Radio Emma - Bodies and Technologies

[00:00:19] Speaker A: Here, there, now. And then electric fluid stream. Hello, I'm Annick Fournier and I'm the curator of research in the archive. [00:00:49] Speaker B: Hi, I'm Sara Giannini and I'm program curator. [00:00:53] Speaker C: Hi, I'm Megan Hutcher and I'm program curator. [00:00:56] Speaker D: Hey, my name is David Caschoto and I'm the research fellow. [00:01:00] Speaker C: Hello. [00:01:00] Speaker E: And my name is Frederick Bergus. I'm director and one of the co founders of Evacondance. I don't want to be part of your revolution, an arts organization that is dedicated to performance and works with commissioned artists and researchers on the basis of long term engagement. In a nutshell. [00:01:20] Speaker A: And we're gathered here today to launch the new edition, its field of inquiry, and the new program. So the new artistic commissions, which are black speaks back, Jessica Katrik and Konstantina Savitzanos, and the research commissions, which are Susan Altman, Samia Henny and Nuremie Giulia Suzi. And they've been selected by Sarah and Megan. So we thought a radio show would be a nice way to introduce the curatorial thinking behind this new program. [00:01:57] Speaker C: We're going to try something a bit different today. We see how it goes. We don't have anybody here to interview us. Instead, we're going to keep switching back and forth, playing interviewer and interviewee. [00:02:10] Speaker B: All right, then I'll go first and I'll interview Frederic. So, Frederick, would you like to say something about what are the fields of inquiry? [00:02:22] Speaker E: Yeah, I thought maybe first to say, actually what for us is the field of inquiry is very simply put, what say, more conventionally is called the public program in art institutions, where, so to say, more theoretical footnotes are placed towards the main program to offer audiences some contextualization of the program. Excuse me. So if I try to think back, like, why we started calling it the field of inquiry, I think there are two facets quite important. The first was that when we started evacondans far back in 2005, six, we wanted to explore more the feminist legacies and potentials in contemporary art practice. And with that came the need to really self educate ourselves. And that's the moment also when we started a reading group, and we are very proud that still today this reading group is running and a very important element of this field of inquiry. So this form of self education also, in a way, implicates that it was never our intention, say, to do research into, say, feminist practice, followed by, say, more a thematic project, say, after the research has been done. But we wanted to really be with and within the research along the development of the program, and also to reach out to other people, the co readers, with us in those reading groups. Yeah, for us it was important that there was a certain journey and a certain open endedness that even would allow for certain detours in this research. And in the beginning it was really a do it yourself. But we also organize sometimes some guidance in this. So, for instance, in the affect edition we had, it was very important for us to have a bibliography that actually Hito Steyrler had composed, and that offered for us a very important framework to work with. Again, the feminist edition. There was the wonderful Iris van Dottein, who introduced us to, for instance, the brilliant Karen Barat. So there were these, say, important reading group members that kind of guided us a bit. And as I said, there was indeed the importance of the reading group members themselves. And we sometimes even literally traveled also with the reading group. So, for instance, we did meetings in the fields of Amsterdam Nord. We had tarot gatherings in Belmar. And in the early days, we also had a reading group session in the Marta Rossler library project that was presented at the time in the Mecca. And funnily enough, now, thinking about it for this session, I realized that then we read the cyborg manifesto of Donna Haraway. So that's a funny coincidence, in a way. So, since the social movement edition, we have engaged a fellow to take the lead in the field of inquiry, because it became clear it was far too heavy to keep running it ourselves. But what is, of course, much more important is that with the fellow, someone joins the team for two years and enrich us with carving out these fantastic paths and exciting paths. So that gave us much more latitude to explore also more formats within the field of inquiry, like the library exhibition that we have started recently and this radio Emma program that you are listening to now. So Annique Fournier, who is sitting here next to me, was the first fellow, and luckily she stayed with us afterwards. And then followed by Giulia Damiani, who guided us through the ritual and display edition. And now with us is the wonderful Devica Chouteau. So back to the field of inquiry. The second facet I would like to mention is that we call the field of inquiry a little more to say the landscape y connotation of the word. It's a field, it's an underlying terrain, it's a meeting place for us as team, for the reading group members, for audiences, and of course, for the artists and the researchers in our program of commission projects, because essential in our way of working is, of course, that these projects are developed over the course of two years, together with the curators, Megan and Sara. So the field of inquiry is not a theme that we impose on them, but it is a space where they are welcome to go in and out as they think works best. Yeah. So, finally, I would like to say that within, say, the field of inquiry, one theme, in a way, leads often to the other. It's quite an organic process, and the relation of the body to technology is, of course, a theme that at some point, as a performance institution, you have to address. It has been long on our agenda, and I think it stayed there for a while, as we also felt a certain reluctancy. And we're breathing on ideas, how we could find flight paths to stay away from the overt tech tech approach. So stay more in line with how it lives, for instance, as technologies of the self, in Grant Watson's how we behave project, as an example. So with Megan and Sara arriving at ifacondance, super exciting interpretations of technologies and bodies are developed. And, Megan, I would like to ask to say something about this move to what you have introduced to the plural. [00:08:50] Speaker C: Yeah, thanks, Frederic. So when Sara and I joined, it was still sort of titled under the body and technology. And as we talked more and more about it, one of the things, a fairly, I guess, simple shift, but to the plural form of bodies and technologies became really productive for us to open the thinking out some more. Maybe I'll just say a little bit about what it did. Yeah. From body to bodies was a really important one, in order to keep it positioned always as it's never an individual body, but it's always bodies operating in relation to one another. So this was the first kind of move, and maybe to add to that also is just this idea that bodies, for us, open beyond, necessarily the human body as well. And so thinking in the plural got us to thinking, what's the relation, not just between human bodies, but between human and non human bodies with the technology to technologies? I think that was really exploded things out for us quite a bit, because technology, like Frederic mentioned, we all have a hesitancy around to kind of boil it down too much into thinking about this kind of hard or software in a kind of a mechanical sense. And with technologies, we