Festival »Fragile Solidarity/Fragile Connections«

Pivilion – Your Darknet Pocket Gallery
Format C (Dina Karadžić and Vedran Gligo)

Workshop, Württembergischer Kunstverein

Registration required by May 5: register@akademie-solitude.de

This free software and new-media art workshop is based on the idea of utilizing multipurpose, low-cost, SoC computers as autonomous digital arts darknet gallery servers. Participants will structure and create their own darknet multi/hypermedia galleries and set them up on a GNU/Linux based system, while considering, applying and discussing digital art’s ethical, aesthetic, and technical aspects.

Dina Karadžić is an artist active in the areas of visual, digital, and Net Art. Karadžić is art director of Format C, an art organization focused on experimental multimedia research and collaborative creation; she also volunteers with many community nonprofits and independent art initiatives.

Vedran Gligo Vedran Gligo is a self-taught DIY hacker/artist/cultural organizer. He applies open-source principles to everyday life and practice and works to empower local communities by holding free and open digital workshops in Zagreb’s Autonomous Cultural Center through the hacklab01.org project which he cofounded in 2009.

Soft Bread, Hard Times: A History of Food Texture Modification
Agnes Cameron and Gary Zhexi Zhang

Lecture, Württembergischer Kunstverein

The history of food texture modification is intimately bound to developments within imperial food systems. The texture of food we eat impacts the crops grown, the nutritional content of food, and even how we speak about food. All these attributes form the backbone of frequent moral panics about our society. In this lecture, we will explore industrial food processes from a perspective critically engaged with, rather than dismissive of technoscientific developments in food texture.

Agnes Cameron is a hardware and software engineer with a particular interest in simulation, distributed knowledge, and infrastructural systems. She is currently developing work around food supply chains and industrial food infrastructure.

Gary Zhexi Zhang is a visual artist and writer whose work explores fiction,
infrastructure, and conceptual systems that compose the concrete world, such as ecology, finance, and information.

Gary Zhexi Zhang and Agnes Cameron make work about ecology, simulation, and the social dimensions of computing systems and technologies.

Yesterday’s Rice, Tomorrow’s Solidarity
Anca Rujoiu in conversation with Elia Nurvista

Artist talk, Württembergischer Kunstverein

After Elia Nurvista’s food workshop on May 10 at Akademie Schloss Solitude, she will address politics, economics, and histories of food as they transpire from the menu created by the artist and in conversation with curator Anca Rujoiu. The entangled histories of rice, alongside tempeh and gado gado — the main components of the dish — lay the foundation and structure of this conversation. Within the framework of the recipe, we will delve into Nurvista’s past projects, her engagement with different solidarity movements in Indonesia, and the virtues of cooking and sharing meals.

Elia Nurvista explores a wide range of artistic mediums with an interdisciplinary approach, focusing on the discourse on food. Through food she scrutinizes power, social, and economic inequality in this world. In 2015 she initiated Bakudapan, a food study group, with colleagues from different disciplines. With Bakudapan she has conducted research on food within the sociopolitical and cultural context. She is also part of Struggles for Sovereignty, the solidarity platform on land, water, farming, and food.

Anca Rujoiu is a curator and editor. She curated the web residencies program »Solidarity is a verb« (2021) hosted by Akademie Schloss Solitude with ARC Bucharest. In 2019 she was cocurator of the third edition of the Art Encounters Biennial in Timișoara, Romania. As curator of exhibitions and later head of publications (2013–18), she was a member of the founding team of the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore. She is a Ph.D. candidate at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, with research focused on institution building, artists’ archives, and transnational imaginaries.

Expanding Solidarities in Interactive Digital Videogame Projects
Grayson Earle, Peter Polack, Ricardo Miranda Zúñiga

Workshop, Merz Akademie and online

Registration required by May 5: register@akademie-solitude.de

This workshop gives participants the opportunity to present and discuss their interactive video game projects. Participants are given five to ten minutes to demonstrate their projects, followed by a collective discussion. Discussion topics can include the fragile solidarities that games and networked environments provide, especially during the pandemic. Together we will look at biased codes, the accessibility of these environments, who they appeal to, who these exemplary interactive videogame projects and technologies ultimately serve/address, their potential for facilitating organization in analogue spaces, as well as questions about specific projects.

Grayson Earle is an American contemporary artist and activist. He uses new media to make political statements. He is known for his guerilla video projections as a member of The Illuminator Art Collective and his co-creation of Bail Bloc, a computer program that bails people out of jail.

