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flupsi: mutual pleasures!

Welcome to this shell.

I spent the windy days with the cyberfeminists of the early 90s. At some point, a recurring figure struck me: the SHELL, embodiment of the abutting surfaces that carry the imaginaries.

Where are you?

Your feet may be on a ground somewhere on this planet, but your hands reach halfway into cyberspace. Or the other way around. Are you comfortable? How would you like to live, which beings to share these minutes with?

I like
                i like salons. i don't like work.

i like to host. usually i like to be hosted.

i like early music and traditional greek and klezmer music. i like
  latex, wool and feathers. i like all shades of turquoise, red and yellow.

i like the long table in the narrow alley. i like a deep and spiraling conversation. i like
  the smell in the small organic shop.

i like stories. i like speculation.

i like architectural patterns, in philosophy, visual design and software.

i like clarinets and Italian harpsichords from the 17th century.

i like fellini's movies because of their estetics.

i like to touch.

i like to make beautiful movies: light and shadow, atmosphere, water, earth,
  body-constellations in movement. Textures. Lots of things going on.

i like my dreams. Very very much.

i like it when everyone is immersed in what they do.

i like curious people.

i like nonverbal play.

i like places and situations outside the logic of reciprocity.

i like skin, gentle impact, being naked. i like vulnerability.
  I'm scared.

i like concave/convex, hard and soft, and everything in between.

i like moist moss and lichen.

i like coffee in the morning (80% Robusta).

i like calm shapes.

i like silence.
i sometimes wish my head was silent, so i stream a video. bad idea.

i like Le Gruyère.

i like dark rye bread.

i like rice with vegetables.

i like cabbage.

i like the colors of all the produce in autumn and of blue carrots.

i like lists.

i like 'i like' lists.

i like recursion, obviously.

these are just some of my favorite things.

i like french.

i like for no reason.

i like sexy everywhere.

i like smiles.

i like it when everything changes.

i like small catastrophes with clear solutions.

i like gifts.

i like linux and free&open software.

i like good documentation.

i like tiramisú, croissants and crêpes.

i like all sorts of nuts.

i like small rivers in the mountains.

i like the pool of cold clear water that forms around the source.

i like kind, nurturing conversations with strangers on instagram.

i like beOS/Windows 3 style window frames and i like
  tiling windows even more.

i like 'browse history'.

i like 'single source of truth'.

i like 'composability' and 'cohesion'.

i like early cyberfeminist enthusiasm.

i like the sunlight in northern february.

i like all animals a lot.

i like when people tell me your so cute.

i like to be very disruptive once it gets too cosy though.

i like people to not know who i am.

i like to have no money problems.

i like to have a place to sleep, a place to be alone, enough
  food and water and a toilet. I like squatting toilet with waterhose.

i like people around me who are peaceful and fierce.

i'd like to have a bathtub.

i like community kitchen and community sleeping room.

i like gardens.

i like painted nails.

i like human-animal hybrids.

i like dense old cities.

i like buildings that have lost their purpose long ago.

i like german expressionist literature.

i like buster keaton films.

i like to draw with Aquarell.

i like to build machines.

i like to create plays and scenes and music.

i like allegory.

i like autogestion culture.

i like the freedom of imagination.

i like the freedom to move around the world.

i like situations without "normal".

i like wood and wooden things.

i like trees in the city.

i like wildlife in the city. Like donkey and deer and lynx.
  instead of cars and polluting factories.

i like the atlantic ocean and the windy beach (also the Mediterranean
  and the north sea. the others i never saw).

i like Buenos aires, a city where everyone is poeta.

i like learning random stuff.

i like dark chocolate.

i like to dislike (but not now).

i like dialectics.

i like glue.

i like zines and valki's collage imagination.

i like witty dialogue.

i like abundance.

i like intimacy.

i like erotics.

i like katamarans.

i like trains.

i like train, tram and metro networks.

i like the portuguese Intercity train and the czech train bistro.

i like puddles.

i like swimming in the lake while it rains.

i like sweatlodge and sauna.

i like autostop.

i like where mountains touch the sea.

i like fog.

i like cats.

i like crows.

i like music that makes me cry.

i like political witchcraft.

i like magic (but I'm uneasy with esoterics and astrology).

i like direct action.

i like how circus troupes travel around from village to village.

i like derision as well as mysterium.

i like to mix past, present and future realities.

i like ochre and violet.

i like beautiful stones.

i like spiders.

i like shells.

i like self made egg tempera.

i like krapplack and azure.

i like copper, iron, brass and chrome.

i like paper and what you can make out of it.

i like surfaces and superficiality.

i like mutual care.

i like losing what i don't need any more.

i like to think I'm here temporarily, so why bother too much, or
  rather: why not bother...?

i like the militants around the world who fight for everyone's freedom,
  and whose freedom we fight for.

i like the destruction of property.

i like airships.

i like turtles.

i like asses.

i like my rage.

i'd like to focus my rage.

i like so much more. what do you like? 
🚧 Poem for you...

Can't I do the good work? What's this bugging pain? I want to live on a boat under a willow-tent, I want to read one page per day, I want a deep conversation per day, eat a bouquet of flowers and colors, drink tea and coffee, move through the dim, prospective air of dreams. I want to take a dip and melt, then reassemble myself in the harsh breeze; again and again, day for day, season for season. Summer, whose promise, or imagined promise, is too large to bear, cruel you, give me the courage to fall!