were able to open out thinking through terms like Foucault and the technologies of the self or technologies of power, but also in marxist senses, around technologies of production, and then, of course, feminist marxist ideas of technologies of reproduction. So in all of these kinds of senses, the pluralization of technology moved us towards thinking about a broader field or matrix of power relations in which both bodies and different kinds of technologies sit. And that includes hardware and software, and those come up throughout all of the commissions that we'll talk about today. But they're always also sitting in relation to, for instance, technologies of access, access to things like knowledge production, to things like healthcare, to things like mobility. Mobility, both in a physical sense, but also in cultural senses. Yeah. So I think with these two terms kind of laid out, and they're plural, we then came back around to thinking what they meant in their entanglements. And with that, I'll maybe pass it over to you, Sara, to talk a bit about that. [00:11:34] Speaker B: Yeah, thanks, Megan. So exactly as we were kind of conceptualizing the plural declination of these two terms, bodies and technologies, we also started to reason around the end between them. So what are the relationships and entanglements and the kind of conditionings that exist between bodies and technologies? And I think, for us, this conjunction, this end, is very much related to the field of performance and performativity, which is what IFacon dance has been somehow investigating and exploring since its foundation. And I believe that always performativity is a lens through which certain topics, questions that are more like social, political, or related to culture in general, like. So we're investigated from the perspective of performance, and also for this edition, we're thinking about performativity as a way to look at this entanglement. So older artists and researchers in the program somehow, like, use performance and performative modes of research as a way to kind of make sense of these relationships between bodies and technologies and the ways in which we are thinking about them is also related to the idea of form. This is something that, actually, I've been kind of reflecting on in preparation of the radio show. So, like, how technologies somehow, like form, inform, deform, perform bodies, but how bodies, in turn, can also form, inform, deform, transform technologies. And I think this kind of duality, or the paradox and this movement between the two is a space that is quite productive and is really at the core of what the artists and researchers in the program are addressing with their work. And so, as Frederick mentioned, we have the reading group as a space for us to self educate and further think collectively about these questions and entanglements. And we have already started thinking about those questions with the reading group that Devika is leading. And so I now pass the word to Annik. Anik, can you introduce Devika and the reading group a bit? [00:14:12] Speaker A: Yeah, definitely. So, indeed, over the last three months, we have been busy with Devika as our guide in this terrain, and I think it's nice to know how we came to. De Vica was actually first as a student in a workshop at the SNDo that Megan and I were teaching, and we were very impressed already a few years back, I think, when you were just a second year student, with the research you were doing around the idea of darkness as a way to explore sort of the ongoing impacts of dutch colonialism and communities of color in the metropole, with a special focus on the histories of indian and Indo surinamese migratory trajectories, as well as the colonial healing tactics. And your performance in sonic work is also. We were so intrigued with its kind of mixture of different vocabularies that include ballroom, voguing, house dance, what you call whacking, and you're also trained in indian classical dance form of Odissi. So we knew already, we can learn so much from you on these vocabularies alone. And so combining sort of your theoretical but also your somatic practices with which you organize various. You were already busy with various reading groups and also radio shows. We felt that we would be in good hands, that you had everything we needed. So maybe it's nice to already dive in to share a little bit what we've been doing so far with the reading groups. One thing that maybe has not been mentioned yet is how we form the reading group anew for each edition. So we always invite different artists and theoreticians, curators, basically practitioners who we feel work and research will contribute to this discussion. But that can also benefit from being part of this study group. So I'd actually like to name them now because they've been very important so far. So this is Tamam Azam, Josephine Arnel, Kirthy Basavarachai, Melina Bonilla, Sancha Castro, Naomi Collier, Brahms Angelo Custodio, Anna de Andrade, Pacafaros, Antonella Ficipaldi, Nureni Giulia Stutti, who we'll hear more about because it's also a commission, a research commission. Pedro Matthias Martin Nidam, Tamara Pavovlic, Fazel Shamo Hamud and Charlie Trier. And actually we will probably be joined in the next cluster reading groups by another commission, which is black speaks back. But maybe first, Devika, you can kind of share with us how you structured the first three, and it has a lot to do with your own research. So maybe you can kind of guide us through this. [00:17:41] Speaker D: Thank you, Annik, for this beautiful introduction. Yeah. So maybe before I enter into how I structure the reading groups to kind of add onto what you just mentioned about me, my interests, because as a performance artist, I cannot escape the hyper visibility that comes with my craft, both onstage, but also offstage, especially when you're dealing with specific topics related to queerness and decoloniality, and also dealing simultaneously with the realm of, like, diversity and inclusion, politics and mechanisms of tokenism. So this actually led to a desire to kind of hide from all of this, which is what led me into the notion of darkness, which I have come to use as a mode to subvert the hierarchy of the visual and the rational realm as the dominant signifiers of knowledge in order to shift into alternative ways of knowledge creations rooted in queer and decolonial understandings of perception and world making. And I also always like to quote other lords, of course, because in her text, poetry is not a luxury. She mentions something beautiful about darkness, which also closely resonates with how I deal with darkness, actually. So I quote, these places of possibility within ourselves are dark because they are ancient and hidden. They have survived and grown strong through that darkness. Within these deep places, each one of us holds an incredible reserve of creativity and power, of unexamined and unrecorded emotions and feelings. The woman's place of power within each of us is neither white nor service. It is dark, it is ancient, and it is deep. So, yeah, like, as a performance artist, I feel like I really tap into these dark spaces, into these unrecognized potentialities, and I try to bring them to the service through my work and through my researches. So, yeah, to dive into the reading sessions talking about how to deal with hypervisibility and perception. The first sessions, actually, which I've coined as technologies of perception. The writers that we read addressed very much this notion of feasibility in relation to modernity. And I'm referring to Rolando Farts Vasquez vistas of modernity, where he actually offers insight into the entanglement of