Peter Polack is a designer and Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Information Studies at the University of California (UCLA), Los Angeles, USA. His work and research address how technical systems are designed to inform our perception, and the role of art-making in illustrating what technology makes perceptible. This focus is informed by his background in game design and data visualization, and by his work with the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, a grassroots organization that analyzes the social impacts of police surveillance systems.

Ricardo Miranda Zúñiga approaches art as a social practice that seeks to establish dialogue in public spaces. The ways that inequality and power manifest themselves in our lives are consistent threads in Ricardo’s work.

Castle of Crossed Destinies: Grounding Workshop
Castle of Crossed Destinies (Aouefa Amoussouvi, Sasha Engelmann, Olivia Berkowicz)

Workshop, Online

Registration required by May 5: register@akademie-solitude.de

This online workshop opens a dialogue based on the Castle of Crossed Destinies (COCD) playing cards »The Devil,« »Anandamide,« »7Mhz« and monologues, which are informed by feminist principles. Participants are invited to respond to the cards’ monologues and questions in various media. The workshop is a space for self-reflection, collecting, and collectively discussing these responses.

The Castle of Crossed Destinies was initiated by geographer Sasha Engelmann, curator Olivia Berkowicz, and curator and biophysicist Aouefa Amoussouvi. The collective encounters merge rituals, technologies, feminist narratives in science and art, as well as personal experiences and reflections on transgenerational memories and migrations.

Opening ceremony of the festival’s venue and exhibition
6 pm, Kunstverein Wagenhalle

Bar open from 6 pm to 11 pm
Livestream from 7 to 8 pm

Beyond Borders It’s Made Up of Islands
die Blaue Distanz

Beyond Borders It’s Made Up of Islands is the spatial concept for the main venue of the festival »Fragile Solidarity/Fragile Connections« at Kunstverein Wagenhalle, designed by die Blaue Distanz. The spatial elements are significantly inspired by the basic principles of solidarity. Sometimes decentralized, sometimes unconditionally supportive, inviting the audience to recharge and explore solidary sharing practices.

Note: As part of the work of die Blaue Distanz, there will be a fruit bar. Visitors and festival participants are invited to bring fruits to share amongst each other.

die Blaue Distanz are Anna Erdmann and Franziska Goralski. They have been working together as an artist duo since 2016. Their artistic collaboration focuses on queer ways of living and learning, the possibility of low-hierarchy spaces and the visibility of underrepresented decisions.

Assemblies, Swarms, and Intricate Webs – no solidarity exists in a social void
Exhibition, curated by Jazmina Figueroa and Denise Helene Sumi

Opening hours: Friday and Saturday, May 13 and 14, 2022, 2–11 pm
Guided tour: Friday, May 13, 2022, 3:30–4:30 pm

With works by Lark Alder aka. Lark VCR, Call to Action, Agnes Cameron and Gary Zhexi Zhang, Castle of Crossed Destinies (Aouefa Amoussouvi, Sasha Engelmann, and Olivia Berkowicz), Distributed Cognition Cooperative (Sasha Shestakova and Anna Engelhardt), Grayson Earle, Format C (Dina Karadžić and Vedran Gligo), Frisch&Schick (Johannes Frick and Jasmin Schädler), Zahra Malkani, Aline Xavier Mineiro, More of Us, Simina Neagu, Anca Rujoiu (invites Medina Bazargali, Alevtina Kakhidze, and Nge Lay), Juan Pablo García Sossa (JPGS), and Peter Polack

Traces of the 1907 Socialist International Congress
Margret Frenz in conversation with Grayson Earle and Ana María Gómez López

Lecture and conversation, Kunstverein Wagenhalle and livestream

What are the traces of the 1907 Socialist International Congress in Stuttgart, both in the archives of this city and elsewhere? This is a conversation on interdisciplinary perspectives related to artifacts, photographs, and ephemera from this event as seen through the eyes of historian Margret Frenz and artists Grayson Earle and Ana María Gómez López. How can these elements be read in the present, particularly through the anti-imperial, feminist, and pacifist legacies of the 1907 Socialist International Congress? Likewise, how can these configure new understandings of international worker solidarity, particularly in light of its overlooked local and global histories?

Margret Frenz is a historian, with a strong emphasis on global, transnational, and imperial history, as well as comparative social and cultural perspectives.

