The main aim of the research pivots around a simple question: how can we do things differently? Our premise is to fundamentally change gender relations, to create a new universe of concepts, of images, of norm, of laws, of sensations that—in an ideal situation—will express joy, not only of women, but of all. And we believe that art—and not political science or anthropology—is the perfect field to begin this different «sensing of the world», and are dedicated to exploring the conditions of this new contract of genders. We need to imagine this as the year to «exercise» total engagement with all sorts of speculative forms. Research is a trial, a method to bring together many fields, not only art, but law, technology, language…

To examine and report the settings that surround the question of equality implies the heavy discomfort of both men and women. The discomfort of losing privileges and of seeing how many structures demand to be modified to encompass the new realities gender diversity entails; the discomfort of discovering the enormous tasks we still need to undertake. One is to argue that equality is definitely not synonymous with the «same», and neither does it correspond to the idea of a fifty-fifty share. Equality is arriving at a stage in which the conditions and the virtues of our work are perceived equivalently to the ones offered to male counterparts. It is therefore not a question of securing the numbers, but of securing the conditions, the qualities, the language, the laws, as well as of modifying the structures accordingly. And we share this with all individuals and social movements struggling for equality. We do need quotas, but we also need a much deeper and profound metamorphosis of our social and cultural organizations, one that cannot be reached just with «equal» numbers. We need the numbers hand in hand with a whole set of strategies aimed to condition the behavior of the systems. We need to engage in the characterization and the exercise of an exaggerated number of measures in order to reach equality. Only through excess—of care, of consideration, of attentiveness to needs—can we permeate individual and collective behavior as well as the imagination of power and its management.

Over the course of two days, 15 and 16 May 2024, the spring symposium at Institute Art Gender Nature will bring together artists, choreographers, dancers, theorists, filmmakers, and hybrid practitioners, all of whom will consider animal dancing as both an ancient and nascent technology oriented toward understanding the co-evolution of bodies. That is, animal bodies, human bodies, machine bodies, and organisms (and organs) without a body. Why so, and why now? If our contemporary vision of the world is often reduced to envisioning rigid and independent units that interact at some distance with one another, there is yet a more complex reality. The relationships between subjects and objects, human and nonhuman beings, bodies and technologies, is always fluid and necessarily constructed at the startling moment of mutual encounter. Such an understanding might affect the way that we understand intelligence—often interpreted as consciousness unitarily located in the brain—and its myriad forms, diverse bodies, and various manifestations and movements.

To be able to imagine decentralized forms of intelligence transforms how we view the movements we make and the technologies that we build, but it also offers a new way of understanding the agency of citizenship in our impoverished systems of democracy. Can a new political thinking and a new view of seeing social relation emerge from dance? Just as scholar and nanotechnology expert Laura Tripaldi has noted, we believe that our technologies do not belong to us, and we therefore cannot use them to change what seems unjust in nature. Instead, we simply borrow these technologies—like divine forces—and therefore we must handle them with sacred reverie. To borrow our movements, whether from animals or algorithms, might encourage different forms of assembly, varied ways of co-existing in which hierarchies are broken down, step by step by step, body by body. To do so, we need art and performance, and to trust in artists as those capable of enhancing a non-instrumental relationship with the cosmos.

Simultaneously, the symposium’s participants will reflect on their own artistic and social practices in light of the Saharan region’s effects and affects. That said, if light is the irradiating trope of colonial enlightenment, the symbol of knowledge in imperialist thought and violently extractive and exploitative political practices, this gathering will attempt to engage with a more decolonial idea of the Sahara and the rich opacities that constitute it. Should the Sahara be understood as ancient space of connection, circulation, and trade—from its northern to its southern shores, its dunes and volcanic mountains to its lusher savannahs—so it might also be seen as a contemporary site of interchange between strikingly singular societies and communities on all sides of the desert, that aspect of the region most often imaged and imagined.

Indeed, the desert has long been a source of inspiration and ideas for artists, writers, and thinkers from both within and without its specific climates. The Sahara—as fact and metaphor both—has resulted in literatures, cinemas, bodies of political and philosophical thought, and social practices and movements that cross not just the desert but the world, often standing in for some larger allegory of place and one’s body reflected or alienated within it, a story of self, surveillance, and social world.

What are the images that the Sahara has evoked over time, in history, on the one hand, and in art and literature, on the other? Benaouda Lebdai asked once. To this query we might add others: What are the forms and futures that the Sahara, and its peoples and nonhuman spirits, its ecologies and migrations, necessitate now? How to see the Sahara through a more decolonial prism, per Yarri Kamara? Featuring the words and works of Phoenix Atala, Kateryna Botanova, Binta Diaw, Adji Dieye, Onome Ekeh, Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi (crazinisT artisT), Yarri Kamara, Benaouda Lebdai, Rania Mamoun, Yara Mekawei, Kettly Noël, Temitayo Ogunbiyi, Mohamed Sleiman Labat, and others, this symposium will attempt some ideas and images, poetics and practices, if not answers.

DAY I – 11 October 2023
Part 1
10.00 am Welcome by Chus Martínez and Quinn Latimer
10.15 am Reading by Quinn Latimer
10.25 am Temitayo Ogunbiyi
11.05 am Yarri Kamara
11.45 am Lunch
 
Part 2
2.00 pm Welcome by Chus Martínez and Quinn Latimer
2.10 pm Benaouda Lebdai
2.50 pm Phoenix Atala
3.40 pm Break
3.50 pm Adji Dieye (online presentation)
4.30 pm Round-up of DAY I by Chus Martínez and Quinn Latimer
5.00 pm End of DAY I
 
DAY II – 12 October 2023
Part 3
10.00 am Welcome by Chus Martínez and Quinn Latimer
10.10 am Reading by Quinn Latimer
10.20 am Onome Ekeh
10.50 am Mohamed Sleiman Labat
11.20 am Kettly Noël
Noon Lunch
 
Part 4
2.00 pm Welcome by Chus Martínez and Quinn Latimer
2.10 pm Yara Mekawei
2.40 pm Binta Diaw
3.10 pm Rania Mamoun (online presentation)
3.40 pm Break
3.50 pm Kateryna Botanova, Yarri Kamara, and Quinn Latimer: Book presentation of Sahara: A Thousand Paths Into the Future (2023)
4.25 pm Walk to der TANK
4.30 pm Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi (crazinisT artisT): The Dust in Bed, performance at der TANK
5.00 pm End of DAY II

Phoenix Atala is a trans, transversal, transdisciplinary French-Moroccan artist, invested in decolonial and queer practices, and speculative and transformative futures. He explores, chops down, wrongs up film, performance, stand-up comedy, web series, rap, and so on. More often than not, and more and more so, Atala works collectively and collaboratively. He is a Visiting Professor at Institute Art Gender Nature HGK Basel FHNW.

Kateryna Botanova is a Basel-based cultural critic, curator, and writer from Kyiv. She writes on decoloniality, solidarity, and care with a focus on artistic practices and societal dynamics in the Global South and Eastern Europe. She is a co-curator of Culturescapes Sahara, and co-editor of its anthologies. Previously the director of the Center for Contemporary Art in Kyiv, she is a member of PEN-Ukraine.

Binta Diaw is a Senegalese-Italian visual artist between Milan and Dakar. Her works sit at the border of the autobiographical and the abstract, the figurative and the conceptual. Whether excavating her Italianness and Africanness, or Black Feminist thought, Diaw is interested in ancestry and ancestors, memory and the way it can be figured into images of the memorial. Her use of soil and land—as metaphor or material—reveals a deep connection to the earth, and all those who came from it.

Adji Dieye is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice examines the construction of national epistemologies within public and institutional settings. Using archival materials, architecture, and advertising, she questions the relationship between our ontological understanding and the paradoxes inherent in the creation of a national imaginary of progress. Her work was recently shown at Fotomuseum Winthertur, the 2022 Dak’art Biennale, and Rencontres de Bamako.

Onome Ekeh is a writer and designer of speculative fictions. Born and raised on both sides of the Atlantic, she started out as a painter, gravitated towards design, and then fell in love with cinema. Somewhere in the collision she went digital and discovered alliances with AI. Her works span film, video, theater, literature, and radio. She is a lecturer at Institute Art Gender Nature HGK Basel FHNW.

Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi [aka crazinisT artisT] is a trans woman with the pronoun sHit if not She. Va-Bene lives in Kumasi, Ghana, but works internationally as a multidisciplinary “artivist,” performer, curator, and mentor. She is the artistic director of crazinisT artist and Our Railway Cinema Gallery (ORCG) studio. Investigating queerness and sexual stigma, her body and gender-fluid persona is employed in performances, images, and installations that confront injustice, violence, internalized oppression, and anti-blackness.

Yarri Kamara is a writer, translator, and policy researcher. Of Sierra Leonean and Ugandan origin, she lived for almost two decades in Burkina Faso. Her essays have appeared in Africa Is A Country, The Republic, and Welt-Sichten. She was longlisted for the 2023 National Translation Award in Prose (USA) for her translation of Monique Ilboudo’s novel So Distant From My Life. Her policy research work revolves mainly around policy for cultural industries with organizations such as UNESCO. She currently lives in Milan.

Quinn Latimer is a writer, editor, and occasional curator. Her books include Like a Woman: Essays, Readings, Poems(2017) and Rumored Animals (2012), and she was editor-in-chief of publications for documenta 14, in Athens and Kassel. Her recently curated exhibitions include Perpetual Language, at Croy Nielsen, Vienna, and SIREN (some poetics), at Amant, New York. She is Head of the MA at Institute Art Gender Nature HGK Basel.

Benaouda Lebdai is University Professor at Le Mans Université. He is a specialist in comparative colonial and postcolonial literature, focused on the relations between literature and history, gender and identity, migration and exile. He has written widely on African literature—on Chinua Achebe, Zoë Wicomb, Rachid Boudjedra, Assia Djebar, and Frantz Fanon, among others—as well as on the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Narratives. He contributes to Le Point Afrique and El Watan.

Rania Mamoun is a writer and Sudanese resistance committee activist. A 2010 International Prize for Arabic Fiction Nadwa participant, Mamoun has published two novels in Arabic: Green Flash and Son of the Sun. Her books also include Thirteen Months of Sunrise, shortlisted for the 2020 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation. Her book of poetry, Something Evergreen Called Life, translated by Yasmine Seale, was recently published by Action Books.

Chus Martínez is a writer and curator, and Head of Institute Art Gender Nature HGK Basel FHNW. She is curator of Ocean Space, in Venice, for TBA21–Academy, and curatorial director of der TANK, in Basel. Her books include Like This: Natural Intelligence as Seen by Art (2022), Corona Tales: Let Life Happen to You (2020), and Club Univers (2017). Previously, she was Head of the department of artistic direction for DOCUMENTA (13), in Kassel.

Yara Mekawei is an artist and scholar who blends urban rhythms with architectural foundations, crafting auditory vignettes into visual tales. Rooted in architectural philosophy, social historiography, and literary thought, her compositions bridge antiquity and modernity, making sound both vessel and voyage. Her forthcoming work weaves Sufi poetry with the Book of the Dead’s wisdom. Drawing inspiration from diverse social philosophies, her art forms a continuous narrative reflecting her cultural identity and femininity in a North East African context.

Kettly Noël is a dancer, choreographer, performer, and actress born in Haiti but often working in Bamako, where she has been the director of the Festival Dense Bamako Danse and of the cultural centre Donko Seko, a space for the development of contemporary dance as a tool for socialization in Mali. Her work has been shown widely, including at documenta 14, in Athens, the Humboldt Forum, in Berlin, and TichÈlbÈ—Transmission and Triennial Dance Repertoire, in the Festival d’Avignon

Temitayo Ogunbiyi is a Lagos-based artist interested in how commerce and history can inscribe public space. In her practice, she forges dialogues between current events, anthropological histories, and botanical cultures. Her work can be currently found at the Museum Tinguely, in Basel, including in a playground installation in Solitude Park titled You will follow the Rhein and compose play (2023).