the dominance of vision and modernity. And he proposes decolonial aesthesis as a contestation of and de linking from western aesthetics, which was quite a new notion to discover, like being in the artistic field. You constantly address the notion of aesthetics, but I've never heard of aesthetics. So that was a nice finding. And then we also looked at texts or writers who proposed possible strategies to bridge this colonial difference Vasquez is talking about, which might be found in Anza Dua's perspective from the cracks and the ability to forge a hybrid consciousness, which he theorizes with Nosotras and as well as Donna Haraway's concept of situated knowledges as a form of perception that is constantly being structured and restructured depending on a located subject, and then taking all of these contemplations upon the visual perception and also inviting other senses. In the second session, we addressed listening to images by Tina Kampt. And Tina Kampt actually proposes listening as a method in her text to attune to quiet and quotidian practices of black refusal in identification photography. Listening as a way to open up to radical interpretive possibilities of images and state archives, and to consider these images not as a site of social reproduction, but as instances of rupturing the sovereign gaze of colonial regimes. So actually, she, in her text, she's invoking, attending to the infrasonic grammar of black futurity, the stasis and the muscular tension, but in a way that doesn't only depend on looking, but it's like attuning to what she calls the infrasonics, the sounds or the narratives that cannot be seen, but can only be felt and only be affected by. And then, actually, the third session is kind of a full circle back into, like, the importance or the value of reading groups. One of the commissioned artists, Nureny Giulia Stutti, was actually a guest, and we invited her to share about her interest in reading groups and the importance of study groups, because she's the founder of Khunji Study Forum and collective in Yogyakarta, which came together in the reformation movement in Indonesia. And she explained, actually very beautifully, that the reading groups and student press were actually very important to formulate critical thoughts and to circulate it amongst peers. [00:24:33] Speaker A: Maybe I can interject now. [00:24:35] Speaker D: Sure, yeah. Sorry. No, no, that's perfect. [00:24:38] Speaker A: But just because I think also what she shared a bit with us were different kind of methodologies that can be used in reading groups that are not solely about just reading and discussing texts. And that's something that you had also already introduced. Each reading group had a different kind of methodology that came a lot also from your somatic practices. Can you maybe say something about these different methodologies that we experimented with in terms of what it means to read together? [00:25:10] Speaker D: Yeah, sure. No, I think, yeah. How am I going to formulate this? For me, when reading, I see the forming of critical thoughts as a collective process. And in general, like, the meaning of words, or like, a term for me, is something that's dynamic, it's a process. It's not like a predefined notion for me. So also, when engaging with texts, I find it important to not all the time be focused on, like, this determination to understand and grasp the meaning of a text and this, like, activity that happens only at the brainy part of our body. But for me, it's also important to engage the whole body, like to make reading and creating thoughts an embodied process. And also at this point in my life, I'm very much influenced as well by the modality of listening and inviting the sonic. So, for instance, also in the third session, we kind of derailed from understanding the texts, which were Kate Morales. So you want to query your pedagogy and Arturo Escobar's designs for the purifiers. We didn't enter into conversations, but rather, I propose to just have an instant composition of the texts. So I asked people to just select sentences and parts of the text, not in a linear arrangement, and then to just collectively create this instant composition where we can also allow ourselves to just be and listen to each other's voices, listen to silences in between, and try to instantly find meaning as we go, instead of this action of having to produce thoughts all the time, as an example. [00:27:27] Speaker A: Yeah, very nice. And I think parts of that will be available on our website shortly because it actually made for a beautiful, sound composition, and you can feel this collective working and thinking and sharing in it. And maybe now it's nice to see how these various themes that you've been already discussing also resonate in many ways across the new artistic and research commissions. So we did sort of structure a way of bringing that in. We pulled out sort of three themes that are both present in what we've been learning and studying together in the reading group, with things that are already present and being worked through in these various new commissions. I'm just going to mention them now, but it's important to stress that they're very interrelated. So kind of wrenching them apart is then in the goal for a bit of clarity and covering some ground. But the first one is definitely this idea of technologies, of perception. This is something that's very present across the program. And also, as Sarah was saying, about the performativity of how bodies and technologies relate, it opens up a space for interference, and especially when it comes to modes of production and reproduction. And finally, there's this idea of transmission. How do, let's say, certain archives, colonial histories, embodied knowledge, how do they get transferred across bodies and with what technologies over time? So these are sort of themes we thought we could flesh out a bit through the new program, but maybe just staying with you. Well, actually, you've done quite a good job. I don't know if you want to say anything more. We're going to start with technologies of perception. And one of the main things was to stress how in the reading group, we've already paid much attention to move away from the visual into the felt and the sauna. But maybe, yeah, we can already pass it on to, as you've said already, much about this derica, we can pass it on already, maybe to Sarah or Megan. How does this play itself out in some of the commissions that we will introduce this weekend? [00:30:09] Speaker B: Maybe I'll go first. [00:30:11] Speaker A: All right, Sarah, good. [00:30:12] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. I think I'd like to talk about the work and research of one of our artist commissions, Constantina Zavizanos. Constantina is an artist based in New York City, and their work is very much devoted actually to the subordination of the visual, but also the subordination of measurability and the idea that it is possible to capture fixed forms through. Through an idea of an enabled body. And for the experimentations that they're doing with us at edificandans, Konstantina is very much interested in the infrasonic. So this really relates very much to what David was saying about Tina Kampt and infrared light. So both are technologies of perception that engage almost the unperceptible or what sits at the threshold of perception. So the infrasound and infrasonics open up actually to sounds that are not heard in a traditional or, like, normative sense, but sounds that are felt. So sounds that are actually vibrations or that are vibes in a room, whereas the infrared light is also a light in the spectrum of visibility that is actually invisible to what is deemed