Grayson Earle is an American contemporary artist and activist. He uses new media to make political statements, known for his guerrilla video projections as a member of The Illuminator Art Collective and his cocreation of Bail Bloc, which is a computer program that bails people out of jail.

Ana María Gómez López is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher based in Amsterdam. She creates durational and body-based projects anchored in self-experimentation and archival research in the history of science.

The Notion of Schiller’s »Spiel«
Spielgruppe

Workshop, Reading Group, Kunstverein Wagenhalle

Registration required by May 5: register@akademie-solitude.de

Reading works by writers such as Mariana Mazzucato, Paul Lafargue, Frigga Haug, and others, Spielgruppe (German for play group) uses the communal reading to reflect on their working conditions as artists, and their role in a capitalist society and share strategies in coping with an anarcho-capitalistic art market and cruel labor conditions in a gig economy. During public reading sessions, they want to establish play as a countermovement to current economical working conditions, drawing from the notion of Schiller’s »Spiel« (German for play).

In February 2021, a few artists from Stuttgart formed a reading group called »Spielgruppe«, meeting once a week since their formation. For the reading session during the festival, Janis Eckhardt, Ariane Koziolek, Florian Model, Dirk Reimes, Mira Simon, and Alexander Sowa of Spielgruppe will be present.

The Trolley Dilemma
Simona Dumitriu and Ramona Dima (Simona & Ramona aka Claude & Dersch)

Interactive lecture performance, online

Please register until May 5, 2022: register@akademie-solitude.de

Simona Dumitriu and Ramona Dima’s project for Digital Solitude’s recent »Solidarity is not a Verb« web residency brought to light zero-hour contracts and precarious working conditions in Sweden, from a perspective of personal stories, but also very much intertwined with the idea of »fate.« Based on this project, Dumitriu and Dima made a performance for a live Zoom event for the festival with a participatory audience, which will present our story and the stories of others in the format of a »choose your own adventure« narrative. Like a »choose your own adventure or ending« story or game, the audience will be asked to vote on a series of options, each of which will propose alternatives to the trolley dilemma, thus choosing our fate.

Simona & Ramona (aka Claude & Dersch) are the artistic alter egos of Simona Dumitriu and Ramona Dima, a duo in both art and life. They share a common interest in poetry and autoethnographical writing as a political tool.

Walk through the exhibition Assemblies, Swarms, and Intricate Webs – no solidarity exists in a social void with the artists present.

Guided exhibition tour, Kunstverein Wagenhalle

Fantastic Confabulations
Jazmina Figueroa and Theodoulos Polyviou

Artist talk, Kunstverein Wagenhalle and livestream

Institutional physicality, cultural political narratives, and contextual significance through expanded media are at the center of Polyviou and Figueroa’s collaborative practice. Theodoulos, starting with the ongoing project Transmundane Economies (2022–) that recontextualizes Cypriot cultural heritage to virtual spaces, will present his artistic practice as a conceptual framework to confront the experiential, social, and epistemic attributes of immersive media within and beyond institutional contexts. In conversation with Polyviou, Figueroa will speak about shared reciprocity, non-linear forms of storytelling and the sound recording practices incorporated in their work together. The discussion will expand beyond the predicated political dimension of their works, opening up to the potentialities of digital experiences such as staging non-space or disorientating institutional presence.

Jazmina Figueroa is a writer and current fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude. Her writing and research critically examine data extraction and experiences with technology as immensely personal, nonscalable and inherently sociopolitical.

Theodoulos Polyviou is a Berlin-based artist. He is currently an artist in residence at Kora – Contemporary Arts Center in Lecce, Italy.

The Grave
Danae Tapia

Performative lecture, Kunstverein Wagenhalle and livestream

The Grave uses excerpts from the Communist Manifesto and combines them with curated images collected by Danae Tapia from signal chats with friends. The intention is to create an oracular instance that uses the spiritually charged aesthetics of Marx and Engels’ text and visual media in conjunction with digital intimacies. Ultimately, it is an exercise in re-territorialization with the potential to unleash a multiplicity of meanings that align with socialist ideals. She will map ideological trajectories and eventually find out if the communist drive is relevant in the twenty-first century characterized by capitalistic precarity and people’s struggles are tackled through sanitized concepts such as »activism« or »solidarity.« This project advances her research on bots, autopoiesis, and divination that she started during the Post-Doom web residency of Akademie Schloss Solitude

Danae Tapia, is a Chile-born working-class feminist writer, multimedia artist, and technologist. She is a lecturer of Hacking and Autonomous Practices at the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. She is the founder of The Digital Witchcraft Institute.

