Soil Is An Inscribed Body.
ON SOVEREIGNTY AND AGROPOETICS
INVOCATIONS 13.09.–15.09.2019
MIT Dina Amro, Marwa Arsanios, Archipel Community Stations Radio, Paula Gioia, Zayaan Khan, Barbara Marcel, Renata Motta, Shela Sheikh, Telling Trees, Bouba Touré, Mama D Ujuaje, Alex Ungprateeb Flynn, Percy Zvomuya, und anderen
Schedule
Thursday 12.09.2019 | |
12:00–16:00 | Zayaan Khan Seed Collection Workshop [RSVP necessary – see below] |
Friday 13.09.2019 | |
11:00 | An Un–Round Table with Prof. Souleymane Bachir Diagne (closed session) |
18:30 | Welcome & Introduction |
18:45 | Bouba Touré La Naissance d'une Conscience en Afrique. L'Expérience de la Coopérative de Somankidi Coura, du Fleuve Sénégal au Mali Presentation (translated into English) |
19:45 | Shela Sheikh Bearing Witness with the Earth Presentation |
20:30 | BREAK |
20:45 | Dina Amro time flows in all directions_water flows through me Performance |
21:30 | Percy Zvomuya Your Farm is on my Land Presentation |
22:15 | MUSIC With Percy Zvomuya and his vinyls |
Saturday 14.09.2019 | |
14:00 | Ahmed Isamaldin and Napuli Langa (Thinking) Activism Through the Prism of Soil. On the Double Agency of John Garang and the Temporary Government of Abdalla Hamdok in Sudan Presentation |
14:45 | Mojisola Adebayo, Marwa Arsanios and Nicole Wolf Agroecological Strategies of Resilience Open Discussion |
15:15 | BREAK |
15:30 | Paula Gioia Peasant Movement in Brandenburg: Contributions to the Global Peasant Struggle Presentation |
16:15 | Paula Gioia, Alex Ungprateeb Flynn, Barbara Marcel, Renata Motta Women in Movement / The Patriarchy of Land. On Agrarian Movements and Their Internal Struggles Conversation |
17:00 | Luis Berríos-Negrón Greenhouse Doppelgänger Deposed: Remembering to Forget Colonial Memory PRESENTATION |
17:45 | Break |
18:30 | Mama D Ujuaje Food and Community Centered Knowledge Workshop [RSVP necessary – see below] |
20:30 | Collective Dinner |
Sunday 15.09.2019 | |
12:00 | Mama D Ujuaje Food Journey For Justice Workshop [RSVP necessary – see below] |
14:00 | Mia Harrison Acts of Geomancy: A Continued Conversation of Alice Walker’s “In Search of our Mother’s Gardens” Lecture Performance |
15:00 | Zayaan Khan A Practice of Light and Death Lecture Performance |
15:30 | Zayaan Khan On Fermentation Workshop [RSVP necessary– see below] |
18:00 | Telling Trees with Daphrose Ndakoze and Bouba Touré |
20:00 | Closing Dinner |
The programme on Friday evening will be livestreamed. On Saturday and Sunday will have broadcasts by Archipel Community Stations Radio. |
Workshops
12.09.2019 12:00–16:00 Seed Collection Workshop with Zayaan Khan
In the context of our Agropoetics Invocations, artist and seed librarian Zayaan Khan will share her knowledge on seed collection, care and preservation. Zayaan, founder of "Seed Biblioteek" in South Africa, strives to reconnect seeds with story, pondering resilience and sovereignty. In the format of a workshop and an act of toxic redistribution, the team of Soil is an Inscribed Body in collaboration with the team of the upcoming show The Long Term You Cannot Afford, alongside the subscribed participants, will embark on a trip to a nature reserve that lies right next to the present landfill of Vorketzin, West of Berlin.
For the upcoming exhibition, researcher Jonas Stuck, artist Jonas Staal and curator Caroline Ektander are developing an installation of plant seeds collected at historical toxic waste sites titled Redistribute Toxicity. These landfills, which are now nature reserves and agricultural lands, emerged from a deal struck between West- and East-Germany. The West would pay the East to dump toxic waste, a process which we see today magnified in the form of the global toxic trade. By redistributing these “toxic seeds” to humans living in the former West, the project challenges audiences to take a seed home to plant and care for. Over a period of decades, it was the ancestors of these seeds who worked to clean the soil of these landfills: they are plant workers, proletarian plantae. Now the project asks to return this care and, as such, include and acknowledge toxic heritage in day to day life. Not to outsource the toxic, but to insource it: to co-exist and care for it.
To make this project happen SAVVY needs the support of voluntary seed collectors, who will travel to the historical landfills, and collect the seeds from the former East to be redistributed in the Former West. This collective action is a transitional one, connecting the exhibition Soil is an Inscribed Body to the upcoming The Long Term You Cannot Afford, adding to the notion of agropoetics the ongoing presence and need for co-existence with toxic subjectivities.
Jonas Staal's project Redistribute Toxicity has been made possible through financial support from the Mondriaan Fund.
14.09.2019 18:30–20:30 Food and Community Centered Knowledge Mama D Ujuaje
15.09.2019 12:00–13:30 A Food Journey for Justice with Mama D Ujuaje
[Please not changes in dates – due to travel issues, this workshop has to take place on two days]
The Food Journey is a multi-sensory experience in which you are invited to be blindfolded to heighten your full sensory experience of the Journey. Whether a vision, a dream or an unfolding nightmare, the story of food excites the imagination. Participating in this workshop will connect you to different ways of looking at how the unique, historical routes of certain food elements link it to their present day impact on culture, tastes, health, community, economics and oppression. All food is vegan and gluten free and you will laugh, feel sad, be joyful, and hear the bad of what has been part of the voyage of human nourishment –and toxicity - on the planet. Come and join us and be transformed, we will enjoy a meal together at the end of the Food journey experience.