the human sight and is very interestingly connected to heat. So to the heat and warmth that bodies, different bodies actually having themselves and also exchange with each other. So for their commission, Constantina is thinking about the relationship between the infrared light, infrasonic and heat, and how they are, in a way, like collaborating to give space to an environment that is mostly accessed by potential visitors and potential bodies in the realm of the haptic and not in the realm of visibility. And the haptic is actually a notion that generally refers to the sense of touch. But Constantina is quite specifically deriving this notion from the work of theorists Stefano Harney and Fred Moton. And they refer to haptic as a shared form of somatic knowledge. So it is something that is not just sensed or touched by an individual body or atomized body, but is something that is shared across. And they write quite beautifully. That haptic is like a feeling through others, a feel for feeling, others feeling you. So, with Constantina, we are working towards, let's say, inception of a space and an installation where this haptic can emerge beyond a measure, beyond visibility, beyond hearing, beyond also the idea of the modern, able body that kind of western modernity has invented. So with their work, I think we are thinking a lot about technologies of perception, but also technologies of ability, disability, and rethinking what capacity and incapacity is giving. Also, let's say, like, space and value to the idea of interdependency. And during one of our Zoom conversations, Constantina told me that their work is almost like a cosmological reflection on this universal levels of interdependency. And I think that's really beautiful. And maybe I. Yeah, I end here and. Yeah, and I think maybe. Megan, would you like to say to add something in relation to this from one of the other projects that are part of the program? [00:34:57] Speaker C: Yeah. Like, I just repeat what Anique said. It was a bit hard for me, actually, to decide who to talk about where, because there are so many entanglements to come back to this world of these different spheres. But I thought here, with the technologies of perception, to bring in the research commission of architectural historian Samia Henny, which, yeah, takes up the question of perception, but from a different way in. And I think it's through the question of reparations, actually. Semia is very engaged in sort of exposing different kinds of colonial architectures and infrastructures. Maybe I just share. One of the places she always starts in describing her own work is around. I should actually let me back up around french colonial architectures and infrastructures. This is a really important point. So whenever she's introducing her own work, and I'll take a page from her on this, she always starts with a law that was passed in France in 2005, which was a law 158, and it only lasted for a year, but it basically made policy that schools had to teach the positive effects of the french presence in the colonies, in particular in North Africa. So, like I said, this law was repealed after one year, but the effects of it, for Semia were something that are still very much felt for many people are still very much felt. And following this law, she really devoted herself to talking about, indeed, all of the negative impacts of french presence, and in particular in North Africa, where Samia is from. So the project she's developing here with, if I can't dance, performing colonial toxicity, is looking really specifically at the french nuclear bomb program in the Algerian Sahara that ran from 1960 to 1966, and it included 17 different detonations. So 17 different bombs in two different places in Rgen and Ineker. Four of the bombs were above ground, and 13 were below ground. I'm gonna come back around to perception right now. Stay with me. So the four were above ground, 13 were below ground. The 13 below ground were all named after natural minerals. There's something around perception that could be thought here, like amethyst. But in 1962, Beryl, one of these underground bombs, the force of the blast exceeded the mountain that it was detonated in, and it actually exploded out of the mountain. And here's where I come back to perception. One of the things in eyewitness testimonies that have been collected over the last 30 years is this. The sound is the felt sound of the force of this blast as it came out of the mountain that could be felt across the region. So this particular sound or this vibration of the blast is something that semi really puts at the same center of the project. Now, that can pull many different elements together. But let me back up a bit from that, too, because this idea of the felt sound of that blast, it sits within a kind of a broader question of how to make visible if we stay within this kind of realm of decolonial perception and we move away from visuality. I think for Samey, the question of how to make visible these atrocities and colonial histories remains very present. So this program, the french program in the Algerian Sahara remains inaccessible by large for researchers. It's still confidential, under lock and key by the french state. So it's really impossible to even know the history. And this is how this question of reparation, how, you know, if there's the question around measurability in Constantina's project, I think here it comes up in the way of how do we get to a place of reparation when we can't even measure what the effects of this, of these atrocities are on the bodies that live in the Algerian Sahara. So one of the key things semi is really trying to deal with is how to make, if not visual, visible or felt, these kinds of effects that are foreclosed by state policy, but also exceed question, you know, exceed human time. How do we see radioactivity? We can definitely see the effects on bodies, but how do we see it in this more discursive sense? So in the project she's developing with us, which will take the form of both an exhibition and a kind of a visual repository, she's dealing a lot with leaked documents that are sort of low threshold, so you can't necessarily read them that have been redacted, so that you can't really understand what they're saying. Saying and these different kinds of mechanisms where the state has made something, or people have leaked state documents to make something visible, and yet it still doesn't become visible in certain ways. So she's playing a lot with those kinds of seen but not seen. Or what does it mean to see if you can't understand even what you're seeing? Yeah, I could keep going as you could see, but I think I will probably. I should probably anyway, stop there. [00:41:15] Speaker A: Maybe it's a nice way to go over to the second kind of line we pulled out. I mean, we know we've just heard, and we spent quite some time discussing in the reading group how technologies, certain technologies both reflect this kind of hierarchy of the senses and also perpetuate it, reproduce certain modes of perceiving. So there's also room there, then to play if we understand this and we know that we can intervene in these technologies of reproduction to perceive otherwise. But one thing so coming into this idea of interference, one thing that one of your projects, Megan, one of the research projects by Susan Altman, adds to this discussion of reproduction beyond, let's say, social reproduction or also the reproduction of certain forms of perceiving, is also the gendering of even something like mechanical reproduction. So maybe could you say a little bit about how Altman is revisiting our understanding of reproduction through a lens, like through