Mohamed Sleiman Labat is a Saharawi artist and writer based in Algeria. He is the founder of Motif Art Studio in the Samara refugee camp in the Hamda Desert. He experiments with discarded materials found in the camp to make art, while facilitating cross-generational learning and the preservation of traditional storytelling. Labat uses various media to document the oral and nomadic cultures of the peoples of the Western Sahara, as well as new narratives of the generations born in the camp since the discovery of phosphate in the 1970s and the resulting land clashes with Morocco.

Forests are entangled with the lifeforms—both human and nonhuman—that they support. As such, they are often contested, endangered, exploited places. Forests have long been utilized as refuges in times of war and conflict, been gleaned for their wood and other resources as sources of shelter, and are both ancient and contemporary sites of Indigenous life, medicine, inheritance, and knowledge. The decimation of forests, then, at the hands of multinationals, both democratic and autocratic governments, warring forces, and others, can be seen as an example of a violent disregard for life in toto. Where forests die, so do lifeforms and epistemologies; where they live, diverse forms of existence, community, knowledge, and language are propagated. As Bojana Piškur has noted: “A forest is not the sum of its tree-parts. It is more than that: an ecosystem based on complex, intertwined relationships among plants, animals, fungi, bacteria, and other organisms.”

Understanding the forest’s multiplicity bears a similitude, perhaps, with current understandings of our multiple and gendered identities, as well as the many roles and functions of artistic practices and cultural conditions outside the modern and after the modern city. Imaging and imagining new futures and ecologies, at once more equitable, sustainable, and full of real possibility, makes us look for new forests, new forest cultures, new poetic and pragmatic and technical languages that expand the practice of what is sometimes called forestry, sometimes called forest knowledges, and sometimes called art.

To that end, Genders of the Forests will emphasize what various disciplines have long noted: that plant thinking exists, and that important concepts are borne from the living world, not only from human thought. Understanding the forest as a force in the transformation of the world is a political act that modifies binary assumptions that we often hold about nature and culture, but also those plans that we envision for technology. If Western cultures believe intentionality is at the core of development, plant thinking has shown that non-intentional consciousness exists. As Michael Marder has written, vegetal thought “amounts to an essentialism-free way of thinking that is fluid, receptive, dispersed, non-oppositional, non-representational, immanent, and material-practical.” A forest that thinks indicates that intelligence is always alive and embodied, and that those codes that animate machines are generated from life itself. No technological development can therefore ignore the forest. Thus forest-related research conducted by artists and other thinkers offers us a philosophical, ethical, and ontological way to envision a more livable future. Learning to live with and for this transformation is the aim of this symposium writ large.

DAY I – 24 May 2023
Part 1
10.00 am Welcome by Chus Martínez and Quinn Latimer
10.15 am Reading by Quinn Latimer
10.25 am Jumana Emil Abboud
11.00 am Gayatri Kodikal
11.30 am Mathilde Rosier
Noon Lunch

Part 2
2.00 pm Welcome by Chus Martínez and Quinn Latimer
2.10 pm Yvonne Volkart & Felipe Castelblanco
2.50 pm Franziska Lauber
3.20 pm Claire Pentecost
3.50 pm Break
4.00 pm Pauline Julier
4.30 pm Ana Vaz, online presentation
5.00 pm Round-up of DAY I by Chus Martínez and Quinn Latimer
5.10 pm End of DAY I

DAY II – 25 May 2023
Part 3
10.00 am Welcome by Chus Martínez and Quinn Latimer
10.10 am Reading by Quinn Latimer
10.20 am Gauri Gill
10.50 am Alexandra Navratil
11.20 am Lucia Pietroiusti & Filipa Ramos
Noon Lunch

Part 4
2.00 pm Welcome by Chus Martínez and Quinn Latimer
2.10 pm Paula Baeza Pailamilla
2.40 pm Chiara Camoni
3.10 pm Break
3.20 pm Monica Ursina Jäger
3.50 pm Pujita Guha
4.20 pm Round up DAY II by Chus Martínez and Quinn Latimer
5.00 pm End of DAY

Jumana Emil Abboud was born in Shefa-'Amr, Galilee. Her artistic practice constellates personal stories and collective mythologies, weaving folklore and contemporary tales to navigate themes of memory and dispossession. Employing drawing, video, performance, objects, and text, she surveys place and resilience amidst the topography of Palestine. She lives and works in Jerusalem and London.

Paula Baeza Pailamilla was born in Santiago. They received a degree in Pedagogy in Contemporary Dance and an MA in Art Theory and History at the Universidad de Chile. Their performances often consider their Mapuche identity, and their textile works are often made collectively, evoking issues of issues of gender, erasure, and displacement within their Indigenous community. Since 2016, they have been part of the Mapuche collective Rangiñtulewfü, which gave birth to the digital project Yene: Revista de arte, pensamiento y escrituras en Wallmapu y Abya Yala. In 2020, their work was featured in the 11th Berlin Biennale. They are currently based in Switzerland.

Chiara Camoni was born in Piacenza, Italy. The diversity of her practices—drawing, vegetal prints, video, sculpture, and ceramics—are often made in collaboration with friends and relatives, as informal and spontaneous groups or more institutional seminars and workshops, all interested in forms and ideas of shared authorship. The “Centro di Sperimentazione” has appeared at the artist’s side for a few years now as a container for the collective processes. She lives and works in Fabbiano in the Apuan Alps, Tuscany.

Felipe Castelblanco is a multidisciplinary artist and researcher who works at the intersection of participatory practices, the moving image, and new media art. His diverse work explores institutional formats and creates platforms for inter-epistemic dialogue. Recent exhibitions include the 2019 Quebec Biennial and the project Water Territories, at Helmhaus, Zurich. His PhD, from the MAKE/SENSE PhD Program at HGK Basel FHNW, examined avenues for biocultural peace-building through participatory art and media in the Colombian Pan-Amazon region. He lives and works in Basel.

Gauri Gill was born in Chandigarh, India. Her image-based practice addresses Indian identity markers of caste, class, and community, as well as ecological issues and Indigenous life. Her works include a two-decade-long engagement with marginalized communities in rural Rajasthan called Notes from the Desert (1999–), and Fields of Sight (2013–), a collaboration with Adivasi artist, Rajesh Vangad that combines her photographs with ancient Warli drawing. She has exhibited at the 58th Venice Biennale; documenta 14, Athens and Kassel; and the 2016 Kochi Biennale. She lives and works in Delhi.

Pujita Guha is an artist and curator. She completed her Masters and MPhil in Cinema Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, and is a PhD candidate at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research concerns the intersection of environment and media, primarily forest ecologies of South and Southeast Asia, with a focus on military and guerilla practices, anthropogenic urban forests, animism, and contemporary moving image art of the region. With Abhijan Toto, she runs The Forest Curriculum, a curatorial project focused on questions of pedagogy and environmental thinking in the forested belts of South and Southeast Asia.

Monica Ursina Jäger was born in Switzerland and received her MA at Goldsmiths College, London. Her multidisciplinary work examines notions of landscape in built environments and natural landscapes, rethinking ‘topography’ as a mental landscape rather than as a form of visual representation. Her research excavates histories of the social, political and sensorial conversations between natural and built elements, the rural and late-century modernist architectures. She is a researcher and lecturer at the Institute of Natural Resource Sciences at the ZHAW School of Life Sciences and Facility Management.

Pauline Julier was born in Geneva. An artist and filmmaker, she studied at the École Supérieure de la Photographie d’Arles and the SPEAP, Art and Politics Experimental programme, Sciences Po, Paris. In her works, she explores the links that humans create with their environments through stories, rituals, knowledge, and images. Her films and installations are composed of elements of diverse origin and form—documentary, theory, fiction—to restitute the complexity of our relationship to the world. Her films include Naturales Historiae (2019), which examines the history of nature and includes an interview with Bruno Latour. She lives and works in Geneva.

Gayatri Kodikal was born in Chennai, India. She is an artist, writer, educator, and game-maker known as gamedevi. Her game worlds and performances are informed by psycho-geography, cinema, oral storytelling, animism, and proto-feminisms. Recent works include Sinking into the Mangroves, a Zoom performance and game-world reading that tells the story of an encounter with the mangrove forest on the western coast of India during an expedition to record the sound of a rare species of crustaceans, which was performed at Forests as Imaginations, at the School of Environment and Architecture, in Mumbai. She lives and works in Rotterdam.

Quinn Latimer was born in Venice, California; she lives and works in Basel and Athens. A poet, critic, editor, and occasional curator, she is Head of the MA at Institute Art Gender Nature, HGK Basel FHNW. Her books include Like a Woman: Essays, Readings, Poems (2017), Sarah Lucas: Describe This Distance (2013), Film as a Form of Writing (2013), and Rumored Animals (2012). She was editor-in-chief of publications for documenta 14, in Athens and Kassel. Recently, she curated the exhibition SIREN (some poetics), which explored technologies of myth and mouth, earth and alarm, gender and poetics, at Amant, New York. She is a PhD candidate in the MAKE/SENSE PhD Program at HGK Basel FHNW.

Franziska Lauber is a Swiss artist and researcher. She is a member of SARN (Swiss Artistic Research Network) and founder of the workgroup Sense of Forest–Sense of Place: On the possibility of perception as an artistic research method in the eco- and energetic system FOREST. Her installations and video works consider points of contact with nonhuman animals and reflect on concepts of landscape, forests, temporality, and landmarks. They also often emphasize the ephemeral, both transience and disappearance, which play out over the course of her exhibitions. She lives and works in Bern.

Chus Martínez was born in Spain and studied philosophy and art history in New York. A writer and curator, she is Head of Institute Art Gender Nature, HGK Basel FHNW. She is curator of Ocean Space, in Venice, for TBA21 Academy, and curatorial director of der TANK, in Basel. Her books include Like This: Natural Intelligence As Seen By Art (2022), Corona Tales: Let Life Happen to You (2020), and Club Univers (2017). Previously, she was chief curator at El Museo del Barrio, New York (2012–2014), and Head of the department of artistic direction and a member of the core agent group for DOCUMENTA (13), in Kassel.

Alexandra Navratil was born in Zurich. She studied fine art at Central St. Martins College and Goldsmiths College, both in London. Her work often starts as scientific-historical research on the beginnings of photography, film, and industrial history. By combining and animating found visual material, Navratil’s works reflect on early modernism and its impact on imagery today, while her videos, installations, sculptures, and silkscreens follow material histories. She is a lecturer at Institute Art Gender Nature, HGK Basel FHNW, and lives and works in Zurich and Amsterdam.

Claire Pentecost is an artist, activist, and writer who researches the living matters of the unified multi-dimensional being that animates the critical zone of our planet. Her work is driven by research and inspired by questions of form; her longstanding interest in nature and artificiality predicates her recent responses to anthropogenic climate change. Her projects often address the contested line between the natural and the artificial, focusing on food, agriculture, bio-engineering, and anthropogenic changes in the indivisible living entity that animates our planet. She is Professor in the Department of Photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Lucia Pietroiusti was born in Rome. She is a curator working at the intersection of art, ecology, and systems. Founder of the General Ecology project at Serpentine, London, she is also the co-curator (with Filipa Ramos, since 2018) of The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish, an interdisciplinary festival, radio, and publication series on consciousness and intelligence across species also held at the Serpentine. Elsewhere, Pietroiusti was curator of Sun & Sea (Marina), by Rugile Barzdziukaite, Vaiva Grainyte, and Lina Lapelyte, for the Lithuanian Pavilion at the 58th International Venice Biennale. She lives and works in London.