Solidarity Must Be Defended
Simina Neagu, Eszter Szakács and Naeem Mohaiemen

Conversation, Kunstverein Wagenhalle and livestream

Artist Simina Neagu in conversation with curator Eszter Szakács and artist Naeem Mohaiemen about the reader »Solidarity Must Be Defended.« The anthology brings together projects on gestures and alignments within the visual arts around transnational solidarity during the Cold War. In an exchange with, among others, the quietist tendencies of non-alignment and the radical vector of liberation movements, the book looks at both grand initiatives and tragic misfires from an entangled, decolonizing world. This anthology begins with the importance of celebrating transnational solidarity, but also recognizes that such solidarity is extremely difficult to inhabit.

Simina Neagu is a cultural worker, curator, and writer based in London/UK, currently working as Program and Operations Coordinator at iniva (Institute of International Visual Arts). Previous projects have explored diasporic histories, networks of international solidarity, translation, labor and access in the arts, and the construction of public space.

Eszter Szakács is a curator, researcher, and Ph.D. candidate at the University of Amsterdam. Eszter is on the curatorial team of the grassroots art initiative OFF-Biennale Budapest and was part of the East Europe Biennial Alliance team that collectively curated the Kyiv Biennial in 2021.

Naeem Mohaiemen researches the forms of utopia-dystopia – beginning from peak decolonization in the Muslim world and radiating outward to unlikely transnational alliances. He is Associate Professor of Visual Arts & Area Head of Photography at Columbia University, New York.

Epistolary Ancestries
Kiran Kumār

Performance lecture, Kunstverein Wagenhalle and livestream

Epistolary Ancestries is an inquiry into a personal filiation of practice, through a corpus of expanded writings intersecting three textual forms: the note, the critical essay, and the letter. Drawing from an embodied practice of dance, a plurality of notes (words, dances, images, songs) drift into an essayistic constellation, in turn, framed as an open letter to an already dead person. By this gesture of direct address, the corpus co-opts an idiosyncratic ancestry of inquiry: dancers, writers, sculptors, mathematicians, and doctors. Nine epistolary essays progressively reframe dance in various contexts: artistic reconstruction, national-cultural identification, feminist modernity, fabulation and historiography, decolonial strategies, and critical scientism. With Epistolary Ancestries, Kiraṇ Kumār amplifies the practice of talking-to-the-dead as both a fragile connection and a practice of re-membering and therefore reshaping our worlds.

Kiran Kumār is an artist, researcher, and writer. He approaches the human body-mind through a trifold practice of dance as art, science, and spi/ritual. Rooted primarily in somatic practices of Haṭha yoga, Kaḷaripayaṭṭ and traditional Indic temple dancing, his research involves critical, conceptual, and artistic inquiries into these practices.

DESMONTE (To Become Undone)
Pedro Oliveira (OLVRA)

Live sound performance, Kunstverein Wagenhalle and livestream

DESMONTE (To Become Undone) is a performance for electronics and recorded voice that seeks to uproot voice from the body, and the body from origin. A study on the limits and failures of (machine) listening, the piece appropriates and misuses spectral techniques similar to those of the so-called »dialect recognition software,« a proprietary technology in use for cases of undocumented asylum seekers in Germany. DESMONTE is constructed with and through the voice of death metal singer Fernanda Lira (Crypta).

Pedro Oliveira ist Forscher und Klangkünstler, der sich in seiner Arbeit mit den kulturellen und kolonialen Ausprägungen von Zuhören, Gewalt und der Überwachung von Körpern in städtischen und grenznahen Räumen beschäftigt. Er hat an der Universität der Künste Berlin promoviert.

Queer Artists’ Perspective on the Socio-Political Mutations
Giorgi Rodionov

Workshop, Kunstverein Wagenhalle

Registration required by May 5: register@akademie-solitude.de

The workshop provides insight into how queer artists from the South Caucasus self-organized and dealt with 30 years of constant sociopolitical mutation accompanied by poverty and conflict. The participants will discuss the difficulties in the artistic dialogue on queer issues while implementing foreign terminologies on human rights without proper translations.

Giorgi Rodionov is a Tbilisi-based artist and curator focused on social and political stories from the South Caucasus. Most of his works are research-based and transform into different media. Rodionov also founded Untitled Tbilisi – an art space aiming to bring the artists together to open the dialogue on human rights.