gender? [00:42:44] Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, Susanna's project, when technology was female, is really continuing a mode of thinking that she's been with for a while to. And this, again, is to kind of move away from a western centered, is to shift her thinking away from how to read production, women's production, or women's use of technologies during the state socialist periods in Europe, how to shift away from reading those always in relation to the west, and how to really read them within the kind of dialogues that were happening in the project here at if I can't dance in particular in dialogues that were happening between the eastern bloc and Yugoslavia. So maybe I just give a little bit of context on that for those who might not know so much about that. So let's see, the eastern bloc is, I think we're probably more familiar, or we're familiar with at least this is what would have been under the soviet sphere of influence following the bolshevik revolution and all the way up through 1989. And, of course, Yugoslavia was a part of this until 1948, when there was a very, very famous and maybe messy breakup between the soviet union and Yugoslavia. Nonetheless, the dialogues amongst cultural practitioners and producers across these borders continued throughout this period, from post World War two all the way up until 1989, when the period of european state socialisms ended, for all intent purposes. So to come back around to this question of reproduction or the gendering of technologies, I think one of the things that Suzanne is really interested in thinking about in the project is in the very, very early moment, just after the Bolshevik revolution, in the territories that would become part of the Soviet Union, there was no kind of gendering of the technology or of a kind of a techno utopian ideal. It was a small, let's say, maximum ten years, probably less, but where it was completely open. And in fact, women played a huge role in shaping what the relation to technology, what a kind of a socialist relation to technology could be or should be or would be. Like I said, it was a very small window which closed and wouldn't actually re emerge. And this is one of the things she's trying to trace, wouldn't re emerge until the very end of the periods of the Soviet Yugoslavia. The end of the soviet yugoslav periods. So let's say in the eighties, it comes back around to women returning to the kinds of working methods that were opened in, let's say, 1918 to 1923, not necessarily with the techno utopianism that it had in that very early moment, but now in this moment of the eighties, really thinking around what different kinds of performances of femininity or the feminine could be made possible by engagements with technologies. I'll cut myself off there, and maybe, actually, I want to pass it back to you a bit here, Devaka, because I know that the question of reproduction is something that comes up in some of the readings from, like, Kate Morales, that we did in the reading group. So maybe you did indeed talk quite a bit about it before, but maybe you could say something specifically about that. [00:46:31] Speaker D: Yeah, I think where you addressed gendering technologies. I think then with Kate Morales, I would shift into queering technology, or rather querying pedagogical technologies and education. Yeah, I mean, drawing back to the purpose of this reading group and this notion of, like, co creating knowledge, I think revisiting how we have been conditioned to learn and especially through, like, institutional ways of learning. I think Kate Morales offers, like, a great perspective on how to queer education and production of knowledge. Querying, in the sense of who is doing the teaching and who is doing the learning, but also related to the theme of bodies and technologies, querying our bodies as we relate differently with ourselves and with each other, and querying the relationship between each other and with bodies and technologies specifically, also creating knowledge together outside of these colonial institutions. And I think, like, this mode of gathering very low key on the floor with food and having these different ways of reading and discussing texts is definitely, for me, like a queer, queer education or like a queer way of obtaining knowledge. Yeah, I think I hand it over to Anik. [00:48:35] Speaker A: Maybe it's a nice way to go to the third scene, which has a lot to do with the transmission of knowledge, the transmission of. Yeah. Cultural traditions, memories, but also embodied knowledge. And this is something. Yeah, there are techniques for doing this, various kinds of techniques, and a lot of the projects, again, explore this in different forms, and maybe it's a nice way to bring you, Sarah, back into the conversation. Maybe you can say a bit more about this in relation to some of your projects. [00:49:09] Speaker B: Yes. Thanks, Annik. Yeah, definitely. The idea of transmission, but also looking back at ancient bodies of knowledge and ancient wisdom, is something that kind of is present across the commissions of both Jessica Kazrik and Muraini Julius Tudi, and for what regards Jessica's project. So, first of all, Jessica, I introduced Jessica. Jessica is an artist, a music producer, dj, technologist, writer, who is very interested in the idea of the indisciplinary and what could be the figure of a polymath in the present time. So the idea of mixing different realms of knowledge, different techniques of knowledge and modes of transmission is something that she's very busy with and is also very much active in the project that we're doing together. So her project commission is called pharmacopoeia. [00:50:13] Speaker A: After. [00:50:17] Speaker B: The shared remedies that circulated across different regions, especially also like in the kind of what is today, like, Middle eastern area, but also like the Mediterranean for centuries, for giving kind of an explanation of ailments and diseases, and also like, sharing knowledge around how to treat, how to heal those illnesses. In modern times, pharmacopoeia, I mean, the term still exists, but the content is radically different. So modern pharmacopoeia are regulated and issued by governmental bodies or pharmaceutical companies for the purpose of standardization and not at all for the purpose of sharing knowledge around how to treat and how to heal. In fact, the compositions of medicines is secretive because it's a space where companies can capitalize on. But like in ancient times, and this is really where the interest of Jessica lies. This pharmacopoeia actually circulated and were written in a collective, transgenerational, trans millennium manner. And in her project, Jessica is kind of, let's say, like seeking to be in a space that can allow this kind of circulation and is also a space where different and probably even divergent sectors of knowledge can come together. So, like the ancient pharmacopoeia, from the disciplinary lenses of today, can be seen as operating at the intersection between magic, alchemy, science, technology, meteorology, cryptography. Because, of course, all these different techniques of knowledge are very much interrelated when it comes to understanding what happens to the body. But, yeah, through modernity, of course, the emergence of taxonomy has. Has had, as a consequence, that also the medical field has kind of become more atomized as well as the other kind of fields of knowledge. But, like in Jessica's project, all these different elements are kind of coming back together. And in particular, she's looking at how still today, magic and science, or like magic and the medical field are still kind of reverberating with each other. For