ARIA Summer School
21 – 25 August 2023, Cukrarna, Ljubljana, SI
ARIA, Algo-Rhythmic Ideation Assembly
21 – 25 August 2023
Public programme: 22 & 23 August
ARIA (Algo-Rhythmic Ideation Assembly) is a summer school designed as a role-playing game. It takes place through the lens of a fiction-theory narrative. Bringing together artists, critical thinkers, and experts from diverse fields ARIA explores theoretical, artistic, and curatorial approaches to imagining, crafting, and inhabiting alternative futures in the context of a changing planetary ecology.
Besides the workshops for selected participants, ARIA offers also a two-day programme of lectures, discussions and a film screening open to the public.
The public programme will take place at Cukrarna, Ljubljana on 22. & 23. August from 17.00 to 20.00.
Speakers:
Florin Flueras, Michael Marder, Špela Petrič, Protektorama toxica, JP Raether, Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás, Simon Speiser, Subash Thebe Limbu, Lea Vene & Lovro Japundžić.
SCHEDULE
22 & 23 August 2023, 17.00–20.00,
Cukrarna, Poljanski nasip 40, Ljubljana (SI)
Tuesday, 22 August
17:00 ➤ Lecture / Florin Flueras: Unsorcery, practiced concepts
Unsorcery composes and explores ways of sorcery that can eventually surpass or undo some of the contemporary realities and subjectivities. It is an Artworld involved in a productive alienation from concepts through experience and from experience through thought. It is the embrace of an impossible cognition and a horrific affect, it is a 'via negativa' that starts where the hopes end and the remaining options are rather negative, dark and dead. Unsorcery was an environment in which Alina Popa and Florin Flueras were working together, each following their own path, doing their own practices, texts and performances around the concepts: Life Programing, Artworlds, Second Body, Dead Thinking, Eternal Feeding, Black Hyperbox, End Dream.
18.00 ➤ Discussion / Curating and Worldbuilding Practice
Speakers: Florin Flueras, Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás, JP Raether, Lea Vene & Lovro Japundžić. Moderated by Tjaša Pogačar and Brandon Rosenbluth.
19.00 ➤ Film screening and Q&A / Subash Thebe Limbu: Ningwasum
Set in an Indigenous Yakthung nation in Nepal, Ningwasum follows two time-travellers, Miksam and Mingsoma, who return to the present from a future where interplanetary civilisations are thriving and living sustainably by adopting Indigenous knowledge and technology. The fragility of our current ecosystem is portrayed in aerial shots and documentary footage of Himalayan glaciers, imbued with an ethereal blue filter. These are woven with digital cosmic landscapes and an immersive soundtrack, which includes electronic sound, spoken word, and folksongs. Inspired by ancient oral traditions, the film is narrated entirely in the Indigenous Yakthungpan, which the artist imagines as a vital language for the future. Ningwasum – which loosely translates as ‘memory’ in Yakthungpan – explores notions of time, memory and space, and how these shape reality. Limbu has theorised his approach to science fiction as ‘Adivasi Futurism’: a space where Nepalese Indigenous people and artists can imagine themselves in a future of their own making, driven by their culture and traditions.
Wednesday, 23 August
17.00 ➤ Talk / Špela Petrič: "The Auf Wieder Schnitzel Tasted Like Infrastructures of Care" - Field Notes from Performative Ethnographies
The talk will address various current (horti)/(agri)cultural technologies to critically analyse tropes of food scarcity, peak soil, colonisation of Mars and other ideological shorthands that are shaping imaginations of futures.
18.00 ➤ Lecture / Michael Marder: The Phoenix Complex
The talk will travel through the mechanisms of natural and social reproduction and replication, especially those ingrained in our individual and collective. Along the way, we will survey and explore the limits, both internal and external, to the seamless phoenix-like reconstitution of the same across the gap of death, total destruction and devastation.
19.00 ➤ Discussion / Anthropoforming For a Weird Planet
Speakers: Michael Marder, Špela Petrič, Protektorama toxica, Simon Speiser. Moderated by Tjaša Pogačar and Brandon Rosenbluth.
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Public programme of ARIA is curated by Tjaša Pogačar and Brandon Rosenbluth, and produced by Projekt Atol in collaboration with Cukrarna, Igor Zabel Association for Culture and Theory and Šum Journal. The programme is supported by the Ministry of Culture, Ministry of Public Affairs and the Municipality of Ljubljana – Department for Culture. ARIA is organized as part of the More-than-Planet project and co-funded by the European Union.
Contact
For more information, press materials or interview requests, you can contact
Tjaša Pogačar, tjasa@projekt-atol.si
Lara Mejač, lara.mejac@gmail.com, +386 41 268 886
More information about ARIA project: www.projekt-atol.si
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Speakers’s biographies
Florin Flueras' work expands into spheres of politics, philosophy, spirituality, health care, media, education, literature – affecting conventions and certainties, producing performative meetings between art and its outside. With Alina Popa he created alternative art environments, artworks as Artworlds (Unsorcery, Clinica, Black Hyperbox). With Ion Dumitrescu he initiated Postspectacle, applying performative tools outside art, like in Candidate's presidential campaign. In Love, Unexperiences, Unimages, Unhere he introduces in public spaces presences and states that can affect what underlies the conceptual and perceptual, what is possible to think, see and feel in different contexts. In certain prestigious art events the works appear uninvited as Unofficial Unworks. More than visual or conceptual, Florin sees his recent practice as affect art. His writing is part of his works, and his works part of his writings.
