LECTURES WITH KALLE LAAR

The healing rhythms of nations
The unknown on vinyl from A(frica) to G(ermany) to Z(imbabwe).

For decades the record was the modern audio medium par excellence and always used for messages conveyed via sound in the fields of music, literature, politics, advertising, and art. Covers and liner notes became essential means of expression – where the zeitgeist was captured in a special way. How was the unknown portrayed here, from the closest neighbors to the more exotic and later also reachable tourist destinations? Which clichés were revived or newly created for this? And how was Germany itself seen by faraway countries? A reflection on the image of the unknown on records during the period before "world music" and digital reproduction had been invented.

Sound makes power

Voice and suggestion, noise and war, audio technology and the military: reflections on the acoustic dominion. We have learned to not let ourselves be unconditionally at the mercy of the daily flood of images in media – in contrast, no one can elude the emotional immediate effect of sound. Noise defines territory, sounds become weapons, voiceovers guide and control: Power reveals itself acoustically, too. Comments on plundering, Muzak, evangelicals, "Seelephonie" (soul symphony), the birth of the telephone from the spirit of anatomy, the vocoder, military research on sounds, encryption, and surveillance. And on why the first digital sound track of Jurassic Park was not convincing.

ARTISTS TALK

after the performances

Dieudonné Niangouna, Le socle des vertiges

Iggy Malmborg, Boner
Jan Lauwers, The Blind Poet

Teatro Línea de Sombra, Amarillo
Mamela Nyamza, Wena Mamela


Rabih Mroué, Riding on a Cloud

Simone Aughterlony / Jorge León, UNI*FORM

Milo Rau, The Civil Wars
Unger/Schmetterlinge/Gustav/Rellöm/Eder/WERK X, Proletenpassion 2015 ff.

Arkadi Zaides, Archive
Motus, Caliban Cannibal

Emke Idema, Rule™

Ulrich Eisenhofer/Benno Heisel, Cassidy

URBAN HEAT – public lecture program

Welcome and introduction

Tomislav Medak

URBAN DISTURBANCE, POLITICAL EMERGENCE

In my talk I will start from situating the planetary urbanization from a double perspective of the metabolic relation between the city and the environment and the global division of labor. While the urban density makes the problems of social reproduction (socio-economic inequalities, migrations, waste production) apparent and the political organizing possible, it cannot provide an appropriate geographic and economic scale to analyze the processes that generate these problems. While the contestation against the uneven and combined development is situated locally, its catalysts unfold at the global scale and consequently their critical and strategic imaginary has to unfold at the planetary scale. If art cannot present another world with any degree of plausibility, given that another world is an emergent condition of political contestations, it can still present the extant world under different conditions, making evident its ideological fissures and points of fracture. I will draw on the work of Right to the City Zagreb and the theatre work that I am doing with my theatre company BADco. to reflect that without the radical politics there can be no radical imaginary necessary to the transformation of the world.

John McGrath

CROSSING THE DIGITAL BORDER: THEATRE IN NEW SPACES

Using examples from the work of National Theatre Wales, widely considered a leader in UK Digital Theatre, John McGrath will explore the new theatrical spaces and opportunities available to us in the digital era.

Response

Tony Chakar

ANY WORLD THAT I'M WELCOME TO (IS BETTER THAN THE ONE I COME FROM)

In the world news there are many reports on ISIL or ISIS and how it is destroying the complex social fabric of the Levant by attacking its (mainly) Christian minorities. In these reports, the stress is almost always placed on the graphic and violent nature of ISIL’s acts, placing them in an apolitical space (»barbaric«), or in a temporality that is other than the now-time (»mediaeval«).
In the meantime, what has been overlooked for more than 100 years now is what can be called »Catholic normativity«, where the values and ideas of the Catholic Church are being passed as what is truly Christian. This normativity has been internalised by many of the Eastern and Oriental Churches in the Levant and Egypt, sometimes leading to the systematic destruction of iconographical and liturgical traditions that date back to the early days of Christianity. What is also being overlooked is that both ISIL and Catholic normativity are products of the great homogenizing forces of capital, through modernity.
Consequently, in order to produce some meaning, it is the cataclysmic powers of modernity that are to be addressed, and not the ready-made, media-friendly subject-shifter categories such as »radical Islam« or »minorities«.

Paula Caspão

ART-MAKING AFFECTS
INTERDEPENDENCIES, (IN)ADEQUATE CONFRONTATIONS, (TRANS)LOCAL IMPLICATIONS

One of the few things I am sure of is that I am a »transversal thing«. Both in my personal and professional life, moving across fields and places has always been a source of joy, rather than a matter of discomfort, despite the frictions and collisions that the fact of crossing borders often implies. Yet of late I have been experiencing an acute need to critically resituate my beloved transversal practices of the last years within the current financial, technological, informational, creative capitalism, and the correspondent dominant knowledge economy and knowledge management that has been expanding across western world(s) and beyond – so much predicated on mobile and transversal forms of creativity, on processing, connecting and transplanting information; redesigning, retransplanting, reconnecting, expanding, expanding, expanding. Often softly imposing a life-long social choreography of self-organizing malleable networking, and a never-ending combination of skilling with de-skilling and re-skilling. In this set up, there is no time to really pay attention to the ecologies of our practices, their social effects – not only there where they take (and make) place as they materialize, but also there where they will take (and make) place afterwards, rematerializing in more or less visible ways.
Following this thread, it is clear that a closer look at the working and production modes of my current artistic and related theoretical practices can help me understand the material and immaterial complexity of the social relations they imply, and the economies they have been moving with. And yet I know I will go on working in transversal modes, transposing tools (and plants) across fields and landscapes, for many reasons that have to do with how I want to live everyday. Because displacement (sensorial-intellectual, cultural, geographic) – call it a certain kind of »tourism«, if you will – is where I get my joy from. Because displacement, and even a certain kind of mis-placement – something like a constant artificialization of »original« frames – is what I believe makes sense not only for my practices (taken as inherently social), but also for wider social processes.

Adham Hafez

»AA: ARTISTS ANONYMOUS« – PERFORMED LECTURE ON URBAN CHANGE, DESPAIR AND THE CITIZEN-MEGALOPOLIS VIOLENCE

A young theorist and artist, disenchanted by the present of her city, angry at its past, and hopeless of its future leaves a letter to her friend, asking for it to be read to an audience of artists, theorists, cultural producers, and political activists.

AA is a lecture based on a fictional letter accounting for real events, and a real letter accounting for fictitious events. It unfolds as a score of theoretic propositions, art history chronicles, and a set of political strategies. At times of (post) revolutionary change, this text comes as a prelude to an unfolding exploration of the mythical and iconic city of Cairo. A megalopolis that consumes its citizens as it is eaten by them at each ideological rupture, a city too dense for us to see through its intricate fabric of (in)visible social threads. Communist jews singing, muslim ballerinas and what is in between is only a glimpse of the complexity of the demographics and communities that lived and live in Cairo. At times of historical change, preset frames are easily put on subjects, masking their subjectivities and producing market tokens and commodities. But, can we think of changing cities through their antiheroes rather than revolutionary icons? Through demons and not through angels? Through broken down buildings, looted museums, burnt books, and censored dances rather than their celebrated histories or commercialized cultural products? AA is a lecture that aims at cooling down the »urban heat« of a city dressed in dust.

Response