FILM SERIES
how does the world breathe now? | Wednesdays
SAVVY FUNK
Every Time A Ear di Soun — a documenta 14 Radio Program | June 17 - July 8
SYMPOSIUM
Towards a Phenomenology of the Unknown | June 27
COLONIAL NEIGHBOURS: FRAGMENTS #2 with Abrie Fourie
We have eyes to see but do not see | April 28- June 30, 2017
NEW PUBLICATION
THE INCANTATION OF THE DISQUIETING MUSE. On Divinity, Supra-Realities or the Exorcisement of Witchery
SAVVY FUNK
An iteration of Every Time A Ear di Soun — a documenta 14 Radio Program
Durational performances for radio, exhibition of footnotes and reading/listening room
June 17 - July 8, 2017 | daily 24 hours
OPENING June 17 | 6PM - 6 AM
Open for visitors: daily from 9:30am to midnight
Frequencies: FM 90.4 MHz in Kassel, 103.0 FM in Berlin, SW 15560 kHz, and all over the world on documenta14.de.
SAVVY Contemporary | Plantagenstraße 31, 13347 Berlin
OPENING NIGHT | June 17 | 6 PM - 6 AM
With words by Adam Szymczyk, Bonaventure Ndikung, Marcus Gammel, Elena Agudio, live music by Adespotes Skyles sonic performances by Satch Hoyt and AGF (Antye Greie-Ripatti), and a DJ Set by Mr. Wallizz.
As iteration of Every Time A Ear di Soun — a documenta 14 Radio Program, SAVVY Contemporary, Deutschlandfunk Kultur and documenta 14 are presenting SAVVY Funk: a radiophonic project, an open archive in the form of a reading and listening room, and a series of footnotes by the invited artists:
AGF (Antye Greie-Ripatti), Leo Asemota, Gívan Belá, Alessandro Bosetti, Alberto de Campo, Igor Eskinja, Islands Songs (Silvia Ploner & Nicolas Perret), Tim Etchells, Abrie Fourie (Colonial Neighbours), Dani Gal and Achim Lengerer, Satch Hoyt, Felix Kubin, Brandon LaBelle and Anna Bromley , Missy Magazine (Gina D’Orio & Margarita Tsomou), Mobile Radio (Sara Washington & Knut Aufermann), Nástio Mosquito, Ahmet Ögüt, reboot.fm (Diana McCarty & Pit Schultz), Natascha Sadr, Haghighian and Nicholas Bussmann, Saout Radio (Anna Raimondo & Younes Baba-Ali), Rui Vilela, Tito Valery, James Webb
TUNE IN HERE: FM 90.4 MHz in Kassel, 103.0 FM in Berlin, SW 15560 kHz, and all over the world on documenta14.de
Within the framework of Every Time A Ear Di Soun — a documenta 14 Radio Program, and for the duration of twenty-two days the spaces of SAVVY Contemporary will be transformed into a radio-station, an open studio and a platform where audio material and sonic content will be produced live and broadcast (on FM, on short waves and online) and where the public is invited to engage in a collective practice of critical listening. A 24/7 radio-program as a work of art, SAVVY Funk is conceived as a space for aural experimentation, for new forms of participation, performativity, epistemological diversity, intellectual contagion and hangabout. Hosting a wide range of practices and languages, SAVVY Funk explores sonority and auditory phenomena as a medium to write counter-hegemonic histories, deliberates on how sound creates and accommodates psychic and physical spaces.
Drawing upon the power of sound and radio to shape forms of knowledge and action, inspired by Franz Fanon’s idea of the radio as a means of political struggle and resistance (Franz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism,1959) and by Arnheim’s call to empathically bring poets “into the wireless studio” (Rudolf Arnheim, Radio: an art of sound, 1936), SAVVY Funk has invited 18 artists to shape the radio programme. The artists invited have developed collaborations with students from the Class for Experimental Radio at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, led by Prof. Nathalie Singer and Martin Hirsch.
Furthermore, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar is also contributing an open archive with more than 200 items: from Singer’s private collection—comprising landmark books, records and historical exhibits since the early days of broadcasting and radio-drama—to the digital archive of radio art EXPA, where visitors can browse through and listen to 7.000 radio works spanning more than a century of radio art history. This archive dedicated to sound and art – accommodated within the structures of Mutant Matters by Lorenzo Sandoval and S.T.I.F.F – is in dialogue with SAVVY.doc, the open library of SAVVY Contemporary challenging archive's traditional categorisations and power mechanisms beyond Western epistemology, and with Colonial Neighbours, SAVVY Contemporary’s permanent radical and participative archive on German colonial history.
Alongside the radio-program and the reading and listening room, it is a series of footnotes in the form of artworks, documents, video and audio-pieces which reflects on auditory agency and the poetic and political dimension of sound. Besides the contributions by SAVVY Funk artists, Rui Vilela is presenting research material focusing on the history of Guinea-Bissauan Rádio Libertação founded during the Portuguese colonial occupation in 1967 and playing a crucial role in the transmission of the ideas of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cabo Verde (PAIGC) founded by Amílcar Cabral.