Filipa Ramos was born in Lisbon. A writer, lecturer, and curator, she received a PhD from the School of Critical Studies at Kingston University, London. Her research focuses on how art addresses ecology, fostering relationships between nature and technology. Curator of Art Basel Film and a founding curator of Vdrome, the online artists’ cinema she co-founded in 2013, her recent projects also include The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish and Persons Persone Personen, the 8th Biennale Gherdëina (2022), both curated with Lucia Pietroiusti. She is a lecturer at Institute Art Gender Nature, HGK Basel FHNW, and lives and works in Lisbon and Normandy.

Mathilde Rosier was born in Paris. Her moving, multidisciplinary work emerges from her interest in the physical and psychological experience of ancient rites and rituals, manifesting in constellations of self-made costumes and mystic and hybridized representations of animals, humans, and nature. Through an admixture of painting, film, dance and theatre, she reflects on the need to reintegrate human activity with the “natural environment,” including pre-industrial practices, observing the world from the vantage of the present-day countryside. She is a lecturer at Institute Art Gender Nature, HGK Basel FHNW, and she lives and works in Burgundy.

Ana Vaz was born in the Brazilian highlands inhabited by the ghosts buried by its modernist capital: Brasília. Originally from the cerrado and a wonderer by choice, she has lived in the arid lands of central Brazil and southern Australia, in the mangroves of northern France and in the northeastern shores of the Atlantic. Her filmography questions cinema as an art of the (in)visible and an instrument capable of dehumanizing the human, expanding its connections to forms of life other than human or spectral. Her activities are also embodied in writing, critical pedagogy, installations, and collective walks.

Yvonne Volkart is head of research at Institute Art Gender Nature, HGK Basel FHNW. From 2017 to 2021 she headed the research project Ecodata–Ecomedia–Ecoaesthetics, for which she completed the monograph Technologies of Care: From Sensing Technologies to an Aesthetics of Attention (Diaphanes, 2022). Until 2025 she will direct the SNSF research project Plants_Intelligence: Learning like a Plant. In collaboration with Sabine Himmelsbach and Karin Ohlenschläger she curated the exhibition and book project Eco-Visionaries: Art, Architecture and New Media After the Anthropocene (Hatje Cantz, 2018). She lives and works in Basel and Zurich.

There are myriad reasons why storytelling about identity and its many avatars has become increasingly theorized again. Consider the autofictions that dominant both contemporary literary and moving-image practices, or the digital technologies that have us performing ourselves every day, writing ourselves down for some desired audience, all economy; consider, much earlier, the invention of the printing press and all of its economies. Each of these technologies and their specific narrative possibilities have fostered, explicitly or paradoxically, certain fictions of the self, in which one might reflect on one’s radical subjectivity in a collective world where space for real resistance, experimentation, collectivity, and non-normativity are rare. Perhaps, too, storytelling has reemerged as an important form and gesture because it resists the endless contemporary performance of the solitary self, instead situating the protagonist in a communal world of older entanglements at once social, political, and ecological. Finally, storytelling always implies an audience, a receiver who, in their listening, allows the narrative to be rewritten in their reception and memory of it.

If storytelling is an act of connecting through the materiality of the voice—its character, its expression—that expression might, sometimes, become an anti-colonial force. It is one that stresses the common feeling of the collective, acting against the systemic isolation imposed by capital and its racial-patriarchal orders. Listening to that voice is an active act of co-imagining and remaking the world with the storyteller. In this symposium at the Institute Art Gender Nature, we would like to stress the political and gnosiological importance of the production of storytelling, and mythological narratologies. In this way we might surpass Northern ways of codifying gender as well as the many hierarchies it intersects with and the oppression and marginalization it is made to support. Equity and equality depend on legislation, yes, but in legal systems built on such vast disenfranchisement, a more just society also must be capable of connecting to the past through language—so often patriarchal and restrictive—with an eye and ear toward a more nonbinary future. So much depends on language. So much depends on being able to narrate nonhegemonic worlds in which we might relate, might identify, instigating the desire that could lead to a necessary transformation of how we live together and how we tell (yes) that story.

Songs to Sound Worlds, Stories to Rewrite Them: On Gender, Storytelling, and Myth continues our semiannual series of Master Symposia at the Institute Art Gender Nature, begun in 2018 with Promise No Promises! and whose most recent iteration, called Ages of Receivership: On Generous Listening, was held in spring 2022. In each of the symposiums thus far, current artistic practices are examined and articulated within the framework of questions of contemporary import, be they political, theoretical, ecological, emotional, linguistic or other.

DAY I – 10 November 2022
On-site and online → livestream

Part 1
10.00 am Welcome by Chus Martínez & Quinn Latimer
10.15 am Reading by Quinn Latimer
10.25 am Tessa Mars, performative talk
11.00 am Saodat Ismailova, screening and conversation
12.00 pm Lunch break

Part 2
2.00 pm Acaye Kerunen, performance talk and conversation
2.45 pm Jumana Emil Abboud, reading and conversation
3.30 pm Bani Abidi, keynote presentation
4.15 pm Tracey Rose, artist talk (online)
5.00 pm Round up of DAY I by Chus Martínez & Quinn Latimer
5.15 pm End of DAY I

DAY II – 11 November 2022
On-site and online → livestream

Part 3
10.00 am Welcome by Chus Martínez & Quinn Latimer
10.10 am Reading by Quinn Latimer
10.20 am Sheelasha Rajbhandari & Hit-Man Gurung, artist talk
11.00 am Françoise Vergès, talk (online)
11.40 am Christian Campbell, poetry reading
12.00 pm Lunch break

Part 4
2.00 pm Welcome by Chus Martínez & Quinn Latimer
2.10 pm Astrit Ismaili, performative artist talk
2.50 pm Marie Hélène Pereira, curatorial conversation
3.30 pm Kara Springer, performative artist talk
4.00 pm Ruanne Abou-Rahme & Basel Abbas, screening and conversation (online)
4.40 pm Round up DAY II by Chus Martínez & Quinn Latimer
5.00 pm End of DAY II

JUMANA EMIL ABBOUD was born in Shefa-'Amr, Galilee. Her artistic practice constellates personal stories and collective mythologies, weaving folklore and contemporary tales to navigate themes of memory and dispossession. Employing drawing, video, performance, objects, and text, she surveys place and resilience amidst the topography of Palestine. She lives and works in Jerusalem and London.

BANI ABIDI was born in Karachi, Pakistan. She studied painting and printmaking at the National College of Arts, in Lahore, and later attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work addresses, in part, forms of nationalism amid the Indian-Pakistani conflict and the violent legacy of partition.

BASEL ABBAS and RUANNE ABOU-RAHME investigate the political, visceral, and material possibilities of sound, image, text, and site. Their works, from multi-media installations to live sound/image performances, probe the slippages between actuality and projection, fiction and myth and desire. Abbas was born in Nicosia, Cyprus. Abou-Rahme was born in Boston. They live and work in New York City and Ramallah.

CHRISTIAN CAMPBELL is a Trinidadian Bahamian poet, essayist, and cultural critic who studied at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and received his PhD from Duke University. He is the author of Running the Dusk (2010), which won the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize. In 2015 Running the Dusk was translated into Spanish and published in Cuba as Correr el Crepúsculo. He lives and works in New York City but is currently based in Basel.

ASTRIT ISMAILI was born in Kosovo and is based in Amsterdam. Their artistic practice features bodies that consist of both imaginary and material realities, using alter egos, body extensions, and wearable music instruments to embody possibilities for becoming. In the act of singing they explore the role of voice in pop culture and identity politics, asking what it means to make audible a body politic.

SAODAT ISMAILOVA was born in Uzbekistan. In her moving-image works, which blur fictional and documentary practices, myth and the real, Ismailova draws from the specific cultural identity and history of Central Asia, often through ancestral knowledge and epic folklore stories featuring women as protagonists, to reveal a broader understanding of what it is to be human.

ACAYE KERUNEN is an artist, performer, storyteller, writer, and activist based in Kampala, Uganda. She graduated with a BSc in Mass Communication from the Islamic University in Uganda, Mbale. Her installation works—featuring hand stitching, appending, knotting, and weaving—are often made with local craftswomen, querying the line between fine art and craft, and centering methodologies of performance, collaboration, social work, and environmental consciousness.

QUINN LATIMER was born in Venice, California; she lives and works in Basel and Athens. A poet, critic, editor, performer, and sometimes curator, she is Head of the MA at Institute Art Gender Nature. Her books include Like a Woman: Essays, Readings, Poems (2017) and Rumored Animals (2012). She was editor-in-chief of publications for documenta 14, and she recently curated the exhibition SIREN (some poetics), which explores technologies of myth and mouth, earth and alarm, at Amant, in New York.

TESSA MARS was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. In her painting and performance practice she proposes storytelling and image-making as transformative strategies for survival, resistance, and healing. Her work is centered around Tessalines, her hybrid alter ego based on the leader of the Haitian revolution, Jean-Jacques Dessalines; through her, Mars investigates gender, history, tradition, and narrative. She is a resident fellow at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam.

CHUS MARTÍNEZ was born in Spain and studied philosophy and art history in New York. A writer and curator, she is Head of Institute Art Gender Nature, FHNW Academy of Art and Design in Basel. She is curator of Ocean Space, in Venice, for TBA21 Academy, and curatorial director of der TANK, in Basel. Her books include Like This: Natural Intelligence As Seen By Art (2022), Corona Tales: Let Life Happen to You (2020), and Club Univers (2017).

MARIE HÉLÈNE PEREIRA was born in Senegal. She is Director of Programs for RAW Material Company–Centre for Art, Knowledge and Society, in Dakar. Her curatorial projects often concern the politics of identity and migration histories, and include Scattered Seeds, in Cali, Colombia, as well as Canine Wisdom for the Barking Dog/The Dog Done Gone Deaf: Exploring The Sonic Cosmologies of Halim El-Dabh, at the Dakar Biennale of Contemporary African Art, in 2018.

SHEELASHA RAJBHANDARI and HIT MAN GURUNG are Nepalese artists and curators based in Kathmandu. Rajbhandari was born in Kathmandu; her practice surveys Nepal’s history and geopolitical positioning through traditional folklore, oral histories, mythology, performance, and ritual. Gurung was born in Nepal; his work concerns mass migrations of Nepalese laborers, urban development, and the legacies of the Nepalese Civil War and its Maoist insurgencies.

TRACEY ROSE was born in Durban, South Africa. Her performative practice often translates to and is accompanied by photography, video, installation, and digital prints. At once anarchic and carnivalesque, Rose’s work explores issues around post-coloniality, gender and sexuality, race and repatriation. In 2004 Rose attended The South African School of Motion Picture Medium and Live Performance and later obtained her Master of Fine Arts, Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK in 2007. She lives and works in Johannesburg.

KARA SPRINGER is an artist of Jamaican and Bajan heritage, who was born in Bridgetown, Barbados, and raised in Southern Ontario, Canada. Her work is concerned with care and armature—the underlying structure that holds the flesh of a body in place. Working with photography, sculpture, and site-specific interventions, she surveys forms of structural support within urban infrastructure and systems of institutional and political power. She is a current resident of Atelier Mondial in Basel.

