INTERDEPENDENT TRIANGULAR CREATIVE PRACTICE & SCENE

SS 2024 / artist talk and bodywork workshop by transmedia artist, choreographer, dancer, and educator Anani Dodji Sanouvi

Sanouvi will introduce INTERDEPENDENT TRIANGULAR CREATIVE PRACTICE & SCENE. The workshop, rooted in both Ewe animist ontology and queer strategies, encourages participants to shift away from logo-centricity and linear thinking, towards a more experience-oriented relationship to the environment that is inspired by ancestral knowledge systems.

Transmedia artist, choreographer, dancer and educator Anani Dodji Sanouvi was born in Togo, grew up in Gabon, lived in Senegal, Belgium and Holland, and currently divides their time between Portugal and Brazil. Known for their synthesis of diverse traditions into a unique artistic language, Sanouvi has performed in theaters, festivals, museums, and cultural centers worldwide since 2001. Since 2016, they have co-directed the transmedia art collective Kawin with Brazilian artist Christiane da Cunha, exploring the transtemporal, transcultural and INdisciplinary dimensions of their animist heritage in the present. Accolades include fellowships from UNESCO, the Africa Center, the Sacatar Foundation, the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Award, and the Niterói Arts Foundation, as well as collaborations with luminaries such as Peter Sellars, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, and Hiroaki Umeda. Anani has brought AGAMA FO, their innovative approach to contemporary dance rooted in ancient principles, to major conferences and taught courses and workshops worldwide.

(dis)appear

WS 23/24 / Excursion nach Gutshof Sauen mit Workshop by Patricia Woltmann, Präsentation in TIER, Berlin

In every beginning and end there is a touch. When we breathe, we touch the air. When we stand or walk, we touch the ground. When we enter the room with our presence, the room is “touched” by us. How do we negotiate space in our togetherness, how do we organise our corporeality? When is a body absent, when is it present? In this laboratory we examine the nature of beginnings and endings, arrivals and departures. Using improvisation and compositional tools, we build from various physical techniques – drawing on touch, distance and proximity, interconnectivity of bodies – investigating forms of togetherness. 

Performance’s being.. becomes itself through disappearance. (Peggy Phelan) 

Patricia Woltmann is a choreographer, dancer and performance artist. At the intersection of dance and visual art, Patricia’s performances create a space for collective, embodied experiences. She explores concepts related to the transformative potential of the body – presence in relation to absence and memory. Patricia’s artistic works have been presented at Museo del Chopo, Mexico City, Goethe Institute Athens, AADK/Spain, KW Institute of Contemporary Art Berlin, Bode-Museum Berlin, among others. She taught at London Metropolitan University, Middlesex University London, Duncan Centre Prague, Erika Klütz Schule Hamburg, Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance London. https://pattywoltman.com/

Using Creative Research Methods and Tools for Artistic Production

SS 23 / screenings, Workshop, discussions with Leil Zahra Mortada

In this hands-on production class we will approach research from a creative, playful and at times unorthodox angles; while we explore tools, best-practices, production processes and project development. We will engage with the works of artists and artist collectives who have used performance and time-based media as a tool for socio-political critique, and whose work is rooted in open-source research and disruptive interventions.

Leil Zahra Mortada is a transfeminist queer activist, researcher and artist/filmmaker, born in Beirut. Their film work includes the archival project “Words of Women from the Egyptian Revolution”; and the awarded experimental short “Breakup in 9 Scenes”. Leil is behind the research project Sound Liberation Front, a music research project focusing on marginalized music and sound art from a decolonial and queer feminist perspectives. As a filmmaker, they recently produced “There is a Baba in Our House” a critical coming-of-age video on the performativity of nationalism and the blurred lines between the father/leader. Leil is a researcher and content developer on digital security, online privacy and open-source investigations. Their work has a major focus on queer and feminist politics, archiving, migration, nationalism,

Coming close(r): copying, imitating, appropriating movement

SS 23 / Workshop and presentation by Magdalena Kallenberger

This workshop combines physical exploration, discussion and writing exercises. We will examine the possibilities and impossibilities of adopting and “owning” movement and will take a closer look at notions of copying, imitation, appropriation, passing and other modes of “coming close(r)” to a specific physicality. As part of this workshop I will give insight into my artistic work with physical appropriation and body archives, mainly the projects “9½ minutes dancing dying” (2016) and “Try Leather” (2021).

