, and her writing has appeared in periodicals including Frieze, e-flux journal, LEAP Magazine, Metropolis M, Eyeline, the Journal of Art (Art Association of Australia and New Zealand), Pages Magazine, Scapegoat, among others.
this presentation has the kind support of:
Image caption: Still from This is Shell (1970), Geoffrey Jones
this presentation has the kind support of:
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A r c h i v e
(season five - summer 2013)
Archive # 30
Archive # 29
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Ashkan Sepahvand is a writer, editor, and translator. His work has been exhibited at Former West 2013, Qalandiya International 2012, Kunsthaus Bregenz, Jerusalem Show V, Sharjah Biennial X, Home Works 5, and MACBA. He participated in dOCUMENTA (13) with the research publication + workshop series "seeing studies", co-edited and in collaboration with Natascha Sadr Haghighian, with presentations in Kassel, Kabul, Utrecht, and Poughkeepsie . Recent choreographic collaborations have been realized at Tanz im August (Berlin), Khalil Sakakini Cultural Foundation (Ramallah), and the Musée de la danse (Rennes). He lives and works in Berlin.
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Archive # 28
Egyptian Film Night
curated and introduced by Louly Seif
curated and introduced by Louly Seif
17th July wednesday, 21h30
Programme:
Al Momia: The Night of Counting the Years
by Shadi Abdel Salam
Based on a true story and universally recognized as one of the greatest Egyptian films ever made, Al Momia: The Night of Counting the Years in a lyrical meditation on identity. The story revolves around a legendary cache of royal mummies that was unearthed at Deir Al-Bahari in 1881, and the ancient tribe accused of plundering the tomb. The beautifully calibrated ritualistic atmosphere is greatly enhanced by the exteriors, filmed exclusively at dawn and dusk, which lend the film an eerie, evocative quality.
Night Visitor: The Night of Counting the Years
by Maha Maamoun
Looking through footage from videos recorded and uploaded on Youtube by the many men and women who broke into Egyptian State Security buildings on 5 March 2011, different narratives of this highly charged political space and moment are encountered. Beyond the first layer of shredded documents and other sought after paraphernalia of this coveted moment, the curious eyes of cell phones expose the psychological space inhabited by both the visitor and the visited.
Both films in Arabic with English subtitles.
length of the session: 120 min.
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Shadi Abdel Salam was born in Alexandria in 1930 and earned a degree in architecture from the Faculty of Fine Arts, Cairo University. Between 1960 and 1967 he designed costumes and set decorations for ten historical Egyptian films. He also participated in designing sets and costumes of epic films such as Cleopatra and Renzo Rosselini's La Lotta dell'Uomo per la Sua Sopravvivenza.
Maha Maamoun’s work burrows through various dominant constructs, whether mental, emotional, literary, cinematic or other, as a means of exploring codified modes of seeing, and how these intersect with and are negotiated by personal experiences. Curatorially, Maamoun has collaborated on several exhibitions, video programs and book projects. She is one of the founding members of the Contemporary Image Collective (CiC) – an independent non-profit space for contemporary arts and culture founded in Cairo in 2004.
Louly Seif is a filmmaker and a film editor living in Cairo.
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Archive # 29
What Happens When Bodies Come Together ?
Or, how i learned to dance that summer.
presentation by Ashkan Sepahvand
19 June 19h
This is a presentation about transformation. When bodies come together, energies and attention are exchanged, negotiated, and directed towards something. In his presentation, Ashkan Sepahvand will address some of those somethings - from the real experience of dancing at a party or joining a demonstration to the imaginations afforded by collective bodies: the desire for a revolution, instances of altered perception due to music (or even, drugs), or far-flung proposals from quantum physics (plausible or speculative) concerning atomic (re)composition. The presentation will look at a few projects that approach transformation from the perspective of "social choreography," that is, the premise that the "social" is an activity consisting of principles applied to the movement of bodies, principles that can be studied (as materials, gestures, or habits ) as well as proposed anew (as scores, sequences, or choices). Charting a rough proposal for further research, this presentation intends to address the embodied possibilities of a body-politic, at once a molecular imagination as well as an ecstatic encounter. AS
Or, how i learned to dance that summer.