Spread across the spaces of SAVVY Contemporary, the footnotes are connected to the main body of the radio through a spatial intervention by artist Igor Eskinja. Visitors to SAVVY Funk are invited to delve into the multilayered research material, and to experience a radio in the making, while becoming actors in an “imaginative partnership between practitioners and audience” (Seán Street, The Poetry of Radio: The Colour of Sound, 2012).
FURTHER DETAILS ON PROGRAMME, CONCEPT AND TEAM - HERE ON THE SAVVY FUNK PROJECT PAGE.
SYMPOSIUM
Towards a Phenomenology of the Unknown
June 27, 2017 | 3-8 PM
SAVVY Contemporary at silent green | Gerichtstraße 35| 13347 Berlin
© Ivana Franke, Photographer: Kristina Lenard
The symposium 'Towards a Phenomenology of the Unknown' -a collaboration by Ernst Schering Foundation and SAVVY Contemporary- aims to explore the experience of seeing the “unknown” on a phenomenological level, while also shedding light on its transformative potential. The symposium is part of the project “Retreat into Darkness. Towards a Phenomenlogy of the Unknown” by the Berlin-based artist Ivana Franke. With Ivana Franke, vision scientist Bilge Sayim, curator and art historian Elena Agudio, artist and author Patricia Reed, science historian Jimena Canales, and Sylvia Pont, leader of the Perceptual Intelligence Lab in Delft.
How do we perceive and experience entities and events that we cannot properly categorize – how does the unknown as a subjective experience come about? What is the relationship between the unknown and the known within visual perceptual experiences, between the visible and the legible? What is the significance of the experience of the unknown in our lives, and what is its function in society?
These and other questions will be discussed by the speakers out of their various backgrounds. The symposium will provide a glimpse into this fascinating, little investigated aspect of human experience, while letting the audience engage in a scientific and artistic voyage into the mysteries of perception and the human mind – into how we fundamentally encounter and shape the world around us.
Please find the PROGRAMME HERE.
Kindly register by June 19 at anmeldung@scheringstiftung.de.
how does the world breathe now?
Session N°29: Fifty Minutes presented by Sînziana Paltineanu
June 28, 2017 | 7.30 PM
NEW ADRESS IN JUNE
Archive Kabinett | Müllerstraße 133 | 13349 Berlin
Free entrance - donations welcome
Fifty Minutes by Moyra Davey (2006)
For our 29th screening, Sînziana Paltineanu presents an encounter with a film by Moyra Davey. A work of autofiction, 50 Minutes approaches the world first and foremost through the personal archive:
"In 50 minutes we see and almost feel cyclical collections of semi-classified (or clustered) photographs and negatives, of dusty books, magazines, newspapers, notes, postcards, correspondence as intersections of personal timelines, of physical traces of selves, of memory sheets left blank etc. At times, the objects open up as potential escapes, offering a fleeting relief – “the ritual is about creating a lacuna, a pocket of time into which I will disappear.” (26:48-55) But objects are never hold onto. They're seemingly kept at a nostalgic distance through steady pacing in front of the camera, recitations of diary-like entries or readings of scripts with lost and found objects, conversations with authors and fragments. Surrounded by flat surfaces, folds, objects – a fictionalized self, its shadows, and companions are meandering through this collection in what appears to be an intellectual and experiential game of “lost and found” performed indoors, almost exclusively in the quotidian of the private sphere with bright windows. NYC after 9/11 lurks outside.
After the screening I would like to place Moyra Davey's film in conversation with a poetic experiment that blends in documents and images mostly drawn from the Mundaneum Archives – the current repository of an early 20th century universalist project of collecting all world's knowledge as envisaged and pursued by Paul Otlet and Henry Lafontaine. I will read from “An experimental transcript” a fictional text I wrote in autumn 2015 for Mondothèque. A project initiated by Femke Snelting and other artists associated with Constant, a Brussels-based association for art and media, Mondothèque grew first as a semantic media wiki and then it turned into Mondothèque::A radiated book. This collective project zooms in and around the Mundaneum and the digitization project undertaken by Google in Otlet's archives. “An experimental transcript” engages with archiving as obsession and triggers questions about entering an archive that is not one's own, about inhabiting one's own archive, and about Google's archive fever."
