26 July 2024 until 27 July 2024
Research Interrupted: workshops and events
Please find more information about the workshops and events as part of the week-long presentation Research Interrupted by the BAK fellows in Utrecht and Istanbul.
Click here for the timetable.
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26 JULY
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(Un)Schooling Resilience; Diagnostics, Resistance and Restorative Strategies is a one-day event that brings together different artistic and research trajectories that center on ‘the body’ as a living diagnostic of extractive capitalism. These bodies range from sick, anxious, and exhausted human forms to earth beings and more-than-human entities. The event explores practices of rebellion and resilience, restorative actions, withdrawals, politics of rest and grief, and glacial resistance.
Join the BAK 2023–2024 fellows on 26 July 2024 from 10-20 hrs for a compelling program of conversations, workshops, and sharings. Together, they will practice, envision, and dream of a future beyond the spell of extractive capitalism.
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26 JULY
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(Un)Schooling Resilience; Diagnostics, Resistance and Restorative Strategies is a one-day event that brings together different artistic and research trajectories that center on ‘the body’ as a living diagnostic of extractive capitalism. These bodies range from sick, anxious, and exhausted human forms to earth beings and more-than-human entities. The event explores practices of rebellion and resilience, restorative actions, withdrawals, politics of rest and grief, and glacial resistance.
Join the BAK 2023–2024 fellows on 26 July 2024 from 10-20 hrs for a compelling program of conversations, workshops, and sharings. Together, they will practice, envision, and dream of a future beyond the spell of extractive capitalism.
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10–13 hrs
Garage School of Medicine: Community Apothecary (workshop)
Garage School of Medicine invites you to a community apothecary workshop and lunch hosted in and around BAK. Over the Fellowship for Situated Practice, the Garage School of Medicine (consisting of Kari Robertson and Santiago Pinyol) has explored alternative ways to understand health, wellness, and resilience through practices of radical herbalism, deep medicine, and community care. Join them for a session of conversation, hands-on study, and eating together.
NB: Please bring to the session a home remedy from your own context or any ingredient that supports you and/or your community. This can be, for example, a herb, fruit, spice, or a pill. If you do not have a home remedy in mind, it could also be a plant that is otherwise significant for you.
10–13 hrs
Garage School of Medicine: Community Apothecary (workshop)
Garage School of Medicine invites you to a community apothecary workshop and lunch hosted in and around BAK. Over the Fellowship for Situated Practice, the Garage School of Medicine (consisting of Kari Robertson and Santiago Pinyol) has explored alternative ways to understand health, wellness, and resilience through practices of radical herbalism, deep medicine, and community care. Join them for a session of conversation, hands-on study, and eating together.
NB: Please bring to the session a home remedy from your own context or any ingredient that supports you and/or your community. This can be, for example, a herb, fruit, spice, or a pill. If you do not have a home remedy in mind, it could also be a plant that is otherwise significant for you.
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14–15 hrs
Marta Keil: Gestures of Withdrawal: Traces, Practices, and Spells of Refusal in Performing Arts (conversation)
In the form of ‘studio sharing’ and conversation, Keil will have a look at withdrawal as an active, political gesture that produces cracks, shifts the perception of reality, and opens new (im)possible paths to be paved. What can be learned from the tired bodies of artworkers and art institutions? What opens up when one takes a leave? What are the new ways they have started to pave instead? Who can afford to withdraw? How can a curator become a doula, accompanying the process of withdrawing and mourning what's needed to say goodbye to?
Following various traces left by the individuals and institutions in the performing arts field who refused to work like this, Keil observes how a withdrawal is being constituted and manifested with performative tools (e.g., a spell, an announcement, a gathering, a curatorial framework, a ritual) and what political potential it might invite to emerge.
14–15 hrs
Marta Keil: Gestures of Withdrawal: Traces, Practices, and Spells of Refusal in Performing Arts (conversation)
In the form of ‘studio sharing’ and conversation, Keil will have a look at withdrawal as an active, political gesture that produces cracks, shifts the perception of reality, and opens new (im)possible paths to be paved. What can be learned from the tired bodies of artworkers and art institutions? What opens up when one takes a leave? What are the new ways they have started to pave instead? Who can afford to withdraw? How can a curator become a doula, accompanying the process of withdrawing and mourning what's needed to say goodbye to?
