Training for Political Imaginaries
Workshops + Gespräche Talks & Workshops Social/Urban Movements
The workshop series Training for Political Imaginaries will serve as the pickup of the Re_Generation festival. Together with artists Mithu Sanyal, Siegmar Zacharias, Neha Spellfish, Eroca Nicols and the “Re_Generation Group”, the participants will ask what a joint future in an exhausted world could look like. They gather strength communally, seeking recovery in a world in which nobody knows how to achieve healing.
The “Re_Generation Group” is made up of students, artists, and cultural workers. It has been part of the Re_Generation festival cosmos since November 2022. The group grew out of the cooperation between the FFT, Siegmar Zacharias, and Cheers for Fears. It deals with the topic of regeneration and reflects, in lectures, discussions, and working groups, on the conditions under which we live: Climate crisis, capitalism, colonialism – in other words: Exploitation and exhaustion. The Re_Generation Group will bring those compiled experiences and the artistic practices developed into several workshops.
TIMETABLE
Friday, may 5
Arrive, tune in to each other, acclimatize. At the beginning of the Re_Generation workshops, Cheers for Fears invites you to a warm-up. With playful formats of exchange we create space in preparation for the two intensive weekends and to get to know each other within the group. How do we live and work together? In the upcoming days, but also beyond? These questions create the focus during the kick-off workshop and offer the opportunity to exchange perspectives and ways of working and to learn from each other.
Language: German and English
Cheers for Fears was founded in 2013 as a network and initiative by young artists for young artists in NRW. The mobile academy pursues the goal of inspiring art students and artists from various disciplines to engage in creative exchange and to stimulate artistic collaborations. The Re_Generation Group was created in the network and spirit of Cheers for Fears.
Saturday, may 6
How can we connect with what lies behind us? How did we get here?
In this Relaxed Performance/ Participatory Workshop we want to reflect together on intergenerational and collective memories, diasporic re-connections and the process of grief and re_generation.
During our research process we asked ourselves: In re_generational processes, what relations of power linger/remain, what collective responsibilities do we carry and who can heal? What can decolonial gestures look like?
Through sound and vibration we will explore the relation of our bodies in space. You will find (poetic) scores to move, linger, get in touch with others. We invite you to slip into movement or stillness and find a space between orientation and disorientation.
Who is anyways (dis)orientated?
Language: German and English
This is a relaxed performance / relaxed workshop / atmosphere with sound installation. The room is wheelchair accessible via an elevator. All information about barrier-free access is available here. Other notes: Partial aesthetic audio description of the action; high and low sound frequencies will be used; please be aware of black cables on black floor.
Linda Jiayun Gao-Lenders (no pronouns) is a post-migrant Chinese performer and sound artist. Lindas works are located at the intersections of auto-/ethnographic biographical work and musical-choreographic scores. Linda is currently studying at the Institute for Applied Theatre Studies in Gießen.
Josephine Pascale Rudolph (24.05.1992) is a Sound-Artist and Performer. Josephine’s works are located between sound, body, space and how they are intertwined with intersectional classism. Josephine studied Performing Arts and since 2019 has been studying in Giessen at the Institute of Applied Theater Studies.
Janis Jirotka (GER/ČZ/CAN) is based in Hamburg and works in political education and aesthetic research on memory politics and decolonizing and queering European art history. A practice of writing, feminist storytelling and performance characterize Janis‘ work.
How can we learn to listen to plants? And what can we learn from plants that are highly disregarded as weeds about living in crisis and regeneration? Drawing from knowledges passed down form Romanian aunts and great grandmothers, form old plant medicine we will meet some plants and be with them in form of teas, infusions, oils and tinctures. Plants can be material companions in complex times addressing both the individual and the social body to support the collective struggles, self-defense, and resilience. We will ask how plants prepare and help us to live in solidarity with a more then human world.
Language: English
This Workshop is a proposal to radical resilience. We are going to ask ourselves, as colonized bodies, how do we start to own our past, present and future? Although we have started to reappropriate our past, but the trauma of colonialism is still inscribed into our epigenetics. How can we break the cycle of violence, heal our trauma, and reappropriate our bodies and objects related to it, and what can we learn for our future?