15.09.2019 15:00–18:00 A Practice of Life and Death – Fermentation Workshop with Zayaan Khan
Fermentation is all about creating suitable environmental conditions and working with time, microbiota – fungi, yeasts and bacteria – to create and transform foods from fruits, vegetables, grains, meats, dairy, insects, seaweeds and others. A great lesson in humility and authenticity, our work in fermentation is always all about community, through a multi-species exploration. Join artist Zayaan Khan in weaving these lessons through a performative lecture of short stories. This will be followed by a fermentation workshop. We will look into “Fermenting SWEET” and "Celebrating SALT" using sweetness and salt to understand fermentation, from wild soda to condiments like ketchup, mustard or chutney, sauerkraut and whole brined vegetables.
Spaces for the workshops are limited, to RSVP please get in touch via communications@savvy-contemporary.com indicating which workshop you’d like to attend.
It is from the land that bodies gather meaning, sensations, and imagination.
In face of global expropriation of land and the devastation of its reproductive powers, we – agropoets, activists, artists and cultural workers – convene at SAVVY Contemporary to invoke, tremble, flare up, conspire, cook and plan together. Believing in the possibilities of transformative encounters, we posit collaboration and contamination as strategies against the individualising logic of the biological imagination. As Anna Tsing attested, “staying alive – for every species – requires livable collaborations.” [2]
Currently, we are struggling with having to watch from afar how the Amazon rainforest as well as forests in Congo, Angola and the Arctic are burning due to reckless and greedy human actions. The Invocations for Soil Is An Inscribed Body. On Sovereignty and Agropoetics seek to trace the exploitation of the earth’s resources and to give visibility to struggles for sovereignty over land, mind and food, and their poetic manifestations. We cordially invite you to this social gathering of performances, participatory discussions and workshops of the cross-pollination between artistic and agroecological struggles explored throughout the project as a whole.
Food is an essential part of this meeting space. In quests for justice, a sensory rooting of experiences in the present through tasting and ingesting is crucial. Through the act of eating, together with Mama D Ujuaje, founder of Community Centered Knowledge, we trace both our complicitness in global systems and networks of food production, but also microbial life passing through our bodies. Inviting activists and artists to create moments of connection and nourishment, we open up different temporalities of the soil, as collaborator, witness and social space: with Zayaan Kahn we ponder on the process such of fermentation, actively slowing down and speeding up time in learning about microbes as crucial members in a more-than-human commons. This is not just a question of food sovereignty, but also spiritual sovereignty in all relationships of cultivation. Explorations of the sonic identities of movements for land and water sovereignty and the poetic cultural manifestations, performed by Dina Amro, are joint by considerations on the soil as a witness of and subject to manmade erosion, depletion but also force of regeneration and collective care.
The Invocations create a focused moment of shared tactics, resources, and knowledges around food and land sovereignty, where we can learn from cooperative farming practices and alternative communal life, of cultivating and building living spaces of emancipation and liberation.
Archipel Stations Community Radio will host full days of live radio with special guest Kate Donovan, broadcasting live fragments of the invocations and the exhibition, talks, and a variety of audio content from the happenings around this project. Archipel will be broadcasting via microFM throughout the spaces in SAVVY Contemporary on 90.5 FM, or you can listen to the stream from anywhere at https://archipel.community. On a tablet at SAVVY Contemporary, you can also follow Archipel's Telegram messaging group connecting rural social movements, researchers, activists and artists around the world. The audio content of this thread will become a generative radio experiment, made possible with the support of radio aporee (https://aporee.org/).
KÜNSTLERISCHER LEITER Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung
KuratorinNen Elena Agudio, Marleen Boschen
ProjektTeam Onur Çimen, Cornelia Knoll
Ausstellungsproduktion António Mendes
Managment Lynhan Balatbat-Helbock
KommuniKation Anna Jäger
TECH Ola Zielińska
Telling Trees Arlette-Louise Ndakoze
DESIGN Elsa Westreicher, Lili Somogyi
Live Stream Boiling Head
Soil is an inscribed body. On Sovereignty and Agropoetics ist das zweite Kapitel unserer Langzeit-Untersuchung THE INVENTION OF SCIENCE. Das Projekt wird im Hauptstadtkulturfonds und von der Foundation for Arts Initiatives gefördert. Shela Sheikhs Beitrag wird, im Rahmen des Floraphilia Projekts, von der Akademie der Künste der Welt und der Kulturstiftung des Bundes gefördert. Jonas Staals Projekt Redistribute Toxicity, in dessen Kontext Zayaan Khans Samensammel-Workshop stattfindet, wurde durch die finanzielle Unterstützung des Mondriaan Fund ermöglicht.
Visual Zitat von Anna Tsing, Design von Elsa Westreicher
Mariarosa Dalla Costa, "The Door to the Garden" (transl. by Fulvia Serra), in Women and the Subversion of the Community. A Mariarosa Dalla Costa Reader (Ed. Camille Barbagallo), (PM Press, 2019 [2002]), 23.
Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World. On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, (Princeton University Press, 2015), 28.