Following various traces left by the individuals and institutions in the performing arts field who refused to work like this, Keil observes how a withdrawal is being constituted and manifested with performative tools (e.g., a spell, an announcement, a gathering, a curatorial framework, a ritual) and what political potential it might invite to emerge.
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15:30–16:30 hrs
Yuliia Elyas: Workbook Workshop
Join Yuliia Elyas for a hands-on workshop exploring themes of knowledge production and resistance. Participants will engage in guided reflections and activities designed to delve into issues of knowledge production and mnemonic wars. Through these exercises, we aim to foster a deeper understanding and exploration of personal and collective strategies for navigating complex socio-political landscapes.
During her fellowship at BAK, Yuliia launched the Ukrainian Decolonial Glossary project, which seeks to develop a shared language for examining de-anti- and postcolonial theories in the context of Ukraine. Specifically for this presentation, she has crafted a workbook aligned with the proposed (un)schooling framework that is used as a basis for the workshop. Her inspiration stems from Myroslav Motenko, one of the 20 authors of the glossary, who discussed alternative historical narratives used in school textbooks within occupied territories of Ukraine. This context positions workbooks and pedagogy as critical tools within the discourse on propaganda and historical memory.
15:30–16:30 hrs
Yuliia Elyas: Workbook Workshop
Join Yuliia Elyas for a hands-on workshop exploring themes of knowledge production and resistance. Participants will engage in guided reflections and activities designed to delve into issues of knowledge production and mnemonic wars. Through these exercises, we aim to foster a deeper understanding and exploration of personal and collective strategies for navigating complex socio-political landscapes.
During her fellowship at BAK, Yuliia launched the Ukrainian Decolonial Glossary project, which seeks to develop a shared language for examining de-anti- and postcolonial theories in the context of Ukraine. Specifically for this presentation, she has crafted a workbook aligned with the proposed (un)schooling framework that is used as a basis for the workshop. Her inspiration stems from Myroslav Motenko, one of the 20 authors of the glossary, who discussed alternative historical narratives used in school textbooks within occupied territories of Ukraine. This context positions workbooks and pedagogy as critical tools within the discourse on propaganda and historical memory.
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16:45–18 hrs
Teresa Borasino: Glacial Conversations
A dying ice body breathes through ancestral territories in the southern Andes of Peru. Quelccaya, the world's largest tropical glacier, faces not only the irreversible impacts of climate collapse but also new threats from lithium and uranium mining projects.
In this lecture performance, Teresa Borasino will facilitate a conversation between four distinct perspectives: Yolanda Quispe, a member of the Phinaya community; Victor Bustínza, a specialist in glacial ecosystems; Vito Calderón, an Indigenous and environmental rights activist; and the glacier-being.
Using insights and materials gathered from field research conducted during the fellowship, this lecture performance brings to life a larger artistic research project examining the intertwined relationship between the erasure of ancestral knowledge systems and the current ecological crisis facing this significant glacier-being.
16:45–18 hrs
Teresa Borasino: Glacial Conversations
A dying ice body breathes through ancestral territories in the southern Andes of Peru. Quelccaya, the world's largest tropical glacier, faces not only the irreversible impacts of climate collapse but also new threats from lithium and uranium mining projects.
In this lecture performance, Teresa Borasino will facilitate a conversation between four distinct perspectives: Yolanda Quispe, a member of the Phinaya community; Victor Bustínza, a specialist in glacial ecosystems; Vito Calderón, an Indigenous and environmental rights activist; and the glacier-being.
Using insights and materials gathered from field research conducted during the fellowship, this lecture performance brings to life a larger artistic research project examining the intertwined relationship between the erasure of ancestral knowledge systems and the current ecological crisis facing this significant glacier-being.
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18:30–20 hrs
Rest In Power: Rest, Grief, and Resilience in the Times of Late Capitalism
Panel participants: Andrea Knezović, Alev Ersan, Enis Köstepen, Irmak Karasu, Marta Keil, Varduhi Balyan
The participants imagine the dual phrase “Rest in Peace” / “Rest in Power” to highlight how it has been a daunting task for the living to “rest in peace” as they always “rest subjected to power.” How may the living get any rest while witnessing ongoing massacres / genocide / extinction / loss and as they constantly wake up into yet another cycle of burnout? And for the dead, is it possible to rest in peace or power while the causes and struggles in question are losing so much ground? What stories are being told by exhausted institutional bodies, the ghosts of what they might have been and will never become? What imaginaries, ambitions, and working methods do we need to get rid of in order to break the ever-deepening spell of depletion?