instance, if we think about the kind of fast evolving field of diagnostics or an analysis, how doctors actually make hypothesis over a body. So, like reading signs, making predictions, this is very much informed by the afterlife, if you want, of divination practices. So this is like, one side that she's researching at the moment. And also another aspect that I think is quite crucial is how she's kind of geared towards a new understanding of diagnosis as exposome. And the exposome, I mean, comes from the word exposure so differently from modern diagnostics that kind of looks at the body as this kind of individual, abstract, non situated, atomized object is instead seen as a body in relation to its surrounding and its environment. So the exposome looks at the kind of lifelong exposures that a body undergoes. And I think this is also very much connected to pre modern ideas of, like, the body as being kind of in this kind of almost like, cosmological connection with the land, with the earth, but also like, with the celestial spheres. And I think in the idea of the exposome, there are also, like, certain elements that before Megan has kind of talked about from the commission of Samia Henny. Because, of course, thinking about the exposure of a body to its environment is also about thinking. Thinking about, like, I don't know, the radiations, the toxicities that a body is exposed to, and how these kind of exposures are also very much conditioned by questions of class, gender, race, geography and so forth. I think, well, in her kind of indisciplinary way, I think the project of Jessica can be seen from so many different perspectives. But for the sake of brevity, I think I will stop here, maybe just mentioning that the trajectory is kind of leading towards a theatrical congregation where all these different disciplines are kind of coming together. But. [00:56:02] Speaker C: Jacks quickly, because I know that also Norellini's work, there's a lot of really resonant ideas here around transmission. But I just interject really quickly with the project of the last artist commission, actually, black speaks back, which is a grassroots, just to give a background, a grassroots media collective that was formed in 2010. And as we were. We were thinking about this earlier, Sarah and I were trying to think about how we could come up with a smooth transition here, but we couldn't really. So I'll just interject instead. I mean, one of the things that we sort of came to was that this, like Sadhu was saying, different sets of conditions, right? That there's not this sort of abstracted body, right? Bodies are always sort of set into really particular kinds of conditions that are raced and gendered and classed in really particular kinds of ways. And one of the things that the black speaks back collective has been working on or towards since it was founded in 2016, was to start to develop a kind of a language that's specific to the afro european experience. And within that, there's a kind of a push to work against. What is really they understand is the dominance of african american languages and frameworks which can't account for the histories of slavery and colonialism, or the diasporic lines of flight, cultural imaginary and contemporary state policies that circumscribe black bodies in european, and particularly in Belgium and dutch contexts. So this, I think, is really the starting point to understand the work of black speaks back. And they really do. I mean, to come back around to technology, they're very much engaged in the social media or in this kind of media platform realms, because part of developing what they have long understood is part of developing a kind of a language is to make it actually accessible to many different people. The project they'll work on, or they're already working on with us, is towards a film. But here, maybe I mentioned, because one of the things you started us with, anique, was this different kinds of techniques of transmission. So one of the things they've already started doing with us for the project, Sorta Ibis, the film they're working towards, is a series of kitchen table talks where they really gather together different people from within the community here in Amsterdam. And the project is very much based here in Amsterdam to think about conditions. They stay very local in order for it to stay very specific, but they've been started to gather literally around a kitchen table to have conversations around what intimacy, self intimacy. Intimacy. Non sexual, I should say non sexual self intimacy, intimacy with others, etcetera. What that looks like or feels like or sounds like for black bodies who are continually under a kind of a capitalist state surveillance system. So in the kitchen table talks, what they really are trying to do is create, not unlike, actually, the reading group space that you were describing, Tevaka. A kind of a space where it's safe to be vulnerable in sharing and thinking about the way that knowledge isn't something that is given to us, but is really formed through our interactions with one another. So maybe I stop there and pass it back over to you, Sara, to talk about Nuraini. [00:59:53] Speaker B: Yeah, thanks, Megan. So we have already mentioned Nurain a few times because indeed, she joined the third and so far, the last reading group session with Evika and the group. So, Nuraini is a cultural worker, activist, writer, researcher and theorist from Indonesia, currently living in Leiden in the Netherlands for her postdoc research. And since the late nineties, Nurania has been involved in different kind of grassroots movements who have been engaged in creating alternative platforms for kind of collective education. As de Vica mentioned, she's the co founder of Kunchi Cultural Studies Forum, a collective based in Georgia, Carta. And with them, she's also initiated a school called the School of improper education. [01:00:53] Speaker D: That is. [01:00:53] Speaker B: Yeah. Thinking about, like, ways to learn together that kind of deviate from institutionalized forms of teaching rather than kind of learning together. And I'm mentioning these experiences because this kind of care towards pedagogy, education, and the transmission of knowledge informs also the work that we're doing together. And so her research project originates in her kind of long standing relationship and research of practices of alternative pedagogy based in the late Reformasi Indonesia and the state of Timor Leste. So, like, Nurain has been kind of in dialogue and researching. Different activist groups were working across these geographical areas who basically are reviving and transmitting forms of indigenous knowledge that have been oppressed or suppressed in the path of modernization that kind of characterizes the kind of cultural environment of Indonesia after the end of the Suharto regime. So after the. The end of the nineties, basically. And this forms of indigenous knowledge regards a lot of crafts, such as weaving, for instance. But it's also connected to agriculture, to eating together, to food. It's also about cosmological stories, origin stories, language themselves. So there are a lot of languages, like ethnic languages, that are basically a diverge of. How do you say that? Like, extinction. So this is, let's say, like, the field in which nuraining is moving and what we're thinking about. And what her. What she's thinking about is, like, how to create a form of, like, display. So a form of further sharing and further activation of these different knowledges that she also conceptualizes as museums or, like, museums of the commons. How can we show the collections of these museums? So there are, of course, intangible