as part of Re_Generation

19.04. – 01.07.2023

Re_Generation is a festival for pleasure, solidarity & healing. International artists, activists, and scientists will gather at the FFT for twelve days to introduce and try out practices that answer to a world that is exhausted in so many ways.

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Rahel Spöhrer

continuities... sharing and assembling what we want to carry along

Re_Generation closing session

talk Talks & Workshops Social/Urban Movements

In the wake of a two-day symposium on theories, practices, and trainings of re_generation, how can we create a space to ponder and integrate what happened, to sustain it, carry it with us, share it with others, and give it a future beyond the event? The final session, facilitated by Rahel Spöhrer, invites the participants to jointly revisit the previous two days of the Symposium. The idea is to reflect, exchange, think through what has been collectively experienced and shared: to gather, assemble, and find ways of holding some of the fugitive moments, movements of bodies, points of contact, thoughts, experiences, and practices that occurred in space and time within the manifold encounters.

Can we, with Ursula K. le Guin, create a bag, pouch, a basket, a net that allows us to hold*, carry, take with us some of these moments before we part? Within the session we will create a vessel or something alike that hold things in a special, powerful relationship with each other and with us (The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction by Ursula K. le Guin) and creates the possibility to share what we discovered with others. It’s an invitation to jointly write, knit, tie, knot, stitch together practices, scores, imaginaries of re_generation, recovery, and repair.

*Working around vessels to hold objects we learn with and from is inspired by the ongoing conversation with my dear friend Sophie Mak-Schram, researcher and pedagogue who has a deep interest in studying together, in learning objects and containers that can hold them.

**Quote from The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction by Ursula K. le Guin

cast

Rahel Spöhrer is a dramaturge, lecturer, and programmer, working at the intersection of performance, visual arts, and critical pedagogy. She is interested in the politics, economies, and ethics of hosting in the arts field and beyond, and understands curatorial practice as one that creates shared, as well as fragile, spaces of touch, contact, and encounter. Together with her collaborators, she asks how ambivalent practices of hosting can be regeneratively effective in exhaustive systems and in times of hostile politics and environments.

credits

Re_Generation receives support from Kunststiftung NRW and from the Federal Commissioner for Culture and the Media, as part of the Alliance of International Production Houses. In cooperation with Cheers for Fears.