Sînziana Paltineanu is a writer, historian, and librarian based in Berlin. Sînziana graduated from the Babe?-Bolyai University, in Cluj (Romania), with a BA in Philology. In 2013, she earned a PhD in the Comparative History of Central, Southeastern and Eastern Europe, from the Central European University in Budapest (Hungary). In 2014, she was awarded a fellowship for literature at Akademie Schloss Solitude, in Stuttgart (Germany), where she finished writing her first novel, Elephant Chronicles, published with Fiktion, in 2015. Among recent publications: “The Woman Without a Mouth” (in Daisy Atterbury, Tarek El-Ariss, and Mirene Arsanios, eds., Makhzin, Issue 2: Feminisms, Beirut: 98weeks, September 2015) and “An experimental transcript” (Femke Snelting et al, eds.,Mondothèque::A radiated Book, Brussels: Constant, 2016).
FRAGMENTS #2 with Abrie Fourie
We have eyes to see but do not see. Continued Meditations on the Colonial Orbit
April 28- June 30, 2017 | Thursday-Sunday 2-7pm
SAVVY Contemporary | Plantagenstraße 31 | 13347 Berlin
Abrie Fourie. Road between Aus and Lüderitz, Namibia, 1992
Curated by Lynhan Balatbat, Marleen Schröder, Marlon Denzel van Royen and Jorinde Splettstösser.
Colonial Neighbours invites you to the second edition of FRAGMENTS - a series of interventions with SAVVY Contemporary ?s archive project. >Wir haben Augen, um zu sehen, aber sehen nicht // We have eyes to see but do not see<, a series of photographic and video works by South African artist Abrie Fourie opens in parallel to the exhibition >Everything is Getting Better | Polish Colonialism< curated by Joanna Warsza.
In the second edition of this series, the South African artist ABRIE FOURIE explores the notion of meditations on places and landscapes, and the juxtapositions within them. The images confront both what is visible and invisible which speaks back to the unknown and known histories of colonialism. The images at first glance reflect a surreal beauty of the island and the Namibian and oceanic landscapes which become even more surreal once placed in relation to the history of these spaces.
In his contemplative photographs of the Gorée Island, the Namibian desert and the oceanic landscape, - water and land emerge as formations of colors, light, shadows and textures but simultaneously reflect on them as places of fear, death, war and resistance. His photo series HOUSE OF SLAVES, GORÉE ISLAND is a photographic approach to a place that is connected to the remembrance of European colonialism and the Atlantic Slave Trade. Gorée Island is a small island off the coast of Dakar, Senegal, which became one of the central departure points for the enslaved Africans. Nowadays, the island serves as a pilgrimage destination for the African diaspora to remember this history of violence and displacement. Parting from the Door of No Return on Gore?e Island, the Atlantic waters became the ground of the Middle Passage - representing the deportations and journeys of millions of enslaved Africans to unknown and hostile lands. These waters reappear in Abrie Fourie's dreamlike OCEAN, a solemn and immersive encounter with dark waters and our own gaze. Mirroring ourselves, we become part of a metaphor of both past and present passages, of personal and collective projections on the sea, yet it simultaneously locates us in the here and now. Fourie's Namibia series was taken in the early 90s, a time in which Namibia and South African underwent major political changes. The images become a reflection of this politically transitionary moment.
Fourie also invited his son Raoul Fourie and fellow artist Lukas E.D. Cuitak to re-install the archival collection Colonial Neighbours in order to subvert the way we look at these objects.
FRAGMENTS is a series of interventions where artists, researchers and activists are invited to engage critically with colonial histories and legacies. Participants are asked to use the content in the Colonial Neighbours archive as a point of departure in creating a response which critically contributes to the context of the archive. The series is curated by the CN team that is Lynhan Balatbat, Marleen Schröder, Marlon Denzel van Royen and Jorinde Splettstoösser.
NEW PUBLICATION
THE INCANTATION OF THE DISQUIETING MUSE. On Divinity, Supra-Realities or the Exorcisement of Witchery
We have the pleasure of presenting you our new SAVVY Contemporary publication: THE INCANTATION OF THE DISQUIETING MUSE. On Divinity, Supra-Realities or the Exorcisement of Witchery edited by Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung and Federica Bueti. The book is designed by Elsa Westreicher and published by THE GREEN BOX.
How do 'witchery' phenomena and practices manifest within cultural, economical, political, religious and scientific spaces in Africa and beyond? This publication is a compendium to the eponymous exhibition project and public programme curated by Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung and Elena Agudio at SAVVY Contemporary, in collaboration with the Goethe-Institut South Africa in the framework of the project African Futures. Through an exhibition and a series of invocations, the project considered 'witchery' as an epistemological space and a medium of continuities between the African continent and its Diaspora. The publication includes essays by Erna Brodber, Seloua Luste Boulbina, Vladimir Lucien, Percy Mabandu, and Greg Tate a.o, and visual contributions by artists Georges Adéagbo, Haris Epaminonda, Kiluanji Kia Henda, Emeka Ogboh, Priscilla Rezende and Minnette Vari a.o.
OUT NOW:
312 pages, 34 illustrations, English / German
ISBN 978-3-941644-95-3
EUR 19,00
This publication has been generously supported by Goethe-Institut South Africa via TURN Fund der Kulturstiftung des Bundes.