presentation by Ashkan Sepahvand
19 June 19h
This is a presentation about transformation. When bodies come together, energies and attention are exchanged, negotiated, and directed towards something. In his presentation, Ashkan Sepahvand will address some of those somethings - from the real experience of dancing at a party or joining a demonstration to the imaginations afforded by collective bodies: the desire for a revolution, instances of altered perception due to music (or even, drugs), or far-flung proposals from quantum physics (plausible or speculative) concerning atomic (re)composition. The presentation will look at a few projects that approach transformation from the perspective of "social choreography," that is, the premise that the "social" is an activity consisting of principles applied to the movement of bodies, principles that can be studied (as materials, gestures, or habits ) as well as proposed anew (as scores, sequences, or choices). Charting a rough proposal for further research, this presentation intends to address the embodied possibilities of a body-politic, at once a molecular imagination as well as an ecstatic encounter. AS
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Ashkan Sepahvand is a writer, editor, and translator. His work has been exhibited at Former West 2013, Qalandiya International 2012, Kunsthaus Bregenz, Jerusalem Show V, Sharjah Biennial X, Home Works 5, and MACBA. He participated in dOCUMENTA (13) with the research publication + workshop series "seeing studies", co-edited and in collaboration with Natascha Sadr Haghighian, with presentations in Kassel, Kabul, Utrecht, and Poughkeepsie . Recent choreographic collaborations have been realized at Tanz im August (Berlin), Khalil Sakakini Cultural Foundation (Ramallah), and the Musée de la danse (Rennes). He lives and works in Berlin.
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A Quest for Flight
or the aurora of psychedelia
a beach bar reading club
A Quest for Flight, or the aurora of psychedelia is a programme dedicated to the escapist narratives and somnambulist dérives originating from the deviant thoughts that bubble from the hidden subterranea of isolated minds’.
Departing from the will to increased ideological nomadism as a manoeuvre against the paradoxical immobility of the now, this programme reacts directly as a sensorial catalyst that surpasses the anaesthesic anxieties of the crisis, aiming for a space of sensorial unleash which may endure as a molecular reflection for futurity.
Taking the form of a beach bar / reading club, this events cycle collaborates with artists who explore themes related to psychedelia, escapism, or alternative collectivities diagonally in their practice, and who will in turn use the space to share their ongoing visual and theoretic research. Such is the case of Diogo Evangelista, who will screen is recent film on Moroccan Berber carpets 'Sungazing', and André Guedes, who will contribute with the re-enactment of a conversation occurred in the Yamagishi japanese commune about textile design and kensan practice, a non-hierarchical decision making process. Alexandre Estrela will also present a programme of experimental films from the extinct youtube channel RedSkyFalls with works by Toshio Matsumoto, Maarten Ploeg, R. Stevie Moore, Steina and Woody Vasulka, among others.
In parallel, the programme will be interpolated with collective listenings of compositions by musicians Eliane Radigue, Delia Derbyshire, or Ghédalia Tazartès, a cycle of auditions programmed in collaboration with music consultant Afonso Simões.
Throughout the cycle, the space will operate as a beach bar reading club where visitors can dissolve their minds in-between a list of selected readings and other sensorial stimulations.
A Quest for Flight, or the aurora of psychedelia beach bar reading club is open from Wednesday to Saturday from 5.30 to 8.30 pm
Programme:
Week One :
3 April / Wednesday 7.30 pm : 'Sungazing', screening by Diogo Evangelista
4 April / Thursday 7.30 pm : 'Die Rebellen Haben Sich In Den Bergen Versteckt - study for Prospectus’s second or third scene', dramatized reading by André Guedes
5 April / Friday 7.30 pm : Collective Listening - Eliane Radigue 'Trilogie de La Mort' - an excerpt
6 April / Saturday 5.30 pm : Beach Bar / Reading Club
Week Two :
10 April / Wednesday 7.30 pm : Collective Listening - Ghédalia Tazartès 'Diasporas'
11 April / Thursday 7.30 pm : 'RedSkyFalls', Youtube Program by Alexandre Estrela
12 April / Friday 7.30 pm : Collective Listening - Delia Derbyshire 'The Dreams'
13 April /Saturday 5.30 pm : Beach Bar / Reading Club
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(season four - winter 2012 / spring 2013)
Season IV has the kind support of Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian
Archive # 27
'Not only, but also'
a drift with Raimundas Malašauskas
a drift with Raimundas Malašauskas
1st February 2013 19h30
Not only, but also will be a phantasmatic soirée dedicated to the drift of speech and the hallucination of representation.
In 1982, Peter Ustinov's theatre play Photo Finish was staged in Vilnius with several actors simultaneously playing one character (Sam) at different stages of his life. A group of actors from that 1982 production was invited to the hologramic space recently orchestrated by Raimundas Malašauskas, with various shapes and visions and several works by Fia Backström, Gintaras Didžiapetris, Elena Narbutaitė and Rosalind Nashashibi. In the opening day of Photo Finish, the group of actors took part in an improvised conversation-turning-into-a-play that was aired on the National Radio's Klasika broadcast.