FRANÇOISE VERGÈS was born in Paris and grew up in La Réunion and Algeria. A writer, thinker, activist, and public educator, she holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley. The author of many books, including A Decolonial Feminism and Wombs of Women, she writes on postcolonial theory, creolization, psychoanalysis, slavery, and economies of predation. She has directed films about Aimé Césaire and Maryse Condé, as well as organized exhibitions on legacies of slavery and gender at the Louvre, Paris.

CAROLINE BERGVALL is an artist, writer, and performer, and a strong exponent of interdisciplinary arts and writing practices adapted to contemporary modes, as well as multilingual identities and histories. Her poetic work is widely featured and translated. Her performances and installations have appeared at Tate Modern, London,  Centre Pompidou, Paris, documenta 14, Athens and Kassel, the Berlin Poetry Festival, and elsewhere. Her books include Alisoun Sings (2019), Drift (2014), and Meddle English (2011). Forthcoming are Caroline Bergvall’s Medievalist Poetics, co-edited with Josh Davies, and Writing at the Crossroads: Essays 1996–2016. She recently launched the online project Solitary to Solidary Arts Lab for exchanges and training in collaborative and expanded writing pratices. She is Visiting Professor at Kings College London and a Kelly Writers House Fellow, at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

MERVE YEŞILADA ÇAĞLAR is Director of the Vuslat Foundation, which creates awareness about and spreads the skill of generous listening, that is, hearing beyond words. Before this role, she was a partner at Galeri Nev Istanbul, one of the most active commercial art spaces in Turkey. While working on the gallery’s program and strategy as well as expanding its international outreach, Merve took advisory positions at various institutions and private collections. From 2011 to 2018, Merve was Director of SAHA Association, a philanthropic private-funding mechanism. Merve worked as the Director of Galerist, Turkey’s first internationally recognized commercial gallery from 2007 to 2011. During her tenure, she oversaw the gallery’s exhibition and fair programs, and founded the first in-house monthly publication, Galerist Newspaper. Previously, she coordinated the design exhibition Block (2007), which linked marble resources, producers, and craftsmen in Turkey with international designers. She holds a B.A. in Communication and Design from Bilkent University.

BILL DIETZ is a composer and writer, born in Arizona. Since 2012, he is co-chair of the Music/Sound Department in Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts in New York. His work is often presented in festivals, museums, and academic journals, but also in apartment buildings, magazines, and on public streets. In 2013 he co-founded Ear│Wave│Event with Woody Sullender. He has published two books of listening scores: one on his Tutorial Diversions series, meant to be performed at home (Eight Tutorial Diversions, 2009–2014, 2015); and the other, made up of “concert pieces,” based on historical and contemporary audience behavior (L’école de la claque,2017). With Amy Cimini, he co-edited, Maryanne Amacher: Selected Writings and Interviews (2020), and he is co-author, with Kerstin Stakemeier, of Universal Receptivity (2021).

NINA EMGE is an artist whose examination of sound lies at the heart of her artistic practice. Her work explores listening methods, tools of expression, and spaces to explore the fullness and complexity of silence. This is evident in her research and archival work, her installations and drawings, and in the often collaborative working and creation processes that she chooses. Her work has been shown at Les Complices*, Zurich, Kunsthalle Zürich, Uferhallen, Berlin, Istituto Svizzero, Rome, Halle für Kunst Lüneburg, and elsewhere.

JAZMINA FIGUEROA is a Berlin-based writer. She mostly writes about experiences with technology as immensely personal and inherently non-scalable. Her published works include On Expanded Spectatorship (March Journal, 2021), Infinite Whole (Montez Press, 2020), The Double Helix and Indigeneity featured in the 0.1% exhibition publication (Navel, 2019), and Methods of Representation for the book, Authenticity?: Observations and Artistic Strategies in the Post-Digital Age (2017). Recent work by Figueroa, Call Signs (2021) is a performance lecture for virtual realms exhibited and digitally archived by fantastic confabulations. Currently she is a fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude; previously she was Beyond Matter's artist-in-residence at Zentrum für Kunst und Medien (ZKM).

VIRNA GÜLZARI, M.A. is a clinical psychologist who has worked with children, adolescents, and adults for 25 years. She has worked at Boğaziçi University’s Centre for Psychological Research and Application, as well as at their neuropsychological testing unit, doing assessments with children with learning and attention difficulties. Since 2011 she has had her own private clinic for psychotherapy, while volunteering at the Bahçelievler Children’s Home and for the Turkish Red Cross, where she works with Syrian mothers and infants. For two decades she has worked years with psychotherapists using art therapy, dance therapy and authentic movement for their own emotional processing. She was Vice-President of the Turkish Infant Mental Health Association (2010–2021), and she is a member of the Turkish Psychological Association. She is on the advisory board of Vuslat Foundation.

AYESHA HAMEED is based in London. Her work explores the legacies of indentureship and slavery through the figures of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, and her Afrofuturist approach combines performance, sound essays, videos, and lectures. Hameed examines the mnemonic power of these media—their capacity to transform the body into a body that remembers. Her recurrent motifs of water, borders, and displacement offer a reflection on migration stories and materialities, and on the relations between human beings and what they imagine as nature. Recent exhibitions include Liverpool Biennale (2021), Gothenburg Biennale (2019, 21), Lubumbashi Biennale (2019) and Dakar Biennale (2018). She is co-editor of Futures and Fictions (2017) and co-author of Visual Cultures as Time Travel (2021). She is currently a Senior Lecturer in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths University of London.

KATE LACEY is Professor of Media History and Theory at the University of Sussex. Her books include Feminine Frequencies: Gender, German Radio and the Public Sphere, 1923 to 1945 (1996), which deals with the constitutive role of gender in the development of broadcasting, the role of the media in times of political transition and crisis, and offers a historically grounded critique of public sphere theory. Her more recent book, Listening Publics: The Politics and Experience of Listening in the Media Age (2013), focuses on the idea of listening as a cultural practice, as a category of critique, and as a form of political action. She was a founding member of the Radio Studies Network and sits on the editorial boards of The Radio Journal and The International Journal of Cultural Studies.

QUINN LATIMER is a California-born poet, critic, and editor whose work often explores feminist economies of writing, reading, and moving-image production. Her books include Like a Woman: Essays, Readings, Poems(2017), Sarah Lucas: Describe This Distance (2013), Film as a Form of Writing: Quinn Latimer Talks to Akram Zaatari (2013), and Rumored Animals (2012). Her writings appear in Artforum, The Paris Review, Texte zur Kunst, The White Review, and elsewhere. She was editor-in-chief of publications for documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel. Most recently, she was co-editor, with Kateryna Botanova, of Amazonia: Anthology as Cosmology (2021). She is curating SIREN (some poetics), opening at the Amant Foundation, New York, in September 2022. She is Head of the MA program of the Institute Art Gender Nature HGK FHWN in Basel.

CHUS MARTÍNEZ is Head of the Institute Art Gender Nature HGK FHNW in Basel. She was the expedition leader of The Current, a project initiated by TBA21–Academy (2018–2020) and she is, for 2021 and 2022, the artistic director of Ocean Space, Venice, a space spearheaded by TBA21–Academy. She recently edited the publication The Wild Book of Inventions (2020) and, together with Julieta Aranda and Markus Reymann, e-Flux Journal #112 (October 2020). She is the author of the collection of stories Corona Tales: Let Life Happen to You (2020).

NOUR MOBARAK was born in Cairo and now lives and works in Los Angeles. Her visual and sound work has been featured in exhibitions at Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York, KIM? Contemporary Art Centre, Riga, Hakuna Matata Sculpture Garden, Los Angeles, Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, Rodeo Gallery, London, and elsewhere. Her performances have taken place at the Hammer Museum and LAXART, both in Los Angeles, and Cambridge University, among many other places, and she was invited to the inaugural Field Workshop: Artist in Residence program at the ICA, Los Angeles, in 2021. Her music has been released by Recital, Cafe Oto’s TakuRoku, and Ultra Eczema, and is included in the Whitney Museum Library’s Special Collections. Her poetry and other writings have appeared in Triple Canopy, F.R. David, and the Salzburg Review. Her first book, Sphere Studies and Subterranean Bounce, was published in 2021 by Recital.

DYLAN ROBINSON is a xwélmexw (Stó:lō/Skwah) artist, curator and writer, as well as Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Arts at Queen’s University. In 2022 he begins a new appointment as Associate Professor in the School of Music at the University of British Columbia. Dr. Robinson’s work spans the areas of Indigenous sound studies and public art, and takes various forms including writing (from event scores to autotheory), gatherings, and inter-arts creation. This range of forms offers him a space to integrate the sonic, visual, poetic, and material that are inseparable in Stó:lō culture. His book, Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies (2020), examines Indigenous and settler colonial practices of listening. Considering how engagement with Indigenous music is often guided by individual listening positionalities, the book advocates for “apposite” forms of writing that convey sensorial, affective experiences of listening. Hungry Listening was awarded the Royal Musical Association/Cambridge University Press Monograph Prize and Best First Book from the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association.

AURA SATZ is an artist whose work encompasses film, sound, performance, and sculpture. She has performed, exhibited and screened her work nationally and internationally, including at Tate Modern, Tate Britain, and Hayward Gallery, all in London; the 2016 Sydney Biennale; NTT InterCommunication Center, Tokyo; MoMA and High Line Art, both in New York; MoMA; and Sharjah Art Foundation. She has presented solo exhibitions at the Hayward Gallery project space, London, John Hansard Gallery, Southampton, Dallas Contemporary, Texas, and the George Eastman Museum, Rochester, and elsewhere. She is currently developing her first feature film, called Preemptive Listening, centered on the sound of sirens and emergency signals. She teaches at the Royal College of Art, London.

STAS SHARIFULLIN, also known as HMOT, is a Bashkir, Siberian-born musician, researcher, and artist working with sound and sociopolitical contexts of the sonic. Based in Moscow since 2018, Stas is the co-curator of Klammklang label, and Head of the Sound Art & Sound Studies department at HSE Art & Design School. Some of HMOT’s commissioned works––from performances to installations and interventions––include those for Manifesta, CTM, Typography CCA, Ural Industrial Biennale, DK Zattere Venice, Unsound and Garage Museum, Moscow. Stas is currently an artist in residence at Lyseloth Musikerwohnhaus, Basel, as a part of the Pro Helvetia Foundation AIR Program.

LI TAVOR & NICOLAS BUZZI
Li Tavor is a musician, composer, performer, sound artist and architect based in Zurich. Their practice often negotiates multiple ways of possible relations within a built environment, through the interplay of sound, space, and perception. Together with Alessandro Bosshard, Matthew van der Ploeg and Ani Vihervaara, they were selected by the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia to curate the Swiss Pavilion at the 16th Architecture Biennial in Venice, where their exhibition Svizzera 240: House Tour was awarded the Golden Lion for Best National Participation. Their work has also been presented at Istituto Svizzero, Milano, Theater Gessnerallee, Zurich, NGV Melbourne, The Architecture Foundation, London, Kunsthaus Bregenz, the Sharjah Architecture Triennial, and the São Paulo Architecture Biennial.

Nicolas Buzzi was born in Bern and is based in Zurich and Frankfurt. Buzzi is a composer, performer, and sound artist who works with music, installation, media, and performing arts, with a focus on activating spaces, ties, and verges, and on perspective and perception as well. Buzzi’s work is or was practiced or presented at the Venice Architecture Biennale, the HKW Berlin, at the Istituto Svizzero Milano, at NUP Tallinn, Kunstmuseum Basel, the NAC Lithuania, at the São Paulo Architecture Biennial, at Schauspielhaus Zurich, Taylor Macklin Zurich, Theater Basel, and ZKM Karlsruhe. Buzzi teaches at HfMDK Frankfurt and is technical director of its electronic studio Selma.