https://www.fflueras.ro/p/florin-flueras.html
Michael Marder is IKERBASQUE Research Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country (UPV-EHU), Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain. His writings span the fields of ecological theory, phenomenology, and political thought. He is the author of numerous scientific articles and monographs, including Plant-Thinking (2013); The Philosopher’s Plant (2014); Dust (2016), Energy Dreams (2017), Heidegger (2018), Political Categories (2019), Pyropolitics (2015, 2020); Dump Philosophy (2020); Hegel's Energy (2021); Green Mass (2021), Philosophy for Passengers (2022), The Phoenix Complex (2023), Time Is a Plant (2023), and with Edward S. Casey, The Place of Plants (2023). https://www.michaelmarder.org/
Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás is a curator and art historian. She has curated exhibitions around themes such as the genealogy and social impact of planetary computation or electronic surveillance and democracy at institutions of contemporary and media art worldwide since 2006, including at ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Chronus Art Center (Shanghai), Nam June Paik Art Center (Seoul), Tallinna Kunstihoone, and the Ludwig Museum Budapest. In 2019 Nolasco-Rózsás started her curatorial research into the “virtual condition” and she is the initiator and head of the international collaborative project Beyond Matter at ZKM | Karlsruhe, which brings together several institutions such as Centre Pompidou (Paris) and the Aalto University.
Špela Petrič is a Slovenian new media artist with a background in the natural sciences. Her artistic practice combines biomedia practices and performativity to enact strange relations between bodies that reveal the underpinnings of our (bio)technological societies and propose alternatives. Petrič has received several awards, such as the White Aphroid for outstanding artistic achievement (Slovenia), the Bioart and Design Award (Netherlands), and an Award of Distinction at Prix Ars Electronica (Austria).
Protektorama toxica is an Artificial Identity crystallised in 2011 and the root vessel of the lifeline of Protektoramae, a herd of WorldWideWitches. She has worked as a Smartphone Sangoma and an Unholdenschar. In 2014, she forked to become a travelling witch (called globalis), and in 2016 evolved into a Rare Earth Occultist (toxicae). She continuously develops her ritual practice, and in the past, was seen exploring mountaintops, stone circles and other natural sites without reception, as well as visiting places of advanced technology (such as Times Square in 2014 or Berlin’s Apple Store in 2016). Protektorama’s interventions expose the reality that our most advanced technology is interwoven with what we call archaic or nature, despite our illusion of human mastery over our nature and environment.
JP Raether lives and works in Berlin. He attended Berlin University of the Arts and is currently holding a professorship for MA Live Art Forms at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Nuremberg, Germany. JP Raether and aLifveForms are supported by the Fellowship Programme 2020/2021 of PACT Zollverein (Essen). http://www.johannespaulraether.net/
Simon Speiser is an artist who conjures fictional concepts that merge nature with technology. Speiser was growing up between Germany, Ecuador and Bolivia. His experience with nature in South America, especially on his father’s cacao farm in Esmeraldas Ecuador had a big influence on his practice. He closely follows the development of emerging tech while placing a variety of media and disciplines in dialogue with one another, ranging from writing, sculpture, weaving and printing to video and VR installations, to explore the intersection of art and science fiction. https://www.simonspeiser.de/
Subash Thebe Limbu is an indigenous Yakthung (Limbu) artist from what we currently know as eastern Nepal. He works with sound, film, music, performance, painting and podcast. Subash has MA in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins (2016), BA in Fine Art from Middlesex University (2011), and Intermediate in Fine Art from Lalit Kala Campus, Kathmandu. His works are inspired by socio-political issues, resistance and science/speculative fiction. Migration, climate change, and indigeneity or Adivasi Futurism as he calls it, are recurring themes in his works. Subash is based in Newa Nation (Kathmandu) and London.
Lovro Japundzic & Lea Vene are independent curators based in Zagreb, Croatia. Together they work at Mocvara Gallery, nomadic exhibition/performance project that operates as a gallery division of Mocvara night club. In this "boutique" curatorial program they are interested in site-specific installations, performances and commissioned solo productions, which combine playful and often confrontational approach towards normative structures. Recently they have been mostly focused on performance art and productions that often imply provocation or performative situation, reexamining established definitions of choreography and dynamics between performer and audience. Since 2019 they have explored subversive potential of role play working with artists like Trakal, Ed Fornieles, Wojciech Kosma, Billy Bultheel, Brody Condon; worked on anger as a positive and regenerative tool with collectives like Young Boy Dancing Group and New Noveta; created floating lexicon of marvels and catastrophes in a collaborative workshop with R-Lab course from Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm; organized performances with artists like Jaana-Kristiina Alakoski, Sanna Helena Berger, Candela Capitán, Mina Tomic, etc. https://www.instagram.com/mocvara_gallery/
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Curated by: Tjaša Pogačar and Brandon Rosenbluth
Role-playing game design: OMSK Social Club
Visual design: Olbram Pavlíček
Organization and PR assistance: Lara Mejač
Production: Projekt Atol Institute
Co-Production: Cukrarna Gallery, osmo/za
In collaboration with: ŠUM Journal and Grounded festival.
The round table “Curating and Worldbuilding practice” is organized in collaboration with the Igor Zabel Association for Culture and Theory.
Programme is supported by the Ministry of Culture, Ministry of Public Affairs and the Municipality of Ljubljana – Department for Culture. ARIA is organized as part of the More-than-Planet project and co-funded by the European Union.