collections, or it's about forms and modes rather than really objects. So in this sense, it is also about thinking of display forms that are going away from what we know of a museum collection as being also, like. Let's say, like, as being connected to the legacy of colonialism and, yeah, like, kind of the displacement of objects and people in certain cases. So her idea is, like, to create a radio play as a form of display where these kind of collections will be activated and transmitted and shared. And, yeah, at the moment, Nuren is thinking about the characters, the props, the stories that will kind of inhabit this radio play. And the kind of the slow durational methodology that. That she's working with is very much in tune with one of our relatively new spaces at IFA can dance, the ifacan dance studio. So in the course of the fall and winter. So fall 2022 and winter 2023, Nuraini will be sharing with us on the ifacondance studio these elements of the scripts for the radio play. So, like the characters, the props and. Yeah, but since I mentioned if I can dance to you, I think I give the word back to Frederick so that maybe you can introduce this new space. [01:05:13] Speaker E: Yeah, yeah. Thank you, Sara. Yeah. Maybe go to sketch a little bit, say, the origins of the ideas developing still much in development for the dot studio. And also these ideas, they go back quite far in the sense that if I go back again to the very first edition of Ifakan Dance, that was held in the context of a theater festival. So we have grown out of a festival and the way we operate as an organization. And from that beginning, in a way, evolved the desire to not, say, constitute an institution with a fixed space, but to really focus on producing work and operate as an itinerant art organization. And that, of course, is also very much related to the fact that we wanted to focus on performance practice and moving, say, locally and internationally, with our projects, being a guest at other institutions, that's really our common practice, which we think is still very interesting, inspiring, sometimes complex, but it always has a surplus in the course of the years. There is also a growing desire and a need to have more permanent spirit space where we really can work and do research and rehearse. And we are very happy here at Vester Dock, where we are now having this conversation, which is part of Brutt Platz Westerdoc, facilitated by urban resort, which is, say, the office that we develop our projects from and sent into the world, so to say. And at the same time, also this space we have been using really to the full with what I already mentioned, this new library, exhibitions, we organized book launches here. We did film screenings and even, incidentally, performance practices, performances have taken place here. But still, we felt we need a space where. Where there is a certain permanency also for us in this kind of nomadic life. And we thought, okay, maybe it becomes more and more in what are the developments here in the city, and almost an utopia to find that space. But. And we will keep searching and also we will keep putting it on the agenda, because we are also not alone in this. And there are many colleagues, prison Dassi, installing here in the city, like the Apple and pact, and many more that are in urgent need of a permanent space. But even though that, we don't want to lose faith. And we also decided not to wait. And therefore, we started the program of open rehearsal, which is again taking place across spaces in the city, where we organize feedback sessions on performance with our community members. But the other very important new step in this is the online studio. As Sarah mentioned, being a producing arts organization, it is really vital for us to be able to bring research and process related elements of our productions to the forefront and, where relevant, share these with our audiences. So, Megan, maybe I hand over to you now again, and you can say a little bit more about this online pendant of our studio here at Westadoc. [01:09:09] Speaker C: Yeah, thanks, Frederica. I'll just keep it to a few words, and then I'll give it back over to Sara to keep going on this DoT studio. That was a dream we came to actually, you know, in 2020, as we were really trying to think how to share things in the midst of a pandemic, when we couldn't really share or gather in the kinds of ways as a performance institution that we are more used to. So the dot studio emerged as a space in the digital realm, where different parts of the commission projects, but also of the work the research fellow does and others, which I won't get into, to overcomplicate, where they could share different elements of the project. Like Sara mentioned with Noraini in the last edition, elements of the projects of Sans Marie Wasink of MPA were able to be shared so that the audiences could get some insight into what the development of a performance project looks like, and that it's not always only a final presentation, but that there's many, many different kinds of stages of layers of thinking and different ways of gathering. I would say that can happen and do happen when it comes to performance production. But, Sara, maybe you want to say a little bit more about that question of temporality in the final presentation. [01:10:44] Speaker B: Yeah, definitely. I think in a way, like, the question of this different temporality that the studio is opening up is also related to the experience of the lockdowns of 2020, which somehow kind of felt almost as a kind of suspension of linear time, or like the time that we were used to. And, yeah, a savoring of, like, a different form of, like, living through time. And the studio, in a way, takes us a bit sideways from the temporalities that we're kind of more used to as a commissioning institution. So the temporality that's kind of, it's almost like a narrative. You have like a bene, a beginning and an end with a presentation. With the studio, we wanted to kind of interject and interfere with that kind of linearity and kind of opening, opening, opening it up so that audiences could also see what is the everyday work behind the creation of a new performance production or a new exhibition. So for us, it's also to think about, like, performance not just as this visible final event, but also the performative modes and tactics and methodologies that are really embedded in the everyday work that an artist or researcher is kind of carrying out. And, yeah, ultimately, I mean, the word itself says it all like, it's a studio. So it's about, it's a space where we work. It's a space where work and mess and accumulation and the uneventful is hosted and can accumulate, as I said. So, yeah, I think this is. I think these are the main lines of thought behind the everyday temporality of the studio. And so more will unfold in that space in the next months and years and, yeah, so I think, Frederick, maybe you want to give a small overview of what we can anticipate there, or maybe not. Maybe we'll leave it a bit more as a mystery. [01:12:56] Speaker A: Well, maybe I can jump in. I think you can keep your eyes on the studio. Like you said, Sarah, I think each project will have a moment in the studio over the coming year or so where they will kind of take a bit of a focus that was a new element, actually, Friedrich brought in, which we all like very much, but maybe also just to say it's a space where we've been activating material from our archive. And maybe just coming back to a project that was already pointing towards bodies and technologies way back in, like, the fourth edition, was how we behave by Grant Watson, which actually began when Grant came across an interview