"A great piece of furniture and a diversity of an event / an image. It reminds me of Ariel Pink music and some digital iceberg. A surface of sharpness, glass and materiality. It looks interesting in a close-up as well as it does from a distance - like a mirage after a year spent with Darius Miksys in a windowless room. A cover of something, which implies a possibility of content." (Gintaras Didziapetris)
Photo Finish was an exhibition organized by the Contemporary Art Centre (CAC) and Tulips&Roses gallery, Brussels in 2011.
Raimundas Malašauskas was born in Vilnius, curates in the world, writes occasionally. www.rai.lt
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Archive # 26
Herding Cats:
Three Allegories of Organisational Knowledge
by Fatima Hellberg
10 January 7 pm
Herding Cats is an illustrated talk in three parts, taking as its point of departure American political scientist and activist Jo Freeman’s 1970 essay ‘The Tyranny of Structurelessness’. Here Freeman’s critique of the rhetoric of openness and a laissez-faire ideal for group structures is explored through allegories of organisation, each of which has its own distinctive take on what a coherent collective project might look like.
Twisting the politics of representation around the representation of politics, Herding Cats turns to the language and practice of ‘structurlessness’ in ideologically conflicting scenarios also involving non-human agents and participants. This plotting, which extends from a conversation with Jean Genet, a neo-liberal management treatise and a ‘Library of Factual Stories’, seeks to map out and reflect on certain moments of tension between a structuring system and a sense of excess or wonder which cannot fully be contained within the limits of organisational knowledge.
The talk departs from a research project into constitutions and manifestos of self-organisation developed for Manifesta 8.
Fatima Hellberg is a London based curator and writer working as part of the curatorial duo behind Electra. She has realised projects in the UK and internationally, including at the ICA, Tate Modern, South London Gallery, Showroom, Flat Time House, Landings (Norway) and Drugo More (Croatia). She has written for Afterall, Frieze, Kaleidoscope and various independent publications.
+ info: http://www.electra-productions.com/
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Archive # 25
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Archive # 24
The Liquid and The Arid
Melancholy, horror, an dust in Andrei Tarkovky's "Solaris" and Reza Negarestani's "Cyclonopedia"
by Hisham Awad
"In 1972, Andrei Tarkovsky made Solaris, a film that staged a
biomagnetic current as a cerebral system, one that is capable of thought
processes. Tarkovsky’s Cold War fiction revolves around a dejected
scientist unable to comprehend the malign activities of the intelligent
planet Solaris and its bubbling and oozing surface.
In 2008, Reza Negarestani wrote Cyclonopedia, a theory-fiction that exhumes the notes of former professor of Tehran University, the renegade archaeologist and researcher Dr. Hamid Parsani. For Parsani, petrol is a sort of malevolent intelligence with an agenda of its own that narrates the dynamics of the Middle East and carves it into a living and sentient entity in a literal and non-metaphoric sense.
By drawing a twin portrait of the protagonists of Solaris and Cyclonopedia, and through an examination of the processes and substances theorized in the two works, this lecture seeks to draw out the philosophical and fictional implications of a ruinous entanglement with matter and the potentialities of thinking the non-human."
WEDNESDAY 19th DECEMBER 7PM
HISHAM AWAD is a writer based in Beirut. His work investigates the
intersections between philosophy, film, and sound. In addition to
drawing out the potentialities of abstraction in audiovisual practices,
he explores the synthesis of theory and fiction in the cinematographic,
the sonic, and the novelistic. He completed an MA in Aural and Visual
Cultures at Goldsmiths College, London in 2011, has contributed to a
number of online and printed publications, and presents papers at
international conferences and symposia.
Support:
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Archive #23
Judith Sonnicken, born in 1981 in Wickede-Wimbern/Germany, is a Berlin-based visual artist. After her studies of Fashion and Fine Arts in Berlin, Paris and Lisbon she graduated as Master of Fine Arts at the University of the Arts in Berlin in 2010. Her work was exhibited internationally in group and solo exhibitions since 2005 at Autocenter Berlin, Art Center Los Angeles, Bourouina Gallery Berlin, Lisi Hämmerle Gallery Bregenz, and Klondike Institute of Art and Culture in Canada. She is currently in residence at The Barber Shop, Lisbon and is preparing an upcoming exhibition at Museu Geológico in March 2013.