HANNAH WEINBERGER is an artist living in Basel. Collaboration and participation are hallmarks of her practice, which utilizes the potential of sound and the properties of spaces to foster collective gatherings or assign a performative role to the audience. She has had solo exhibitions at the Centre d’Art Contemporain Geneve, Kunstverein Braunschweig, Schinkel Pavilion, Berlin, Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof, Hamburg, Kunsthaus Bregenz, MIT List Center for Visual Arts, Cambridge, MA, Swiss Institute, New York, and Kunsthalle Basel, and elsewhere. Her work has also been presented internationally at the Ural Biennale, Ekaterinburg, Russia, Copenhagen Contemporary, Okayama Art Summit, Manifesta 11, the Lyon Biennale, and Kunsthaus Glarus. She is a lecturer at Institute Art Gender Nature HGK FHNW and a member of the board of Kunsthalle Basel.

The first two days of the symposium, titled Seeing Into the Heart of Things: Earth and Equality Within Indigenous and Ancestral Knowledges, will be devoted to presentations, conversations, talks, and performances that will speak to such questions as well as field possible answers. Also included will be a book launch and presentation of the CULTURESCAPES 2021 reader, Amazonia: Anthology as Cosmology (Sternberg Press, 2021), with its editors Kateryna Botanova and Quinn Latimer. The gathering’s third and final day will feature a keynote lecture by Davi Kopenawa, the shaman and spokesperson for the Yanomami people. For more than three decades he has led the campaign to secure Yanomami land rights in the Brazilian states of Roraima and Amazonas; he is also the author of the acclaimed book The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman, written with Bruce Albert. In it, Davi Kopenawa notes: «When your eyes follow the tracks of my words, you will know that we are still alive, for Omama’s image protects us. Then you will be able to think: ‘These are beautiful words.’» Language testifies to co-existence, to shared life itself.

We hope that you will join us in Basel.

(subject to alterations)

DAY I – 3 November 2021
→ Online Link 3 November 2021

Part 1
10:00 am Welcome and Introduction: Chus Martínez & Quinn Latimer 
10:15 am Reading: Quinn Latimer 
10:30 am Talk and Conversation: Vandria Borari 
11:15 am Lecture and Screening: Felipe Castelblanco in conversation with Taita Hernando Chindoy & Ayenan Quinchoa
12:00 pm Lunch break

Part 2
2:00 pm Lecture and Conversation: Jeremy Narby 
2:45 pm Lecture and Screening: Annette Amberg presents Video nas Aldeias 
3:30 pm Lecture: Katya García-Antón 
4:00 pm Performance and Conversation: Pauliina Feodoroff 
4:30 pm Panel discussion with all participants
5:00 pm End of DAY I

DAY II – 4 November 2021
→ Online Link 4 November 2021

Part 3
10:00 am Welcome and Introduction: Chus Martínez & Quinn Latimer 
10:15 am Reading: Quinn Latimer 
10:30 am Lecture and Conversation: Biung Ismahasan 
11:00 am Lecture and Conversation: Ashfika Rahman 
11:30 am Lecture and Conversation: Pamela Rosenkranz 
12:00 pm Lunch break

Part 4
2:00 pm Book launch and presentation of Amazonia: Anthology as Cosmology: Kateryna Botanova and Quinn Latimer 
2:45 pm Lecture and Screening: knowbotiq with Ana Garzón Sabogal 
3:30 pm Sound/Poetry Piece: Timimie Märak 
4:15 pm Panel discussion with all participants
5:00 pm End of DAY 2

DAY III – 5 November 2021
→ Online Link 5 November 2021

Part 5
3:30 pm Keynote Lecture: Davi Kopenawa

ANNETTE AMBERG is an artist and curator. She is the director of Coalmine – Raum für Fotografie, in Winterthur, where she recently presented solo projects by Jiajia Zhang, Lena Maria Thüring, and James Bantone. She is curator of the exhibition Vídeo nas Aldeias: An Audiovisual Movement by and Among Indigenous Peoples in Brazil which will open at Coalmine in November 2021. Amberg has organized exhibitions and held curatorial positions at Kunsthalle Basel, and at Shedhalle and Strauhof, both in Zurich. Her own artistic works have been shown at the Istituto Svizzero, Rome, Kunsthaus Glarus, and Aargauer Kunsthaus, in Aarau. She has been a guest lecturer at ZHdK, Zurich, HEAD Geneva, and the Hochschule für Gestaltung und Kunst, in Basel.

VANDRIA BORARI (Vandria Garcia Correa) is a Brazilian artist and activist from the Borari people of Baixo Tapajós, in Pará, Brazil. She is currently artist-in-residence at Atelier Mondial, in Basel, in partnership with CULTURESCAPES 2021 Amazonia and LabVerde, in Manaus, Brazil. Borari is also the first lawyer from her region, holding a law degree from the Federal University of Western Pará. In addition to her artist and activist practices, she works as a producer and cultural manager, organizing exhibitions in cultural spaces in the village of Alter do Chão, Pará, such as Mutak—Mukameẽsawa Tapajowara Kitiwara (Indigenous art Exhibition of the Lower Tapajó) and the Indigenous Culture Space Wasú.

KATERYNA BOTANOVA is a curator, cultural critic, and writer. She is co-curator of CULTURESCAPES, in Basel, Switzerland. Previously, she was the director of the Foundation Center for Contemporary Art, in Kyiv, Ukraine, and a founder and editor-in-chief of Korydor, an online journal on contemporary culture. She has worked as a trainer and consultant for various programs within EU Eastern Partnership Culture Programme, dealing with cultural policy analysis, cultural industries, and cultural journalism in the region. Botanova is the co-editor of Amazonia: Anthology as Cosmology (2021).

FELIPE CASTELBLANCO is a multidisciplinary artist and researcher who works at the intersection of participatory practices, the moving image, and new media art. In his practice, he explores institutional formats and creates platforms for inter-epistemic dialogue. Recent exhibitions include the 2019 Quebec Biennial, Seasons of Media at ZKM – Zentrum für Kunst und Medien, Karlsruhe, and the project Water Territories, currently on view at Helmhaus, Zurich. Felipe is completing a practice-based PhD that examines avenues for biocultural peace-building through participatory art and media in the Colombian Pan-Amazon region.

TAITA HERNANDO CHINDOY is the Governor of the Inga Nation and a social leader from Aponte, Nariño, in the Southwest region of Colombia. He is the founder of the initiative Wuasikamas (Guardians of the Earth), which has become one of the most successful cases of voluntary substitution of illicit crops and social entrepreneurship among Indigenous communities affected by violence in South America. In 2015, Taita (chief) Chindoy was awarded the Equator Prize from the United Nations Development Program (UNPD) for his contribution to social, economic, and environmental advancements in the region.

PAULIINA FEODOROFF is a writer and director of film and theater. Her projects include CO2lonialNATION, presented at Giron Sámi Teáhter, in 2017, and the film Non Profit (2007), for which she was awarded the SARV Critical Incentives Prize, from the Finnish Critics’ Association, in 2007. Her family are originally from the Kola Peninsula, and she grew up in a family of reindeer-herding Skolt Sámi. Feodoroff has fought for water and land rights as well as to preserve the reindeer husbandry in the old forests of Nellim in the east of Sápmi/Northern Finland. She has served as elected President of the Sami Council, a period during which Feodoroff visited many remote Sámi communities in Russia, where she addressed the issue of mining companies occupying the land. She also participated in a multiannual study of land occupation, which resulted in the critically acclaimed publication, Eastern Sámi Atlas, edited by Tero Mustonen and Kaisu Mustonen (2011).

KATYA GARCÍA-ANTÓN is Director and Chief Curator of the Office of Contemporary Art Norway, in Oslo. Trained as a biologist, she conducted field research in the Amazon and Sierra Leone, and then transitioned into the arts with an MA from The Courtauld Institute of Art, London. Since then, she has worked at Museo Nacional Reina Sofía Madrid, and ICA London, among other institutions, and as the Director of the Centre d’Art Contemporain (CAC), Genève. She was the lead curator of the Nordic Pavilion, at the Venice Biennial 2015, and curated both Spanish Pavilions at the São Paolo Biennial, in 2004, and at the Venice Biennial, in 2011. In 2015 García-Antón launched Critical Writing Ensembles, an ongoing OCA research platform that publishes art histories beyond the Western canon (notably Indigenous worldviews). She was chief curator of the exhibition Actions of Art and Solidarity, in Oslo; and is currently devising a program activating decolonial thinking with colleagues from Afro-Norwegian communities in Norway. García-Antón is an advocate for decolonial, transformative and Indigenising practices and programs, and is a member of the curatorial group working on the historic transformation of the Nordic Pavilion into the Sámi Pavilion for La Biennale Arte 2022.

BIUNG ISMAHASAN is Bunun, one of Taiwan’s sixteen Indigenous Nations, and a curator, artist, and researcher. A PhD candidate in Curating, from Centre for Curatorial Studies at the University of Essex, his thesis is titled, Indigenous Relational Space and Performance: Curating Together Towards Sovereignty in Taiwan and Beyond. His research relates to contemporary Indigenous curatorial practice and aesthetics, focusing on Taiwanese Indigenous contemporary art. Ismahasan emphasises issues of participation, performativity, and the historiography of Indigenous curation and exhibition design. His curatorial projects include Dispossessions: An Indigenous Performative Encounter an international performance art exchange of Indigenous artists from Taiwan (2014 – 2019), and the Rukai Nation artist Eleng Luluan’s Between Dream in Àbadakone | Continuous Fire | Feu continuel at the National Gallery of Canada, for its series of presentations of contemporary international Indigenous art.

DAVI KOPENAWA was born around 1955 in Marakana, a Yanomami community on the Upper Toototobi river in the Brazilian state of Roraima, northern Amazon. A shaman and spokesman for the Yanomami people, he has led the long-running international campaign to secure Yanomami land rights, for which he gained recognition in Brazil and around the world. In 1985, he began the fight for recognition of the vast area inhabited by the Yanomami in the Brazilian States of Roraima and Amazonas; in 1989, he won a UN Global 500 award in recognition of his battle to preserve the rainforest. In 2009 he received the Bartolome de las Casas Award, in Spain; in 2019, he, along with the Hutukara Yanomami Association (Brazil), was awarded the Right Livelihood Award. He is the author of the acclaimed The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman, written with Bruce Albert (2013).

KNOWBOTIQ (Yvonne Wilhelm and Christian Huebler) is an artist duo living and working between Zurich, Berlin, and Lisbon. They investigate geontological entanglements in neo- and postcolonial contexts. Techno-aesthetic and techno-political aspects shape their somatic and emphatic artistic practices and formats. knowbotiq question and enact molecular, psychotropic, and derivative forces, and are currently focusing on narrations of mercury in the interrelationships between Colombia and Switzerland. Recently, with Nina Bandi, knowbotiq published Swiss Psychotropic Gold (2020), which tracks invisible paths of affects and violence inside commodity trading. They hold a professorship in the MFA program at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK).

ANA GARZÓN SABOGAL is Director of the Fundación Más Arte Más Acción, in Chocó, Colombia. She is also an industrial engineer at Universidad Distrital Francisco José de Caldas, in Bogotá, working with collaborative learning networks, cultural project management, activism, and free culture across Colombia. In recent years she has participated in projects such as Radio Vallena (2014 winner of the Crea Digital award for transmedia content) and Territorios, a study group and collaborative editorial project of the Arts Collaboratory Network that delves into specific contexts, histories, and autonomous political strengths.