Language: English
White bodies, black bodies, bodies of culture. „When two or more foreign bodies meet, our brain prompts to find out if we are safe. A short circuit that this part of the brain – which is responsible for the feeling of safety – creates, is to detect how similar or different the other bodies are. In response, the body switches to relaxation or tension and self-defense. Both white and black bodies do this frequently.“ Intergenerational imprints, as well as everyday experiences, have a significant impact, according to Resmaa Menakem, an American author and psychotherapist who specializes in the relationship between trauma and racism. We will read portions of his book „My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies“ and engage in somatic exercises and conversation on issues of critical whiteness and white fragility.
My biggest inspiration in the field of performance and politics are Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens so I want to share some of their teachings – and their fun – and invite you to an eco-sexual walk to the Volksgarten, which translates as „garden of the people“. We will look for A-spots and E-spots and learn how to hug a tree consensually. Bring some food an get close up and dirty with nature.
Mithu Sanyal is an award-winning author, broadcaster, and cultural scholar. She works in the fields of gender, race, and sexualities.
Sunday, may 7
The theoretical-practical workshop „sexotechnologies“ proposes to analyse and generate thought around technofeminist performance practices. The concept of sexotechnologies as a technofeminist performative form, will focus on the naturcultural relationship. we will interact with plants, mosses, and other natural species, to which we can approach affectively, generating relations of conflict from the performative actions that are generated with them. For this, we will take as an example the video-performance proposal Dendrophilia, which is presented as a first approach and alternative hacking of the natural. Consequently, the practice in the workshop will focus on the creation of video-performances through the interaction of the body, with technological interfaces in contact with objects of nature. It is an erotic ritual that seeks to connect the body with the primary, through electronic devices, which enhances a magical act of sound and visual hacking of nature through the erotic actions performed by the participants.
Participants are invited to bring a video of a plant, tree or moss to the workshop. Those who wish may also bring a real plant.
Language: German and English
Nicol Rivera Aro (Osorno, 1990). Chilean Performer and Researcher. Actress with a specialty in playwriting, University of Valparaíso (2015). PhD candidate in Philology at Leipzig University. Currently based in Berlin, where she develops her work as an independent artist and researcher, focusing on the relationship between the body and technological interfaces, delving into gender discourse and post-porn with DIY electronics. She has made collective performances in Chile, Germany, Switzerland, Holland, Italy and Poland. Playwright for the Tinta Negra company (Valparaíso, Chile). Her technofeminist, noise and post-porn performance „Noise from the Matrix“, has been presented at festivals such as Performing Arts Festival Berlin 2021, Live Performers Meeting Rome 2022, and at the Internationales Digital Kunst Festival Stuttgart 2022.
This workshop introduces participants to the Speak Audiojournal Platform, a multi-user experience that enhances sharing of intimate thoughts and voices. Speak orchestrates shared recorded audio snippets into long form, meta-tagged conversational threads into an easy to navigate mobile ui. The platform supports long form, ever branching audio exchange, presenting journal entries and responses as an ongoing shareable stream.
For the Beta Release, the participants will learn to install and use Speak and will have to opportunity to walk through its features.
Language: English
Neha Spellfish works multidisciplinary in the fields of conceptual art and noise art. Neha incorporates her research on psychosonics and polyvagal theory into handmade sound works and sonic encounters. Neha produces generative sounds using live coded audio programming languages, inviting audiences to explore psycho-emotional states and the surface of autonomous perception.
90 minutes of Aggressive Snuggling, embodied consent and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu toward bodily autonomy and trans liberation
Aggressive Snuggling: from the politics of touch to the poetics of touch is a practice Eroca Nicols has developed to share embodied consent and body autonomy tactics using the basics of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu as a learning frame. She thinks of it as a combination of pre dojo, trans liberation practice, working toward trusting other humans 101 and the bare bones of yes and no. She works with dancers, choreographers and/or queers and trans folks interested in queer self defense or safe ways to strangle one another for fun or pleasure. No experience with martial arts is needed.
Eroca Nicols is a choreographer*, dancer*, and organizer of contexts for collective liberation through relationship building and embodiment. After earning Nicols‘ Bachelor of Liberal Arts (Honors BFA) in Film/Video/Performance and Sculpture at California College of the Arts (San Francisco, California), Nicols‘ artistic practice shifted to the body. Nicols studied in Canada at professional programs at Ballet Creole and the School of Toronto Dance Theatre before Eroca continued her education in function-based and improvisational forms.
credits
Re_Generation wird gefördert durch die Kunststiftung NRW sowie im Rahmen des Bündnisses internationaler Produktionshäuser von der Beauftragten der Bundesregierung für Kultur und Medien. In Kooperation mit Cheers for Fears.