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The Barber Shop Residency Program offers support to the practice of artists, curators, and musicians hosting them in Lisbon for the period of 4 to 8 weeks, providing regular consultations and organized programmes to ensure assistance to the residency holder practice, and contact with the Portuguese art scene.
Archive #22
Judith Sonnicken, born in 1981 in Wickede-Wimbern/Germany, is a Berlin-based visual artist. After her studies of Fashion and Fine Arts in Berlin, Paris and Lisbon she graduated as Master of Fine Arts at the University of the Arts in Berlin in 2010. Her work was exhibited internationally in group and solo exhibitions since 2005 at Autocenter Berlin, Art Center Los Angeles, Bourouina Gallery Berlin, Lisi Hämmerle Gallery Bregenz, and Klondike Institute of Art and Culture in Canada. She is currently in residence at The Barber Shop, Lisbon and is preparing an upcoming exhibition at Museu Geológico in March 2013.
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The Barber Shop Residency Program offers support to the practice of artists, curators, and musicians hosting them in Lisbon for the period of 4 to 8 weeks, providing regular consultations and organized programmes to ensure assistance to the residency holder practice, and contact with the Portuguese art scene.
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Archive #22
+ info: 98WEEKS
Support:
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Archive #21
Archive #21
Nomadic Ontology: Mutations of the Aesthetic
The programme will introduce core questions inherent to the discipline of ontology, exploring both its direct implications towards an understanding of the aesthetic object, as well as the essence of its relational and transformative potency. Thus, the proposals of the theorists invited to take part in Nomadic Ontology: Mutations of the Aesthetic, intend to intensify the debate about the essential relational links between objects and agents, the human and the infinite, therefore defying the reflexive horizon of ontological thought.
Tim Morton — Dark Ecology: Art and Thinking after the End of the World
Timothy Morton will present a communication which will wonder through terrains far from the anthropocentrism central to most continental philosophy, revising the place of art and thought in a post-humanist world, with the support of his ecological theory. Morton will introduce his thoughts according to his positioning within the Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) movement, which has been growing exponentially on both margins of the Atlantic, as an ally of Speculative Realism.
26 Oct - The Barber Shop 7pm
28 Oct - Laboratório de Curadoria, Fábrica ASA Guimarães 4pm
28 Oct - Laboratório de Curadoria, Fábrica ASA Guimarães 4pm
"Since roughly 1790, humans have been depositing a thin layer of carbon in Earth's crust. This layer can now be detected in deep lakes and in Arctic ice. The term now given for this by geology is Anthropocene, a disturbing moment at which human history intersects decisively with geological time.
Since 1945, when humans began to deposit a layer of radioactive materials in Earth's crust, the Anthropocene has accelerated logarithmically, and we now live within a period called The Great Acceleration. Global warming and extinction are interrelated effects of the crossroads we have now reached, a crossroads at which geological and human time have intersected.
This intersection renders meaningless the very tools with which modernity has striven to talk about the nonhuman: concepts such as Nature,world, and even environment are now obsolete. Though they may be politically useful in some circumstances, they are not heuristically useful in any meaningful sense, and may indeed be part of the problem and not part of the solution.
Furthermore, we are now confronted with gigantic entities —global warming, evolution,biosphere—that cannot be seen directly by three-dimensional beings of limited intelligence. Rather, they can be inferred mathematically and logically, a fact that emphasizes that reason itself is not strictly human-flavored, and that we inhabit a reality that is much larger, and more intractable, than we had supposed.
1790 was also roughly the moment at which Western philosophy decided that it could not talk about the real, but only about (human) access to the real. I see this moment and the fact of the Anthropocene as deeply related.
What is required is a philosophy—and a corresponding ethics and politics—that can think the nonhuman, not simply as the adornment or correlate of the human. Modernity damaged Earth, but it also damaged thinking. Unfortunately, one of the damaged concepts is the very concept Nature.
I call this philosophy dark ecology. It has quite strong implications for ecological arts."
Tim Morton
Next Session:
Luciana Parisi — For an Aesthetic of Computation
Luciana Parisi, former member of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) of Warwick, once led by Nick Land, will present her recent research. Parisi has dedicated her interest to areas as wide as cybernetics, non linear and endosymbiotic evolutional dynamics, synesthesia and generative simulation of perceptive space, or the impact of biotechnology, questioning the relation between science, technology, ontological evolution and capitalism.
This session has been postponed.
produção:
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Recently in Residence:
Judith was preparing her upcoming solo show at
Museu Geológico, this coming spring.
Museu Geológico, this coming spring.
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