QUINN LATIMER is a California-born poet, critic, and editor whose work often explores feminist economies of writing, reading, and moving-image production. Her books include Like a Woman: Essays, Readings, Poems (2017), Sarah Lucas: Describe This Distance (2013), Film as a Form of Writing: Quinn Latimer Talks to Akram Zaatari (2013), and Rumored Animals (2012). Her writings appear in Artforum, The Paris Review, Texte zur Kunst, and elsewhere. She was editor-in-chief of publications for documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel, for which she co-edited The documenta 14 Reader and South as a State of Mind: The documenta 14 Journal (2015–17). Most recently, she co-edited Amazonia: Anthology as Cosmology (2021). She is a lecturer in the master’s program of the Institute Art Gender Nature, at HGK FHNW, in Basel.

CHUS MARTÍNEZ is head of the Institute Art Gender Nature HGK FHNW in Basel. She was the expedition leader of The Current, a project initiated by TBA21-Academy (2018–2020) and she is, for 2021–2022, the artistic director of Ocean Space, Venice, a space spearheaded by TBA21-Academy. She recently edited the publication The Wild Book of Inventions (2020) and, together with Julieta Aranda and Markus Reymann, e-Flux Journal #112 (October 2020). She is the author of the collection of stories Corona Tales: Let Life Happen to You (2020).

TIMIMIE MÄRAK is Sámi poet, performer, and feminist-queer activist. In their poetic practice, Timimie processes the different facets of their identity, their wishes and frustrations. Through talks and lectures, Timimie details how normative power systems and relations neglect various peoples. Originally from Jokkmokk, they are engaged in environmental issues and have been active in Giron Sámi Teáhter, in Kiruna. Timimie has won many poetry slam competitions, and, in 2015, SVT made a documentary series about Timimie and their sister Maxida, called Sápmi Sisters.

JEREMY NARBY is a Switzerland-based writer, activist, and anthropologist. Since 1989 he has worked for the NGO Nouvelle Planète, backing initiatives by and for the Indigenous peoples of Amazonia, including land titling, bilingual education, sustainable resource use, preservation of plant knowledge, and environmental monitoring of petroleum companies. He is the author of several books about shamanic epistemology and Western knowledge systems, including Intelligence in Nature (2006) and The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge (1999), as well as the collection of translated essays, Shamans Through Time (co-edited with Francis Huxley, 2001). His most recent book is Plant Teachers: Ayahuasca, Tobacco, and the Pursuit of Knowledge, co-authored with Rafael Chanchari Pizuri (2021).

ASHFIKA RAHMAN is an artist from Dhaka, Bangladesh, whose work straddles visual art and documentary practices. She often recontextualizes historical archives using contemporary media, with photography the predominant medium through which she examines systemic social issues. She often works with marginal peoples of Bangladesh, focusing on the violence against tribal or ethnic groups in the remote hills and peripheries. She has degrees in Photography from Pathshala, Dhaka, BD (2016), and from Hochschule Hannover, in Germany (2017). In 2018 she was selected for the Joop Swart Masterclass by World Press Photo Foundation. She has been a finalist for the Samdani Art Award, the IPA Award, and Leica Oskar Barnack Award.

PAMELA ROSENKRANZ is an artist working in Zurich. Her conceptual practice encompasses sculpture, video, installation, and painting, often questioning the subjective element in the apprehension of an artwork, shifting the viewer’s focus toward the material, biochemical, and neurological determinants of human behavior. Dubious of a worldview that places human beings at the center of the natural and material universe, she critiques anthropocentrism by exploring consumerist attempts to “domesticate” nature. Recent bodies of work engage with the ecosystems of the Amazon as well as the titular tech corporation. Her exhibition Healer is currently on view at Sprüth Magers, London. Rosenkranz represented Switzerland at the 55th Venice Biennale, in 2015.

(subject to alterations)

DAY I – 17 March 2021
→ Zoom link

Part 1

10 am Welcome by Quinn Latimer and Chus Martínez; Reading by Quinn Latimer
10.15 am Filipa Ramos, lecture
11.15 am Regina Bittner, lecture and conversation with Quinn Latimer and Chus Martínez Noon Lunchbreak

Part 2

2 pm Otobong Nkanga, lecture
2.45 pm Maria Lind, lecture
3.30 pm Maria Thereza Alves, lecture
4.15 pm Ursula Biemann in conversation with Quinn Latimer, prerecorded interview
5 pm Round up DAY I by Quinn Latimer and Chus Martínez
5.15 pm End of DAY I

DAY II – 18 March 2021
→ Zoom link

Part 3

10 am Welcome by Quinn Latimer and Chus Martínez; Reading by Quinn Latimer
10.15 am Yvonne Volkart in conversation with Peter Spillmann
11.15 am Barbara Casavecchia, lecture
Noon Lunchbreak

Part 4

2 pm Welcome by Quinn Latimer and Chus Martínez
2.15 pm Kapwani Kiwanga, lecture and conversation with Quinn Latimer and Chus Martínez
2.45 pm Kerstin Stakemeier, lecture
3.30 pm Anja Kirschner, artist talk and conversation with Kerstin Stakemeier
4.15 pm Lydia Ourahmane in conversation with Myriam Amroun
5.00 pm Round up DAY II by Quinn Latimer and Chus Martínez
5.15 pm End of DAY II

MARIA THEREZA ALVES (Brazil) has exhibited widely internationally, including the Sydney Biennale, Berlin Biennale 8, Sharjah Bienale (2017), dOCUMENTA (13), among others, as well as solo exhibitions at MUAC in Mexico City and at CAAC in Seville. Alves is the recipient of the Vera List Prize for Art and Politics 2016 – 2018. In 1978, as a member of the International Indian Treaty Council, Alves made an official presentation of human rights abuses of the indigenous population of Brazil at the U.N. Human Rights Commission in Geneva. She was one of the founding members of the Green Party of Sao Paulo in 1987. Recent books are Recipes for Survival and Thieves and Murderers in Naples: A Brief History on Families, Colonization, Immense Wealth, Land Theft, Art and the Valle de Xico Community Museum in Mexico.

MYRIAM AMROUN is a cultural practitioner and curator based in Algiers. She is the artistic director of rhizome, which she cofounded with Khaled Bouzidi in 2017. Inspired by the rhizomatic model of thought developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in the 1970s, the organization has been supporting artists, researchers, and cultural practitioners since its inception, while ceaselessly evolving as a non-physical space.

URSULA BIEMANN is an artist, writer and video essayist based in Zurich. Her artistic practice is strongly research oriented and involves fieldwork in remote locations where she investigates the political ecologies of forests, oil and water. Her video installations are exhibited worldwide in museums and international Art Biennials. In 2020 she had a solo exhibition Indigenous Knowledge_Cosmological Fictions at MAMAC in Nice and she recently published the online monograph on her ecological works Becoming Earth. Biemann received the 2009 Prix Meret Oppenheim, the Swiss Grand Award for Art.

REGINA BITTNER (PhD) studied cultural theory and art history at Leipzig University and received her doctorate from the Institute for European Ethnology at the Humboldt Universität Berlin. As head of the Academy of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation she curates and teaches the postgraduate and crossdisciplinary programs on transcultural modernism in design and architecture research. Her most recent curatorial project include Versuchsstätte Bauhaus. The collection, the permanent exhibition in the Bauhaus Museum Dessau. Her research interests combine cultural anthropological approaches in architecture and design studies with questions of decolonization, critical heritage and its mediation in teaching and curatorial practice. She edited recently Design Rehersals. Conversations about Bauhaus Lessons (2019) together with Katja Klaus.

BARBARA CASAVECCHIA is a writer, curator, and educator. Since 2011, she has taught in the department of Visual Cultures and Curatorial Practises at the Brera Academy in Milan. She is currently curating the research project The Current III (The Mediterraneans: Thus Waves Come in Pairs (After Etel Adnan)), TBA21–Academy.

ANJA KIRSCHNER is an artist living and working in Berlin and London. In her films and video installations she attends to the phantasmatic and material anatomies of media practices and their role in the production of knowledges and bodies. She was the winner of the Jarman Award (2011) and has exhibited widely internationally. Currently she is a PhD candidate at the Royal College of Art in London, working on immersion from queer feminist and decolonial perspectives.

KAPWANI KIWANGA is a Franco-Canadian artist based in Paris. Her work traces the pervasive impact of power asymmetries by placing historic narratives in dialogue with contemporary realities, the archive, and tomorrow’s possibilities. She recently received the Prix Marcel Duchamp (2020). Two of her solo exhibitions, Plot at Haus der Kunst in Munich and Kapwani Kiwanga. new work at Kunstinstituut Melly are currently on view.

QUINN LATIMER is a California-born writer and editor whose work often explores feminist economies of writing, reading, and moving-image production. Her books include Like a Woman: Essays, Readings, Poems (2017), and she was editor-in-chief of publications for documenta 14. She is a lecturer in the master’s program of the Art Institute HGK FHWN in Basel.

MARIA LIND is a curator, writer and educator from Stockholm. She is currently serving as the counsellor of culture at the embassy of Sweden in Moscow. She was the director of Stockholm’s Tensta konsthall (2011 – 2018). In 2019 she co-curated the Art Encounters Biennial in Timisoara. She has taught widely since the early 1990s, including as professor of artistic research at the Art Academy in Oslo (2015 – 2018). Currently she is a lecturer at Konstfack’s CuratorLab. She has contributed widely to newspapers, magazines, catalogues and other publications. She is the 2009 recipient of the Walter Hopps Award for Curatorial Achievement. In 2010 Selected Maria Lind Writing was published by Sternberg Press, and Seven Years: The Rematerialization Art from 2011 to 2017 appeared in 2019.

CHUS MARTÍNEZ is head of the Art Institute HGK FHNW in Basel. She was the expedition leader of The Current, a project initiated by TBA21–Academy (2018 – 2020) and is in 2021 and 2022 the artistic director of Ocean Space, Venice, a space spearheaded by TBA21–Academy. She recently edited the publication The Wild Book of Inventions(2020) and together with Julieta Aranda and Markus Reymann e-Flux Journal #112 (October 2020).

OTOBONG NKANGA (born in Kano) is an Antwerp-based artist whose multidisciplinary practice spans drawing, photography, installation, video and performance, and focuses on the interrelation between environment, architecture and history. Nkanga looks at the notion of ‘land’ as a geological and discursive formation, often taking as her starting point the systems and procedures by which raw materials are locally dug up, technologically processed and globally circulated. From there she follows the threads that intertwine ores, material culture and the construction of desire with the redistribution of power and knowledge. Otobong Nkanga exhibited widely internationally, including solo exhibitions at Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Høvikodden (2020), Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin (2020), and Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (MIMA), Middlesbrough (2020), as well as the 58th Venice Biennial (2019), Sharjah Biennial 14 (2019), and Documenta 14 (2018). She won various prizes such as the Peter-Weiss-Preis (2019), the Inaugural Lise Wilhelmsen Art Award (2019), and the Special Mention Award of the 58th Venice Biennial (2019).

LYDIA OURAHMANE, (born in Saïda) is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Algiers. Her research-driven practice explores major geopolitical issues of our time testing the permeability of boundaries and the state of being in-between. Her work in recent years has built on complex histories of colonialism, migration and abstraction in a poetic exploration of the present, the personal and the political. Lydia Ourahmane graduated from Goldsmiths University of London in 2014 and has exhibited internationally. Recent exhibitions include Solar Cry, Wattis Institute of Contemporary Art, San Francisco; Homeless Souls, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art; Crude, Jameel Art Center, Dubai; Manifesta 12, Palermo; Jaou, Tunis; Droit du sang, Kunstverein München; 2018 New Museum Triennial: Songs for Sabotage, New Museum, New York; The You In Us, Chisenhale Gallery, London. She is currently presenting her first solo exhibition in Switzerland at Kunsthalle Basel until 16th May 2021 and is included in the 34th São Paulo Bienal.