Magdalena Kallenberger is an artist, writer, educator and researcher. She works with video, photography, performance, installation and text, combining research into feminist histories and writing with autobiography, theory and performative elements. Kallenberger’s research-based and often collaborative practice investigates themes around radical care and feminist practices tackling the in/visibility of care/work and motherhood(s) not just in the Arts. Kallenberger’s most recent articles and essays will appear in publications with MIT Press (2023), k-Verlag (2023), demeter press (2023) and gender(ed) thoughts (2023). She has co-edited “Re-Assembling Motherhood(s): On Radical Care and Collective Art as Feminist Practices” by MATERNAL FANTASIES, published with onomatopee in 2021, second edition in 2022. Available via onomatopee https://www.onomatopee.net/exhibition/re-assembling-motherhoods/. Magdalena Kallenberger is initiator, co-founder and active member of MATERNAL FANTASIES collective and was member of CAIRO BATS

Performative Memory Culture

WS 22/23 / workshop with Laia Rica

Who are “we?” What role do objects, materials and everyday products play? What can we tell through them? What do they say about us? How do they shape us? With which other people and contexts do they connect us? What (de)colonial heritage is hidden in objects, materials and everyday products?In the lab, we will work performatively with different materials and examine them in different different states performatively. We will tell autobiographical stories and find stories in the materials. In the relationship with and materials, we will explore the practice of collecting and exhibiting objects. of objects. The concept of colonial continuities will be used as a perspective on historical events in relation with personal, structural privileges will be examined.

Inter-weavings

SS 2022 / Exchange program with the performance class, Art School in the University Kassel of Mounira Al Solh

Inspired a.o. by artist and writer Etel Adnan, but also by post-colonial thinkers such as Glissant, Spivak, and Fanon, we would like to open up our work and connect our classes, with a shared interest in performative formats. For her weavings, writings, and poetry the artist Etel Adnan referred to her own past as migrant, inter-weaving her different identities, using tangible and non-tangible materials that gave her inspiration: the sun and the mountains around her, her everyday life, and her involvement with the planet, wars and daily news, whist also being able to work with abstraction.

The use of textiles as common source material for all participants will function as an open communal starting point. Working with ‚Textile’ could include working with old or new clothes, with pieces of cloth or textiles used or new, working with wool or cotton, using knitting, even recycling plastic, old tapes,  etc., anything that one can think of in relation to textiles, even on a metaphorical level. At first, in the beginning of June Kassel students could bring their own material to Berlin to play with. After that, on June 20th until around June 25th Berlin students will visit Kassel, the outcomes will be used in performative ways in the city of Kassel including the visit of Documenta15.

Workshops by performance artist and choreographer Ania Nowak

EXCHANGES AND INVISIBLE ENTANGLEMENTS

WS 2021/22 – SS 2022 / Research project and study trip around the project Maison Gbégbé in Agouegan, Togo

This project is set up in the context of postcolonial theory and in dialogue with the following pairs of themes: Original / Copy, Mutual Approach / Multiple Authorship, Appropriation / Exchange. Is it possible to overcome the separation of traditional culture and contemporary art that is constituted in the Western European exhibition business? In this project, we want to programmatically focus on the interstices and connecting elements of binaries focus. In Togolese Traditional Knowledge a distinctly collaborative and participatory understanding of art is lived. The participating students of my class work and rehearse around themes such as identity, distribution of tasks, and roles in collective and/or participatory projects.

With Workshops, evaluations, and discussions by lecturers Gregor Kasper & Musquiqui Chihying and Arlette-Louise Nkoze, and contributions o.a. by Abdel Amine Mohammed, Nanna Lüth, Anna Lauenstein, Jouliette Houssou, and an online meeting with Messanh Amedegnato, Rossila Goussanou, Nadja Ofuatey-Alazard, Anani Sanouvi, and dr. Ohiniko Toffa.

POST DIGITAL IGNORANCE

a’21 amberNetworkFestival
Art Technology

How does technology influence socio-cultural change? Can technological change bring about a democratization of society, can we dream of a techno-utopia? Does unrestricted access to knowledge and information sharpen the critical consciousness of society or does it exacerbate incomprehension, fear, and ignorance? How can power structures be broken up and changed through critical artistic interventions?

LAB is a new feature introduce to amberNetworkFestival. The lab aims at creating collective research, creation, and production platform where artists from the network nodes collaborate physically as well as remotely meeting at Oyoun in Berlin, which is the base for the LAB. The LAB will be based at Oyoun in Berlin but also in the network nodes. All the activities will be hybrid; on multiple locations and online at the same time.
In a’21 amberNetworkFestival, we are placing the LAB in the core of the festival which will be longer than a month where the invited artists and artists from the network nodes collectively research, create, produce as well as curate and perform. The output of the LAB will be documented and exhibited at Oyoun as well as distributed locations on the network and also online on the website of the festival.

In the ’21 amberNetworkFestiva LAB, we exchange with students from the Humanities and Social Sciences Department of the Istanbul Technical University, under the guidance of Ebru Yetiskin.

More info