Fot. Klaudyna Schubert
The LIVE program of April edition of the Grand re Union project will be held on Saturday, 17 April on Zoom platform under the title “Interdependencies”. In the course of our online meetings we will have a look at where choreographic practices are situated. What do we see if we observe carefully their various contexts? What shapes them? How do we take a stance with the artistic choices? What is the constellation of desires and urgencies we operate within? How are the collaborative bonds created and with whom? What is the landscape of their relations with humans and more-than humans?
The April edition of the Grand Re Union will feature Marta Keil and Zeyno Pekünlü – invited artists, activists and thinkers, who will tackle the notion of interdependence and propose expanding the territory of choreography and viewing it from a broader perspective. Together with Begüm Özden Fırat, Daniel Blanga Gubbay, Evrim Kavcar, Pirate Care (Valeria Graziano and Tomislav Medak), Agata Siniarska and Katarzyna Słoboda, they will investigate the interdependence as a reciprocal relation with other humans and more-than-humans. Together with the invited guests we will address both the complexity of the ecosystem we operate in on an everyday basis and the problematics of care and ambiguity of solidarity, two terms that are being constantly repeated in the current discourse in the arts field and beyond.
Slips, stories, archives
A conversation between Agata Siniarska and Katarzyna Słoboda
Saturday 17 April
4:30 pm CET | 3:30 pm BST | 7:30 am PDT
Live on Zoom
Zoom link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86955055808
The point of departure for the conversation is (Land)Slip, an exhibition by Agata Siniarska, the fourth event organised within the framework of the Prototypes project based on the collection of Muzeum Sztuki (Museum of Art) in Lódź, Poland. The exhibition is an archive of the material qualities of artworks that preserve traces of the artist’s work. The archive is in itself a living, pulsating organism, whose sole purpose is to enter into relationships with other organisms, and the only principle for action, continuous change. Within the framework of the exhibition, the archive is the space and time, the past and the future, meeting in the process of sensory experience and imagining our shared present. (Land)slip is for us the exhibition as a story capable of encapsulating multiple parallel narratives and contradictory emotions, capacious and non-hierarchical. When the worlds are slipping, when they gradually disappear, we need a new type of story that would deal with the difficult art of survival on our destroyed planet.
Agata Siniarska – Agata’s present research is dedicated to multi-species archives in the time of extinction. Human nature is an interspecies relationship which makes extinction a co-extinction, our process of dying-with. How, then, can we build our common future, how do we write a common story, not a story of the world but in the world? Our future cannot forget the past. When we tell stories of the past, what past do we talk about? Every choice plays a powerful role in structuring the future. What is to be lost, retained, preserved, remembered?
Katarzyna Słoboda – a curator, researcher, writer. She has curated exhibitions such as You come, We’ll show you what we do. On dance improvisation (2013) (with Sonia Nieśpiałowska-Owczarek), Frames of Reference. Choreography in the Museum (2016) (with Mateusz Szymanówka), Moved Bodies. Choreographies of Modernity (2016) and Prototypes 04: Agata Siniarska, (Land)slip (2020/2021) among others (Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź). She has also edited publications on choreography, dance and contemporary art. She is a recipient of Grażyna Kulczyk fellowship in the field of contemporary choreography (2018). Affiliated with the Common Space initiative.
Failed Solidarities
A gathering with Begüm Özden Fırat, Valeria Graziano, Tomislav Medak, moderation: Zeyno Pekünlü
Saturday 17 April
6:00 pm CET / 5:00 pm BST / 9:00 am PDT
Live on Zoom
Zoom Link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86088182313
In this gathering, together with Begüm Özden Fırat, Valeria Graziano and Tomislav Medak, we wish to reflect on the neoliberal crisis of care, potentials and limits of solidarity networks, community and neighbourhood organizations. Highlighted by, but not limited to the current crisis, we wish to question how the meanings of practices of solidarity and care are currently changing and what possibilities of piracy and politicisation of care-organizing there are.
Failed Solidarities: Crisis, Corona, and Networks of Mutual Aid in Turkey
Based on my previous research on the local urban commoning movements, post-Gezi uprising neighbourhood assemblies and mutual aid practices, I would like to touch upon the potentials and limits of pandemic “solidarity networks” that (re)emerged during the early weeks of the lockdown in Turkey in April 2020. I will put forward my critical concerns and questions about the potentials of and dilemmas faced by the (pre- and post-pandemic) networks of solidarity in Turkey. I will present “six factors impeding the rise of the common in against and beyond the pandemic crisis” as a response to Stavros Stavrides’ article “Life as Commons” published during the early days of the pandemic. These “6 factors” relate to the transformation of the politics of the scale of the neighbourhood and changing meanings of practices of solidarity and care. I will be focusing on the situation in Turkey mostly, but I hope the questions I attempt to raise would have larger reach than their country of their origin, as I think the emergence of neoliberal authoritarian populist regimes all over the world and the socio-political conditions triggered by the pandemic makes us share a similar, if not common ground.
Begüm Özden Fırat – is an Associate Professor of the Department of Sociology in Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, Istanbul, Turkey. She works in the fields of visual culture, urban sociology, and social movements studies. She is the co-editor of Commitment and Complicity in Cultural Theory and Practice (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2009), Cultural Activism: Practices, Dilemmas, Possibilities (Rodopi, 2011) and Aesthetics and Resistance in the Age of Global Uprisings (I Letişim, 2015). Her book entitled Encounters with the Ottoman Miniature Contemporary Readings of an Imperial Art was published by I. B. Tauris in 2015. She is one of the directors of the documentary Welcome Lenin (2016) and the director of the short experimental video The Lightwell (2020).
Pirate Care Network
With our Pirate Care network we have been mapping and connecting efforts of collective organising of mutual aid and solidarity emerging in response to the neoliberal crisis of care – a convergence of processes that include austerity, welfare cuts, rollback of reproductive rights and criminalisation of migration. In response to that denial of care, these practices are helping migrants survive at sea and on land, providing pregnancy terminations where those are illegal, offering health support where institutions fail, organising childcare where public provision does not extend to everyone, liberating knowledge where access is denied. Crucially, they share a willingness to openly disobey laws and executive orders. Our aim is to support learning processes from the knowledges of these practices and, to that end, we have created a collaboratively written the Pirate CareSyllabus.
With the onset of the pandemic, we have seen an unprecedented expansion of community organising, which we documented in our “Flatten the Curve, Grow the Care”. Yet, a year later, it seems that much of that effort could not be sustained over long periods of time, while social movements struggled to avert the re-entrenchment of inequalities in the division of care-labour and in the imperial intellectual property relations resulting from the market-oriented responses of the states to the pandemic crisis. Thus, at this moment, care-organising seems in a dire need of piracy and politicisation.
Valeria Graziano – is a cultural theorist and practitioner, currently holding a Research Fellowship at the Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University. Her research is situated at the intersection of artistic practice, radical education and social movement organizing. She focuses on techniques, technologies and tools that can help society to refuse work and to foster instead a redistribution of the labour of social reproduction and the politicisation of leisure.
Tomislav Medak – is a doctoral student at the Centre for Postdigital Cultures. Medak is a member of the theory and publishing team of the Multimedia Institute/MAMA in Zagreb, as well as an amateur librarian for the Memory of the World project. His research focuses on technologies, capitalist development, and postcapitalist transition, particularly on economies of intellectual property and unevenness of technoscience.
More information: www.grandreunion.net