FILIPA RAMOS (born in Lisbon) is a writer and curator. She is interested in how art engages with ecology and fosters relationships between humans, non-humans and machines. She is curator of Art Basel Film and a founding curator of Vdrome. She has lectured widely in Europe, Asia and the US. She is a lecturer at the master’s program of the Art Institute HGK FHNW, where she runs the Art & Nature seminars. She is co-curator of Bodies of Water, the 13th Shanghai Biennale (2020 – 2021). Her upcoming book, The Artist as Ecologist, will be published by Lund Humphries in 2022.

PETER SPILLMANN is a cultural producer, artist and exhibitionmaker. He researches and teaches in the master program Art in Public Sphere at the Lucerne Unversity of Applied Sciences and Arts – Design & Kunst. Over 20 years of close collaboration with Marion von Osten have resulted in projects such as fallingwild (2019), Viet Nam Diskurs Stockholm(2016), CPKC – Center for Postcolonial Knowledge and Culture (2008), This Was Tomorrow (2008), Be Creative! (2002) or Labor k3000 (1998). Currently being developed is an exhibition and series of events entitled Cohabitation – A Manifesto for Solidarity of Animals and Humans in Urban Space, which will take place in collaboration with ARCH+ in Berlin starting in June 2021.

KERSTIN STAKEMEIER, Professor for Art Theory at the Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg, works in education, writing and exhibition formats, currently collaborating with Anselm Franke on the show Illiberal Arts (House of World Cultures Berlin, from September 2021), and with Bill Dietz on the publication Universal Receptivity (March 2021). She has worked with M. Ammer, E. Birkenstock, J. Nachtigall and S. Weber on Class Languages (2017/2018) and wrote Reproducing Autonomy(2016) together with Marina Vishmidt. An English edition of Entgrenzter Formalismus. Verfahren einer antimodernen Ästhetik (bbooks, 2017) will be published in 2022.

YVONNE VOLKART (Dr.) lectures art and media theory at the Zurich University of Arts and the FHNW Academy of Art and Design in Basel where she has led the Swiss National Science Foundation research project Ecodata – Ecomedia – Ecoesthetics. She is author of the monography Technologies of Care. Techno-Eco-Feminist Readings of Art + Science. She was a core-member of the cyberfeminist network Old Boys Network OBN, and curator at Shedhalle Zürich.

If injustice is predicated on creating and instituting bodies that do not matter, performance—and all its variously embodied practices—is the medium where, critically, new forms of justice, space, and critique have often emerged. Presence, proximity, voice, movement, and performative relations (both online and off) are the tools by which many contemporary artists, in unprecedented ways, continue to explore how to create equitable space for our ever-regulated, dully delimited bodies. This symposium will serve those practices, examining how performance has become the means by which so many artists reflect on and denounce political systems that foster inequity, violence, and binary relations at their core.

Performance remains the way in which many artists bring their dissent into the art and cultural context, reclaiming care and the right to address the collective as a body, as an organism that can synchronize and act against pain. Performance can allow for an exploration of the universalist role of the viewer that Modernism promised, and our cultural institutions reinforce. Too, performance has historically been a key force in radically transforming our inheritance—political, social, cultural, biological, technological—for the body in motion can challenge us to accept responsibility for social injustice and the conditions that allow it to flourish. Finally, the movement or blocked movement of the singular and collective body is a reminder of the physical suffering that underpins progress as measured in a capitalist society.

At the Art Institute HGK FHNW, Womxn in Motion will explore performance in all its forms: from dance, poetry, music, sound, and the moving image, to participatory social actions and institutional critique, to writing, reading, and orality. The symposium will feature performances as well as critical and conversational reflections by the invited artists and thinkers on how both their work, and their ideas of what performance and its unique poetics denotes and might one day become, has evolved. Thinkers Sadie Plant and Barbara Casavecchia will offer keynotes against speculation and for an embodied and entangled art and politics, while the poet and translator Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro will present a lecture considering fragment, continuance, and archive. Performances by Isabel Lewis, Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė, Pan Daijing, Lynne Kouassi, and Martina-Sofie Wildberger will variously consider the politics of encounter and participation; technologies of language, sound, and silence; and the aesthetics of catharsis. A new film by Kat Anderson offers a collection of audio/visual notes on oppression, Black liberation, and the white imagination, and Bhanu Kapil sends us a new series of notes on shame and performance. Finally, talks and screenings by Julieta Aranda, Tessa Mars, Ingela Ihrman, Pauline Curnier Jardin, and Sonia Fernández Pan will explore the performances demanded by practices and lives devoted to image- and world-making.

Womxn in Motion is the fourth Master symposium at the Art Institute within a series dedicated to new forms and ideas of artistic practice, gender, language, and social justice. An essential ambition for this series of seminars from its inception in 2018 has been to talk about the subjects at hand—that is, contemporary art practices and the singular and social lives such practices might alter and be altered by—in languages of clarity, virtuosity, respect, intelligence, and love. We aim to practice the very values that might produce the emergence of a different, and more just, artistic and social order.

(subject to alterations)

DAY I – 7 October 2020
→ livestream

Part 1
10 am Welcome by Quinn Latimer and Chus Martínez
10.15 am Notes on Shame by Bhanu Kapil (read by Quinn Latimer)
10.30 am Performance by Isabel Lewis
11 am Sonia Fernández Pan in conversation with Isabel Lewis
11.30 am Performance and talk by Lynne Kouassi

Part 2
2 pm Reading by Quinn Latimer
2.15 pm Dig yourself out. Return to me, performance by Dorota Gawęda and Eglė Kulbokaitė
3.15 pm Against Speculation, lecture by Sadie Plant
4.15 pm Panel discussion with all participants
5 pm Bad Man Nuh Flee (2020), film screening by Kat Anderson (no livestream)
5.45 pm End of day I

DAY II – 8 October 2020
→ livestream

Part 3
10 am Welcome by Quinn Latimer and Chus Martínez
10.15 Reading by Quinn Latimer
10.30 am On dancing and studying together: a collective research on queer and transfeminist archives in Milan, lecture by Barbara Casavecchia
11 am Talk by Tessa Mars
11.30 am Ausgeblutet, Bled Out, Qu’Un Sang, video screening by Pauline Curnier Jardin
11:45 am Sonia Fernández Pan in conversation with Pauline Curnier Jardin

Part 4
2 pm Reading by Quinn Latimer
2.15 pm Scream, performance by Martina-Sofie Wildberger
3 pm Hyena Days, lecture by Mayra A. Rodríguez Castro
3.30 pm The Fig, performance by Ingela Ihrman and conversation with Sonia Fernández Pan
4 pm Talk by Pan Daijing and conversation with Sonia Fernández Pan
4.45 pm Final discussion with all participants
5.30 pm End of day II

DAY III – 9 October 2020
(Master students only)
Tower Building Auditorium D 1.04

10 am – 12:30 pm Workshop Part 1 with Julieta Aranda
Lunch break
2 pm – 4.30 pm Workshop Part 2 with Julieta Aranda

KAT ANDERSON is an artist, filmmaker, and curator from the UK often working under an artistic and research framework called Episodes of Horror, which uses the horror genre to discuss representations of mental illness and trauma as experienced by or projected upon Black bodies in media.

JULIETA ARANDA is a Mexico City–born artist who lives and works in Berlin and New York. In her practice she composes sensorial encounters with the nature of time and speculative literature, observing the altering human-earth relationship through the lens of technology, artificial intelligence, space travel, and scientific hypothesis.

BARBARA CASAVECCHIA is a writer, curator, and educator. Since 2011, she has taught in the department of Visual Cultures and Curatorial Practices at the Brera Academy in Milan. She is currently a mentor of the Ocean Fellowship at Ocean Space, Venice, for TBA21–Academy.

MAYRA A. RODRÍGUEZ CASTRO is a poet and translator. She is the editor of Audre Lorde: Dream of Europe (2020), a book of unpublished seminars and interviews by Audre Lorde delivered across Germany and Europe between 1984 and 1992. 

PAN DAIJING is a Berlin-based artist and composer who channels sound and performance to tell stories that cross various disciplines and forms, combining diverse philosophical and cinematic references, raw emotions, and striking aesthetic sensibilities. Pan Daijing has been commissioned and performed internationally. Recent work includes Dead Time Blue at Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin, 2020, and Tissues and The Absent Hour at Tate Modern, London, 2019.

DOROTA GAWĘDA AND EGLĖ KULBOKAITĖ are an artist duo based in Basel. Their work spans performance, photography, installation, fragrance, sculpture, and video exploring incompleteness and linguistic ingraspability, both in their performance and in the sculptural objects and environments that they propose, offering ways to renegotiate our complex relationship to nature.

INGELA IHRMAN moves in her art practice between performance art, installation, the moving image, and writing. Costumes and staged situations are recurring elements in her presentations, bringing creatures to life, i.e., giving birth or blooming. Her work is characterized by tactile craft techniques, hobbyism, and poetic absurdism, borrowing from amateur theater as well as from science. It explores limiting norms, notions like loneliness and belonging, and relations between different life forms.

PAULINE CURNIER JARDIN is an artist, filmmaker, and performer who lives and works in Amsterdam and Berlin. She often focuses on expanded narrative forms: optic-operas, an ethnographic peep-show, and dark musical films, installations, and spectacles. In 2007 she co-founded the dada-femme recital, The Vraoums.

BHANU KAPIL is a British poet whose practice includes performance, improvised works, installation, and ritual. She teaches poetry, fiction, performance and hybrid writing seminars and is the author of many books, including Schizophrene (2011) and Ban en Banlieue (2016).

LYNNE KOUASSI is a Basel-based artist whose works explore the excluding effects of structural dominance and other normative orders, as well as the historical and social conditions that shape the relationship between body, gender, knowledge, and power. Her practice also addresses strategies for escaping control and questions of migration.

QUINN LATIMER is a California-born writer and editor whose work often explores feminist economies of writing, reading, and moving-image production. Her books include Like a Woman: Essays, Readings, Poems (2017), and she was editor-in-chief of publications for documenta 14. She is a lecturer in the Master’s program of the Art Institute HGK FHWN in Basel.

ISABEL LEWIS is a Berlin-based artist born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. Trained in literary criticism, dance, and philosophy, her work encompasses myriad forms, from lecture performances to workshops, music sessions, parties, hosted occasions, and large-scale artistic/programmatic works like the Institute for Embodied Creative Practices.

TESSA MARS is a Haitian visual artist living and working in Port-au-Prince. Her work has been exhibited internationally, and she has recently held residencies at the Rubenstein Art Center at Duke University, as part of Visionary Aponte: Art & Black Freedom, at Power Plant Gallery, Durham, NC.

CHUS MARTÍNEZ is head of the Art Institute HGK FHNW in Basel. She is also the expedition leader of The Current, a project initiated by TBA21–Academy (2018–2020), and the author of Club Univers (2017).

SONIA FERNÁNDEZ PAN is a (in)dependent curator who researches and writes through art and, since 2011, is the author of esnorquel, a personal project in the form of an online archive with podcasts, texts, and written conversations. She currently hosts the podcast series Feminism Under Corona and Corona Under the Ocean produced by the Art Institute and TBA21–Academy.

SADIE PLANT is a British philosopher, cultural theorist, and author based in Biel/Bienne. In her research and writings, she offers an alternative, feminist account of the history and nature of digital technology, and the influence of psychoactive substances on Western culture. Her books include Zeros and Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture (1997) and Writing on Drugs (2001).