Dreaming As an Active Practice (Dreaming and Dream Tech As Sites of Liberation)
Mia Imani Harrison

Workshop, Kunstverein Wagenhalle

Guiding principles and questions in this workshop will include: Who can afford to dream? Recognizing the need to reclaim sleep and dreams from colonial agendas, Black activists and artists have led the »rest for resistance« movement. This movement has developed alongside the rapid growth of sleep tech into a multibillion-dollar industry of products for sleep-deprived consumers. The next frontier is dream neurotech—technology that directly interfaces with the dreaming mind. Examples include lucid dreaming wearables, dream recording, and dream advertising.

Mia Imani interrogates the ways that disenfranchised communities can heal individual, communal, and societal trauma by creating works that live in between the worlds of art and science. This »third way« mixes unconventional methods (dreams, rituals) and science (ethnography, geography, psychoanalysis) to dream new potential ways of being.

The Internet Farm and the Philippine Circumstance
Mac Andre Arboleda

Screening and artist talk, Kunstverein Wagenhalle and livestream

Mac Andre Arboleda will screen an extract of his video tentatively titled The Internet Farm and the Philippine Circumstance. This video presents his work The Internet Farm, a web-based project and collective that was further developed out of the militarized pandemic situation in the Philippines. In the following discussion, Arboleda will address topics surrounding mutual aid, digital media in the age of platform capitalism, soft networks, and artmaking in the pandemic.

Mac Andre Arboleda is an artist interested in exploring the sickness of the internet through research and dialogue, art, and text, and organizing and publishing. He is the founding President of the UP Internet Freedom Network, an alliance of students and volunteers advocating for digital rights in the Philippines and beyond.

Futura Trōpica – A Decentralized Network
Juan Pablo García Sossa (JPGS)

Artist talk, Kunstverein Wagenhalle and livestream

Today, it is still a common belief that tech innovation in the Tropics is a direct legacy of colonial and postcolonial intervention, rather than a manifestation of genuine, blooming interactions between emerging technologies, and endemic practices, and costumes. Juan Pablo García Sossa (JPGS) will introduce investigations in territories in Colombia, Brazil, Kenya, Tanzania, India, Vietnam, and Thailand, among many others. García Sossa has been investigating how emerging technologies are being »misused« or reappropriated by grass-root popular culture in the Tropics, developing scenarios otherwise unthought in the so called Global North. After months of lateral exchange around situated knowledge examining our natural and artificial environments, Futura Trōpica has special focus on further developing the concept of FLOW (Free Libre Open Wild) Systems as a shift from FLOSS (Free Libre OpenSource Software). Systems meant to be mutable, re-appropriable and wild.

Juan Pablo García Sossa (JPGS) is a designer, researcher, and artist fascinated by the clash between emerging technologies and grassroots popular culture in the Tropics. His practice explores the development of cultures, realities, and worlds through the reappropriation of technologies from a Tropikós perspective (the Tropics as a region and mindset).

How to Complete a Network?
Panel with Juan Pablo García Sossa (JPGS), Dina Karadžić and Vedran Gligo, moderated by Mac Andre Arboleda

Panel, Kunstverein Wagenhalle and livestream

Initiated by Mac Andre Arboleda, How to Complete a Network? brings together artists and collectives from the Digital Solitude network whose practice involves organizing and building networks and collectives, whether online or offline, toward a particular cause. This panel looks at the concerns, aspirations, and failures in solidarity building, to answer how to better nurture existing networks, especially in a world mediated by technology. Mac Andre Arboleda begins this inquiry with his personal experience of establishing the Artists for Digital Rights Network, an alliance of artists/activists in the Asia-Pacific.

Mac Andre Arboleda is an artist interested in exploring the sickness of the internet through research and dialogue, art, and text, and organizing and publishing. He is the founding President of the UP Internet Freedom Network, an alliance of students and volunteers advocating for digital rights in the Philippines and beyond.

Juan Pablo García Sossa (JPGS) is a designer, researcher, and artist fascinated by the clash between emerging technologies and grass-root popular culture in the tropics. His practice explores the development of cultures, realities, and worlds through the reappropriation of technologies from a Tropikós perspective (the tropics as a region and mindset).

Dina Karadžić is an artist active in the areas of visual, digital, and net art. Dina is art director of Format C, an art organization focused on experimental multimedia research and collaborative creation, and volunteers with many community non-profits and independent art initiatives.