In working alongside one another in the past five months, what the artist realized as a subtle common thread, was how landscape / place / site / institutional body could act as a means to access loss and how thinking through these may be an invitation to move toward what is no longer accessible yet what is in need to be grieved and remembered.
18:30–20 hrs
Rest In Power: Rest, Grief, and Resilience in the Times of Late Capitalism
Panel participants: Andrea Knezović, Alev Ersan, Enis Köstepen, Irmak Karasu, Marta Keil, Varduhi Balyan
The participants imagine the dual phrase “Rest in Peace” / “Rest in Power” to highlight how it has been a daunting task for the living to “rest in peace” as they always “rest subjected to power.” How may the living get any rest while witnessing ongoing massacres / genocide / extinction / loss and as they constantly wake up into yet another cycle of burnout? And for the dead, is it possible to rest in peace or power while the causes and struggles in question are losing so much ground? What stories are being told by exhausted institutional bodies, the ghosts of what they might have been and will never become? What imaginaries, ambitions, and working methods do we need to get rid of in order to break the ever-deepening spell of depletion?
In working alongside one another in the past five months, what the artist realized as a subtle common thread, was how landscape / place / site / institutional body could act as a means to access loss and how thinking through these may be an invitation to move toward what is no longer accessible yet what is in need to be grieved and remembered.
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27 JULY
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14–15:30 hrs
Radical Data: Digital Solidarity (workshop)
Join Radical Data for the workshop Digital Solidarity, where they explore the subversive potential of technology to combat oppressive digital labor. In collaboration with union organizer Marta Roz, this workshop delves into innovative strategies for digital solidarity and organization. Marta Roz will highlight how employers exploit technological advancements to increase labor demands, often at the expense of workers' health and safety. Together, they will discuss how digital tools and collective action can be harnessed to protect workers' rights, promote well-being, and foster a supportive community in the digital labor landscape.
27 JULY
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14–15:30 hrs
Radical Data: Digital Solidarity (workshop)
Join Radical Data for the workshop Digital Solidarity, where they explore the subversive potential of technology to combat oppressive digital labor. In collaboration with union organizer Marta Roz, this workshop delves into innovative strategies for digital solidarity and organization. Marta Roz will highlight how employers exploit technological advancements to increase labor demands, often at the expense of workers' health and safety. Together, they will discuss how digital tools and collective action can be harnessed to protect workers' rights, promote well-being, and foster a supportive community in the digital labor landscape.
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16–17 hrs
Maoyi Qiu: Movement/Somatic (workshop)
A public workshop will be held under the proposition from Minor Gesture, where the author Erin Manning positions the body as an "ecology of practices" always being facilitated by the environment. This workshop aims to provide a moment to focus on the zoomed-out exhaustion of sequences and movements. Materials, workbooks, and movement guidance will facilitate participants in examining social and psychic transformation in a lagged temporality.
16–17 hrs
Maoyi Qiu: Movement/Somatic (workshop)
A public workshop will be held under the proposition from Minor Gesture, where the author Erin Manning positions the body as an "ecology of practices" always being facilitated by the environment. This workshop aims to provide a moment to focus on the zoomed-out exhaustion of sequences and movements. Materials, workbooks, and movement guidance will facilitate participants in examining social and psychic transformation in a lagged temporality.
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17–18 hrs
Betül Aksu: Global Talent (performance)
During the BAK Fellowship for Situated Practice, Betül Aksu researched visa requirements for cultural workers and went through the application process of a Global Talent visa herself, to live and work as an artist in the UK. The performance highlights the everyday absurdities of looking at one’s own art practice through the lens of visa requirements.
17–18 hrs
Betül Aksu: Global Talent (performance)
During the BAK Fellowship for Situated Practice, Betül Aksu researched visa requirements for cultural workers and went through the application process of a Global Talent visa herself, to live and work as an artist in the UK. The performance highlights the everyday absurdities of looking at one’s own art practice through the lens of visa requirements.