MARTINA-SOFIE WILDBERGER is a performance artist working on the power of language, alternative ways of communicating, and the relationship between scribality and orality. Central to her practice is sound, the articulation of words, and the meanings constituted in the act of speaking as well as the poetic quality of language.

“Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition.” This infamous quote attributed to Marilyn Monroe, among others, was paraphrased years later by feminist scholar Luce Irigaray in her critique of the often constraining and unallied aspirations of equality and equity. But what does it mean? Simply: men are not—and cannot continue to be—the measure of social justice. Following on from this complex argument the symposium will be dedicated to understanding the relations between feminism and species coexistence. Women on Earth, and all those it might be composed by,will consider the question of how environmentalism has been variously represented or non-represented in women’s and gender studies curricula, through the fields and ideas of ecofeminism, yes, but also others. Indeed, the symposium will go beyond the entanglement of gender and environmental issues to encompass other threads of the tight knot of ecocide: extractive capitalism, the movements and struggles of the Indigenous, and environmental racism in all its iterations.

The issue of nature—and of all that is naturalized or deemed unnatural by hegemonic discourses and policy—is of particular importance to gender issues, as is science. But a scientific and technical approach to the climate emergency cannot be accurate without taking into consideration how gender, racial, and economic violence foster our emergent ecocides, nor by how women—often poor and Indigenous women—are overwhelmingly at the forefront of this violence as the very first recipients of. What kind of political and cultural transformation must occur to make these entanglements obvious and of vital concern? How to counter this violence in all its manifold forms?

Feminists and global feminisms have always shared a critical concern for science, being that this has long been the field on which the subjugation of women—and all the world’s others—has rested, in part. The inferiority of women—physical, intellectual, emotional, sensorial—has been extensively theorized and the subject of intensive scientific discourses since the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, at least in the West, and certainly in the modernity that developed alongside emergent imperialisms. This critique of a patriarchal pseudoscience is built into feminism, by its very nature—and what is that?By addressing questions of a female “nature” (whatever that is) and by addressing the question of human “nature” (another ringing question), and then deconstructing both, we not only lay open the question of the power of knowledge—who decides what, and in which situational or discursive contexts—but also the more epistemological questions: what to do with objectivity; what to do with certain notions of distance or neutrality; what to do with an increasing quantification of what we call scientific knowledge. How do we beat the regular and systematic recurrence of exclusion, of the same others, who recur and repeat across history and its power struggles, and the persistence of this process of othering itself?

A further outcome of the collaboration between the Art Institute and Instituto Susch, the joint venture with Grażyna Kulczyk and Art Stations Foundation CH, is the podcast series Promise no Promises!, an ongoing endeavor originating from the first series of symposia initiated in October 2018 in Basel, also moderated by Chus Martínez and Quinn Latimer. The podcast, and the symposia from which it emerges, aims to develop different teaching tools, materials, and ideas to challenge more normalized and traditional curricula around ideas of gender, culture, power, and language, but also to create a sphere in which to meet, discuss, and foster a new imagination. The notion of the voice is a crucial one in the historical development of women’s consciousness and their position and agency in society. We need a chorus! Listen to the podcasts here.

Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu once wrote that, «sociology and art do not make good bedfellows.» His reasoning was grounded in the perceived tension between the art world’s desire to focus on individual creative genius, and sociology’s insistent aim to explain phenomena in terms of social forces. Taking the measure of a wide swath of art institutions and spaces run by women curators in recent years, it would seem that these art professionals remain in many cases on the (sociological) side of Bourdieu. The art spaces they activate do not often stress the importance of size, the need for expansion, or the importance of demographic media impact, but rather the necessity of programs that encourage a qualitative interaction between different social spheres as they relate to exhibitions, public programs, and the continuous presence of the artist community. But the question remains: Do women art professionals aim for this outcome or is this the result of the difficult and adaptive process to the very patriarchal conditions in which they, as women in a system created by and for men, are mandated to work?

The transition from the 20th to the 21st century was marked, in part, by the energy of certain discourses occupying a central place in art institutions, a discursive renewal of ideas that would come to effect the programs of the larger institutions, but that had its origin in small and medium-size initiatives. The question of the future of representation and its place in the Western democratic system was answered by a proliferation of philosophers and various curatorial and artistic agents, all of whom claimed access to ideas, archives, initiatives… the past became plural, became the competing stories of many, and the question of History began to be fragmented into the problems caused by colonial imperialism and its postcolonial legacy. The archive was the first door, the document—still white (and male)—remained the threshold one needed to pass through to gain entrance to the materials and artistic voices of different territories and histories… restitution started to gain a body, some reality, and was as well prior to the question of enforced racial hierarchies in the myriad art worlds.

Nevertheless, an entire energy of renewal in the Western art system seemed possible, as its many agents were possessed by an enthusiasm, and an economic and social growth, that unprecedentedly envisioned an empowered art as capable of opening up the social to its past through ideas of a different education, participation, social wealth, and access. The art world believed in itself and many European politicians supported this wave—at the beginning—in their hope that it was a powerful way of activating the Union by creating a resonance between the old continental dreams and a new political organization. Europe, a continent with a dubious economic future, trusted its legacy to the idea of culture once again. This liaison with contemporary art, though, did not last long. Cuts to the cultural sectors and a rapid re-nationalization process across the continent rang the alarm on the future of internationalism and plurality, affecting how contemporary art and its many institutional lives and languages should appear in and be narrated for the public. But this turn not only affected drastically the art world at large, but the way in which it might be occupied and traveled by women artists, curators, writers, administrators…

Ideas of intimacy, the small scale, and the need for a social space in which to express authentically and in solidarity—ideas and ambitions that are often accorded to women professionals, in a specific kind of gendering of care, affective relations, and the minor forms—can seem to clash, simultaneously, with the larger, louder, seemingly more «ambitious» views of what women should want (as outlined by mainstream feminist narratives that center the claiming of traditional modes of power). What do all these ideas—projected or not—imply, and how do they manifest in space itself? What is the historical origin of these conceptions? How have such ideas affected the view of women who claim space, as it were, large or not?

The ambition (for isn’t there always one?) of «Women in Space» is to spend two days on the campus of Institut Kunst, in Basel, in dialogue with a group of art professionals addressing these ideas and notions. Like its predecessor «Promise No Promises!» this symposium will be dramatized in a way that avoids the expected power point presentations, instead creating a sense of real debate and conversation, at once performative and improvised, as well as include live readings on the various subjects being addressed (so as to bring in voices both historical and farflung). The voices and thinking of each participant will testify to their specific experiences as women in space—a space that is at once certain, uncertain, competing, and ever expanding and contracting—as well as offer reflections on the recent past and hoped-for future scenarios of their fields, offering the audience a series of shifting images of the very «space» that women occupy in the art system today.

Some Questions (by which to begin):

Is there any beginning that can proceed without questions? We don’t think so. And yet: Should the queries concern gender, the question of women, and transgender issues? Should questions of masculinity also be asked? And are these general enquiries similar to those queries that follow us to work, within (and without) the arts? Are practical questions relevant, those that redefine our thinking on the matter? Are old and new feminist concerns—arising from a spectrum of feminisms—adequate to cover the entire spectrum of questions that we may need to ask? Are these queries an exercise we may desire as well as a protocol we may embark on to test the «equality health» of specific (professional and personal) situations? Do you think you can avoid having to deal with all these issues? Are you afraid of talking? Does the sound of your own voice give you pleasure or make you wince? How much money do you want to earn? Do you think your career will continue to rise in the near future? Are you afraid of your own desires? Is it better to remain mute or to disclose your ambition, even if, many times, you seem to not find the words to express it?

Do you think the idea of aesthetic taste is a gendered concept? Do you think gender is the first fiction you ever wrote? What does the image of power look like to you? How did you first learn (or not) to use it? Is art history a house you can live in? Who and what taught you to be a woman and/or other? If you were to die and come back as an artwork or an artistic genre, what would it be? What is your greatest extravagance? What is your greatest extravagance as a woman? What is your greatest extravagance as an artist? Are these different things? At a Basel bar a couple of years ago, prominent Swiss curator said he didn’t think there were any good female Swiss artists. All the young male artists drinking with him laughed and agreed.

Do you think gossip can be a form of activism? Can you remember the time before you became aware of (your) gender? Do you think grammatical gender has influenced the language in which you understand yourself and your work? What does the following title conjure for you: «The Uterus of the Young Boy»? Do you think lying is the language of misogyny? Do you find the language of feminism to be absurd or inspiring or a bit of both? What is your greatest fear? Does this fear have to do with your gender?

«To live a feminist life is to be a feminist at work,» Sara Ahmed writes. If art is one’s work, how does one be a feminist as an artist? How does the practice of feminism inflect one’s art practice? Do you think the way one embodies or practices feminism in the studio is different from the way one embodies or practices feminism in the (art) institution? How would you like to work, ideally? When you’re at work, do you consider yourself a woman at work or just («just») a worker? Do you ever talk about sexual politics at dinner? At breakfast? Do you think the contemporary art world’s sporadic embrace of feminism (mostly Western, white, and upper-class feminism) is a form of normalization and institutional misogyny?

How do you think being a man would change your expectations of success (or failure)? Do you think your life would have taken a different course had you been given a male name? What is the quality you most like in a man? What is the quality you most like in a woman? What is the quality you most like in an artwork? How have your ideas about gender and power transformed (or not) as your work and practice have progressed?

Sara Ahmed has also written: «To work as a feminist means trying to transform the organizations that employ us – or house us. This rather obvious fact has some telling consequences.  When we try to shake the walls of the house, we are also shaking the foundations of our own existence.» What if that house is the studio, though? How has feminism shaken the foundation of art-making and being in the world as an artist for you?

How do you think ideas of social justice manifest in artistic practice? Do you think there is a boy or a man inside you? Does he make your work sometimes? Are you influenced by fictional characters? If you were able to naturally change your sex – like some ocean species can do – what influence would this might have on human social behavior? How would you describe the female voice in three adjectives? Do you think sound is inherently gendered?

Women’s writing is often called «confessional»; do you think visual art can be confessional? Or only when it’s made by a woman?

Artists have largely been concerned with questions that the technology industries consider secondary: What role do women play in the development of technology, and how has technological change affected the roles of women and ideas of gender? How does technology offer possibilities for new social relations and how should we evaluate these possibilities?

A series of experts—local and international—will present and discuss the relevance of gender, race, class, and sexuality in today’s understanding of technology and the development of new technological tools. We consider the art context—and the educational context of the academy—ideal to introduce these questions to a larger audience interested in how art and culture may help neutralize an uncritical approach to media, its presence in our everyday lives, and its contribution to a more equal social future.

Media technologies are a crucial part of our future, and neither an antagonism towards nor celebration of them allows us to better understand what they are and, more importantly, how we act around them. Art has played a seminal role in discussing and contesting the politics of media. Since media, media tools, and technology are representational-based languages, it is not surprising that art and artists were among the first communities to pay attention to the new forms of gender and race relations they provide and confront us with.

The symposium is intended to introduce ideas, but also practical examples, images, works by artists, as well as best practices that address a different use of the media, as well a new user language.

→ PDF of the whole program

«Desktop Exhibition / Examples or Gender & Technology»

«The Rubens Engine»

«What do we mean with technology? A short introduction into feminist thinking about technology, astonishing practices and the technological performance of being female.»

«Artist Talk»

«The Company one keeps—laptops, lapdogs, lapdances»

«Escaping the Digital Unease»

«I'm not here right now. The Manning-Lamo -Chatlogs Reading»

«Is Technology Sexist? On Media, Post-humanity and the Role of Gender in the development of a new Media Practice.»