Vedran Gligo is a self–taught DIY hacker/artist/cultural organizer. Strongly applying open-source principles in everyday life and practice and working to empower the local community by holding free and open digital workshops in Zagreb’s Autonomous Cultural Center through the hacklab01.org project which he cofounded in 2009.

LET’S WRITE A CURSE
Ulla Heinrich, Andara Shastika in conversation with Elke aus dem Moore and akiko soyja

Kunstverein Wagenhalle and livestream

Members of dglt fmnsm and guests in conversation about the dgtl fmnsm web residency call for Akademie Schloss Solitude: »Resting: Undesired by the Market,« structural violence in the art field and feminist perspectives on equity.
LET’S WRITE A CURSE came up in an online discussion dgtl fmnsm had with the international applicants for the »Resting!« call. The discussion focused on the question of intersectional justice within the arts community. Together, demands on institutions were developed, which will be presented during the talk.

For dgtl fmnsm collective: Andara Shastika is an artist who works with digital media and performance, community organizer based in Kassel, and currently one of the artistic assistants at the research project ComArts (Community Arts) in the University of Applied Sciences Dusseldorf, led by Prof. Dr. Swantje Lichtenstein and Prof. Maria Schleiner.

Ulla Heinrich is the founder of dgtl fmnsm, cultural educator, curator for hybrid and digital arts and CEO of the queer feminist Magazine »Missy Magazine.«

akiko soyja is moved by interruptions of binary thinking, by how we can connect various struggles & movements and what societies do to our bodies. They focus on anti-racism, queer feminism, empowerment and powersharing in their works.

Elke aus dem Moore is the director of Akademie Schloss Solitude. Her curatorial and programmatic approach is based on the principles of encounter, exchange, and dialogue. The interconnection of global social questions with local experiences and a contemporary art practice are characteristic for her curatorial work.

Aftermath of Future Deaths
Anna Engelhardt (Distributed Cognition Cooperative)

Lecture performance, livestream

Colonial wars, associated with the conquest of space, spread out into time. Russian colonial invasions span generations and subject their targets to repeated cycles of fear and violence. Russian weaponry, advertised to exist in the high-tech future of remotely controlled battles, is stuck in the mud of time. In its obsolescence, its colonial violence persists. As the dead of one war haunts the dead of another, Anna Engelhardt thinks about how to amplify the hardwired obsolescence of Russian colonialism.

Anna Engelhardt is a Russian research-based media artist and writer. Her investigations take on multiple forms of media as they develop over time, including publications, videos, websites, and physical objects. Her primary interest lies in decolonial approaches to cyberspace, which she advances in her Ph.D. on Russian cyber warfare as a colonial enterprise.

Magandzelo
Nkhensani Mkhari

Performance, guided meditation and discussion, livestream

Magandzelo is a tsonga word for ritual. Nkhensani Mkhari will be offering an online ritual of meditation or »Ehleketa hi vuenti« which functions to (re)connect the participants with their ancestral lineage. A transtemporal ephemeral gesture looking back and forward in time.

Nkhensani Mkhari is a multidisciplinary artist, curator, and healer based between Cape Town and Johannesburg with a keen interest in the intersections between art and technology. Their artworks function as multimodal material-semiotic metaphors.

Clearing The Traum(a): A Ritual Of Collective Healing
Mia Imani Harrison

Performance, Kunstverein Wagenhalle and livestream

»I dream a dream that dreams back at me.«
– Toni Morrison

During the REM sleep cycle, our brain consolidates, downloads, and processes the data from the day. It is also a time when our body undergoes paralysis, but our mind is the most active as we dream. Much like our paralyzed body during sleep, trauma can get frozen in the body during our waking life ­­– locked in pockets of cells. Ultimately, it creates a blockage of energy that stops us from connecting with ourselves and others. This occurrence is not just present inside a person. Collective bodies (communities) and geographical bodies (land/water) can also hold the tension. Clearing The Traum(a) is an opportunity to witness each other as we seek multi-dimensional healing. As we engage in this collective ritual, we will tap into these living memories to move through them and collectively dream of a new reality.

Mia Imani Harrison is an international interdisciplinary artivist (art + activist) and arts writer. Harrison interrogates the ways that disenfranchised communities can heal individual, communal, and societal trauma by creating works that live in between the worlds of art and science. This »third-way« mixes unconventional methods (dreams, rituals) and science (ethnography, geography, psychoanalysis) to dream new potential ways of being.