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18:30–19 hrs
Esra Oskay: Sounds from “the archive of anonymous censorship notes”
"Since November 2023, I have been keeping a log book where I note down people talking about “sensitive” issues in public, amongst their friends yet at a hearing distance to me. This particular form of listening captures what is spoken in the shrinking public spaces. I employ eavesdropping on others and hence approach gossip as an alternative mode of production and circulation of knowledge that gives us a glimpse of what is censored. I listen to everyday conversations, standing nearby to the moments of passing sensitive information, the infra-tiny moments when people speak up within the restricted domains of the public sphere. This could be considered as a particular method of listening, overhearing the others, eavesdropping on the edges of the dominant discourse where a moment of truth and political resistance briefly emerges: listening to what is suppressed. For this event, through the tools of speaking at a distance, notes from the anonymous censorship archives will be voiced by anonymous speakers."
"Undocumenting - Anarchiving": Present in Absence
This is the first attempt of the working group "Anarchiving - Undocumenting" to share the outcomes of our discussions which took place during the BAK fellowship program. Through different film, sound, and textual materials, they share their outcomes on how to (an)archive - (un)document under oppression. By using speculative methodologies and intangible formats they explore what sound and image can bring as one wishes to stay anonymous.
The working group "Undocumenting - Anarchiving" consists of Esra Oskay, Fırat Yücel, Paula Montecinos Oliva, Seher Uysal.
18:30–19 hrs
Esra Oskay: Sounds from “the archive of anonymous censorship notes”
"Since November 2023, I have been keeping a log book where I note down people talking about “sensitive” issues in public, amongst their friends yet at a hearing distance to me. This particular form of listening captures what is spoken in the shrinking public spaces. I employ eavesdropping on others and hence approach gossip as an alternative mode of production and circulation of knowledge that gives us a glimpse of what is censored. I listen to everyday conversations, standing nearby to the moments of passing sensitive information, the infra-tiny moments when people speak up within the restricted domains of the public sphere. This could be considered as a particular method of listening, overhearing the others, eavesdropping on the edges of the dominant discourse where a moment of truth and political resistance briefly emerges: listening to what is suppressed. For this event, through the tools of speaking at a distance, notes from the anonymous censorship archives will be voiced by anonymous speakers."
"Undocumenting - Anarchiving": Present in Absence
This is the first attempt of the working group "Anarchiving - Undocumenting" to share the outcomes of our discussions which took place during the BAK fellowship program. Through different film, sound, and textual materials, they share their outcomes on how to (an)archive - (un)document under oppression. By using speculative methodologies and intangible formats they explore what sound and image can bring as one wishes to stay anonymous.
The working group "Undocumenting - Anarchiving" consists of Esra Oskay, Fırat Yücel, Paula Montecinos Oliva, Seher Uysal.
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19:15–20 hrs
Yâni/Yaani: Ongoing research presentation and discussion
Yâni is Hanieh Fatouraee, Siwar Krai(y)tem, Alev Ersan, Betül Aksu
The presentation includes documentation of the collective’s work and their publication outcome. Formed shortly after the start of the BAK Situated Practice Fellowship, Yâni/Yaani is a group who work using multilingual and translational writing, video, and drawing. Living in four different cities, the artists bring this separation and the specifics of their habitats as well as their personal and familial histories of migration and movement into their collective work. The research content spans locations such as Amsterdam, Beirut, Ankara, Kyrenia, Tehran, Istanbul, Utrecht, and İzmir.
Their first public work, entitled Still in My Quotidian, an attempt at imagining the possibilities of text acting as host, was performed at de Appel, Amsterdam in March 2024. In this lecture performance, the artists presented a collective composition of text, drawings, and videos that spoke to experiences of and references to belonging, alienation, and familiarity with one’s mother tongue as well as questions of absence and presence. The second iteration was a gathering where all participants were able to spend time together in person for the first time, at Sezon, an art space in İzmir. The publication seeks to present the ongoing and unfinished nature of their work and is divided into chapters through the cities that have particular resonations within the research.