with Foucault in Vanity Fair, of all places, in 1983. I mean, it dated back to 1983. Grant came across it in 2014. And in this interview, Foucault is discussing techniques of the self from antiquity and seeing what kind of purchase they held on his notion, of course, of techniques of self care, but also on certain political projects in the present. And Grant kind of jumped on that for his own interest in research into feminist movements, gay liberation, queer experience, and decided to take up the interview as a kind of form through which he would then go out and interview people about their own techniques of self care. And this went on for a few years with Frederick, actually, and the then curator, Vivian Searle, expanded various cities in different locations, from the Netherlands into, well, La, San Francisco, also, though, in Brazil, like Sao Paulo. And the final result of the commission were 14 video portraits. And just coming back now also to the idea of the studio, Grant continued even with the first batch of the 14 portraits. That was, like, a small fraction of the material he had gathered at that point, which consisted of transcripts and then actually scripts, because he always pulls out of the interviews kind of life stories, which he transforms into scripts and then are re performed by the interviewee for the camera, which makes this video portrait. But we just had already a kind of mound of archival material. And he continued to work on this project after the official commission with, if I can dance, finished. And the cartography actually extended to cities. Yeah, like New Delhi, Mumbai, Brussels, Antwerp, Athens, Utrecht. And I, in 2020 was a very productive year. Was trying to gather all this material from these interviews together, and all of these different life stories and different techniques of self care. All of a sudden, within, the pandemic became very, very resonant, and there was this deep desire to share it somehow. So together with Megan and Grant, we started culling through all of this, and until now, we've basically reworked. Grant has basically reworked and even, again, extended his interview so that we've had three different uploads. But again, it's just to sort of give one example of the different temporality of that studio, where this research material then can come and resonate and, yeah, be a source of inspiration. Again in the present. [01:16:57] Speaker C: Yeah, I mean, it's been really fun to work on it with you and Grant and IX and to imagine how these. I mean, actually it shares quite a bit with what you had said about Noraini, how we can imagine different modes of display. Yeah. Play with the temporalities, but also make different kinds of information accessible. But I know that. And actually, Frederic, you mentioned this a bit earlier, because the dot studio has been one site that you've really been busy with the kind of archive activations. But we also, last year, it was sort of inaugurated our library, researched display space. And you've been busy in there in the last year and are gearing up for some new things this fall, so maybe you could share a bit about. [01:17:48] Speaker A: It again in 2020. [01:17:52] Speaker D: Production. [01:17:54] Speaker A: Two interns, Amelia Calderon van Ufa and Naomi Collier Brums, who now works with us, but was then doing her masters in Utrecht. They basically, we have shelves. We had shelves and shelves of books in the office, but we weren't quite sure what was there. So they, over a period of six months, basically inventorized, categorized, weeded through, and basically structured our library. And what was super interesting, again, was to see what kind of rich material we have that's basically been accumulating around the various commissions. So research projects, artistic projects and fields of inquiry since 2005. So what we have here is a library very much specialized not only on our institutional history, but also in performance and in a very extended field. So we again really decided, yeah, we need to share this more and also what's in the archive. So every now and then we activate that material. We have a beautiful little display space within the archive that's been designed by moat for Fenn. And we've had two exhibitions so far. One was called inside the bark of the tree, and the second was actually dedicated to the filmic research in the commission of Pauline cournier Jardin, which was co curated also with Giulia Damiani. But yeah, coming up in the fall, we will be looking into the archive yet again to see. This time I've decided I want to explore liveness in relation to bodies and technologies. So I want to see how we can look at technologies. Yeah. In terms of what kind of liveness they hold, perform, behave so in their processual nature or in their embodiments. Catherine Hale so beautifully reminds us that technologies are no less embodied than other material entities, but also the relational and the kind of effectual side. Yeah, kind of encounters that they stage with us. So, yeah, you've already spoken of questions, of intimacy, but they can even become sort of like companions as we talk about their kind of reciprocity between bodies and technologies. So, yeah, we're going to look into this through various actually works from the collection. Material from the archive, including scores. Actually, that's something I thought of when I was reading through Sarah's notes on Constantina's project, who mentioned scores as a really almost obvious, but for me, overlooked site of reproduction. But also, yeah, through material that's already in the library that's recently been acquired through Devicas, guiding us through this thematic. So, yeah, it will be about liveness and technologies and bodies, but maybe that's in September, way more pressing where we're all here busy introducing is coming up this Saturday. So on the 2 July, we really hope that you will join us in the launch of these new artistic commissions and research commissions. Basically just to give you a rough sketch. This will happen at likeminds, which is the former dance Mackers in Nord. And roughly the morning will be dedicated to the research commission. So Susanna Altman, Samia Heni and Nareni Giulia. And then we're actually going to break for a gluten free vegan lunch which has been carefully conceived and prepared by Risa Horn, an Amsterdam based artist, chef Dandula. And then in the afternoon, we will have the presentations of the artist commission. So black speaks back, Jessica Katzrick and Konstantina. So we hope we will see you all then. And all of this, of course, could not happen without our supporters. [01:22:35] Speaker E: So the words of thanks, I gladly address to our structural supporters, the AVga and the Monlian fund, and also many thanks to Amodo for supporting these bodies and technologies edition. We are very grateful, as Annik just mentioned, that we can present our introductory event this coming Saturday at like minds. And I would like to extend already a big thank you to the theme over there, to the team over there. I also would like to extend a thank you to Devika and a new group of reading group members. I really look forward to the sessions to come. Big thank you to Megan and Sara for composing this very exciting program. Thank you, Annik, for your continuous support in the research of the institution. And lastly, a big thank you to our radio partner, yaya ya nene ne and Monty Mao who was with us today. Again, thank you a lot. We were again, in your good hands. Thanks. And then lastly, I would like to thank Paula Montesinos Oliva that made this beautiful new intro and outro for us. [01:24:15] Speaker A: Here, there now. And then electric fluid stream.