19:15–20 hrs
Yâni/Yaani: Ongoing research presentation and discussion
Yâni is Hanieh Fatouraee, Siwar Krai(y)tem, Alev Ersan, Betül Aksu
The presentation includes documentation of the collective’s work and their publication outcome. Formed shortly after the start of the BAK Situated Practice Fellowship, Yâni/Yaani is a group who work using multilingual and translational writing, video, and drawing. Living in four different cities, the artists bring this separation and the specifics of their habitats as well as their personal and familial histories of migration and movement into their collective work. The research content spans locations such as Amsterdam, Beirut, Ankara, Kyrenia, Tehran, Istanbul, Utrecht, and İzmir.
Their first public work, entitled Still in My Quotidian, an attempt at imagining the possibilities of text acting as host, was performed at de Appel, Amsterdam in March 2024. In this lecture performance, the artists presented a collective composition of text, drawings, and videos that spoke to experiences of and references to belonging, alienation, and familiarity with one’s mother tongue as well as questions of absence and presence. The second iteration was a gathering where all participants were able to spend time together in person for the first time, at Sezon, an art space in İzmir. The publication seeks to present the ongoing and unfinished nature of their work and is divided into chapters through the cities that have particular resonations within the research.
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20–21 hrs
Astrid Feringa and Claude Nassar: If the International Atomic Clock was Circuit-Bent, It Would Play "Aquarius (Flamman & Abraxas Radio Mix)" by Party Animals and De-Synchronise the Rhythms of Modernity
Jamming-session during drinks
The managing systems of Western modernity (network- and communication technologies, satellite navigation, financial markets, trade, the internet, etc.) function by synchronizing their components to a master-clock. The same logic applies to small-scale electronic systems. For example, in the case of a synthesizer, the components that constitute it need to be synchronized to a master-clock in order for it to generate steady oscillations and produce a stable sound.
However, as our bodies are subject to and enactors of dissonant (social) frequencies, rhythms, and vocabularies, we are wondering: what kind of technologies and what kind of social structures accordingly can we imagine if we forgo a mode of organization dependent on synchronization according to a presupposed steady and unified rhythm? Through a jamming-session with synthesized sound*, samples**, and steady rhythms inspired by Gabber-house music***, we invite you to imagine what would be an alternative to modern modes of bureaucratic management, if their core, their circuits, and their structure of organization are not synchronized to a steady clock of a presupposed order. Additionally, we invite everybody who wants to be part of this experiment in undoing harmonization to bring their own instruments that can be plugged into a mixer plus the necessary cables.
*Synthesized sounds, exploring relations between different patterns beyond harmonic alignment, that is, alignment according to a pre-established, periodic and universal order.
**Samples of speech and spoken word, exploring discursive articulations of harmonic alignment
***Steady rhythms, exploring the tension between the irregular events of the previous two, and a rigid structure.
20–21 hrs
Astrid Feringa and Claude Nassar: If the International Atomic Clock was Circuit-Bent, It Would Play "Aquarius (Flamman & Abraxas Radio Mix)" by Party Animals and De-Synchronise the Rhythms of Modernity
Jamming-session during drinks
The managing systems of Western modernity (network- and communication technologies, satellite navigation, financial markets, trade, the internet, etc.) function by synchronizing their components to a master-clock. The same logic applies to small-scale electronic systems. For example, in the case of a synthesizer, the components that constitute it need to be synchronized to a master-clock in order for it to generate steady oscillations and produce a stable sound.
However, as our bodies are subject to and enactors of dissonant (social) frequencies, rhythms, and vocabularies, we are wondering: what kind of technologies and what kind of social structures accordingly can we imagine if we forgo a mode of organization dependent on synchronization according to a presupposed steady and unified rhythm? Through a jamming-session with synthesized sound*, samples**, and steady rhythms inspired by Gabber-house music***, we invite you to imagine what would be an alternative to modern modes of bureaucratic management, if their core, their circuits, and their structure of organization are not synchronized to a steady clock of a presupposed order. Additionally, we invite everybody who wants to be part of this experiment in undoing harmonization to bring their own instruments that can be plugged into a mixer plus the necessary cables.
*Synthesized sounds, exploring relations between different patterns beyond harmonic alignment, that is, alignment according to a pre-established, periodic and universal order.
**Samples of speech and spoken word, exploring discursive articulations of harmonic alignment
***Steady rhythms, exploring the tension between the irregular events of the previous two, and a rigid structure.
VISITING INFO
To register for the workshops, please email fellowshipforsituatedpractice
@gmail.com.