There you are, scent of budding, earthworm, virtuoso of harpsicord and trombone. I thought you were gone. You should have gone for I was horrible. But perhaps you don't mind so much? You like this place? And your comrades, they're here as well? How fabulous, how delightful!

I want to play the instruments with you. Or listen. I want to sing to you and cry. I want you close or distant. In silent appreciation or disdain. I want all of you close or distant, I want to know if I want you close or distant. I want to tell you in clear and calm words, now is the time for me, and I want you to tell me, or to tell each other with our bodies, or with the closing note.

I miss you.

I miss you so dearly, but am I missing the imaginary memories I created, that I composed out of helplessness and self-sorrow once, out of the vapors of warm soil, the moist, infested shade behind a straw bale? Am I missing a second hand or third hand memory or caricature thereof?

We take a walk on the cloud that is mist over the morning river, our feet dissolving. I want to freeze and to evaporate. I want my skin to be the portal of your anger and your hope. I want the path to open once a year to let a stranger in, but only if they know what I don't know. Don't tell me about the systems some guru has told you about. No, I want to admire how every limb of your body moves with the swells of mood and temperature. I want your four liquids all over the place. I want your grace and earnesty.

I know you. The better I know me I know you. I know us. We are many. I know it's a small step from the cubicle to the vast, open. We are connected. I am feeling the umbilical channel ring like a phone line. Knock, and I'm scared to accept.

Help me accept. Wind, help me accept and trust that I can deny when I need to. Sun, help me stay where I am and go where I go. Help me channel my anger, my radiant, sound, manifest rage, into beauty for I am one beautiful beast as my naked feet are dancing on the dry planks over mud and puddles. Ocean, give me the salty drops that heal my pain. Let it rain on me to make my skin transparent. Embrace my clay-made, readymade, multiple body to exchange the heat and soften the form. Dust, injure my eyes so that I listen. Make me stiff and long so that I forget the dragon in my womb.

This night, I had a pleasurable dream.

I woke up and told a friend, via e-mail. Pleasurable but disturbing. Distance is quite relative, and I'm just learning to be intimate with myself.

Those who talk big about the future have no clue. They believe in euklidean space and binary gender, and these superstitions make them deaf to the whirring and whirling all around. I am hereby devoting the rest of my life to nurturing connections across and beyond the territorial.

What I want
I don't want friends. I want fellow militants.
I don't want relationships. I want intensities.
I don't want art. I want magic.
I don't want money. I want power-with.
I don't want fulfillment. I want emptying.
I don't want a community. I want a fairy lair.
I don't want family. I want a post-capitalist cell.
I don't want connections. I want encounters.
I don't want comfort and security. I want boundaries.
I don't want guidance. I want confusion.
I don't want answers. I want mysteries.
I don't want challenges. I want to challenge.
I don't want creation. I want failure.
I don't want deals. I want gifts.
I don't want future. I want now.
I don't want sex. I want perversity.
I don't want privacy. I want maturity.
I don't want sustainability. I want system collapse.
I don't want harmony. I want wrath.
I don't want accountability. I want mutual care.
I don't want authenticity. I want beauty.
Wie die Welt

Wie die Welt vergeht

Gestern gab es noch Äpfel

Kreaturen wachsen in Tälern heran,

ich kann sie hören

Die Täler schließen nicht mehr



Go ahead and read some of these texts that have accumulated in the recent years. Or skip to the pictures. Since I'm usually undecided, I leave you the choice whether you want to go chronologically, thematically or associatively. As I love arbitrary-but-insistent schemes of classification, I came up with a trifecta of themes that can be found in the stuff I was concerned with, ca. 2011-19. These are:

What follows now may not be up to date, but then, the internet is mostly a trace of memory, a dumpyard of unfinished and half-connected bites. Enjoy, my heart, and let me know when you need something!

end of images

What is left to do if all new images are doomed to turn out as replicas of previous images? If everything you see just tells the same old myth again?

This is where I found myself around 2013, and looking back today, I can discern three approaches I would try. First, dreaming into the figures of abandoned spaces, and taking a site as myth container. Voids filled with imaginary societies and the peculiar became self-evident. I sense the traction of alternative myths.

Second, to empty the situation of all signs, to dance without knowledge, to let my belly guide. In small groups, exploration of our machine pleasures, untainted from hypertrophic subjectivity, would reopen our attention to materiality and mutuality, and enable encounter: as an unconditional gift. We let ourselves fall into figures from a world without violence.

Third, where is the knowledge of that world? Which economy is without violence? What language will post-patriarchy speak? Reading D.A. Haraway’s cyborg manifesto and Silvia Federici’s economy-history of body inscriptions as scores, in several collaborative projects I put together a toolbox of rituals, narratives and practices that may help us dance cyborgs' liminal spaces into our realities: dancing economy.

FlupCV

2024 Presenting the Shell at p4p unconference and pa-f summer university, more digital commons projects with eco:bytes; more collaborations and beautiful travels and generosity.

2023 Experimental naked limit jam; several open Shell workshops and a celebration of grief; producing a dance piece with Alina Belyagina; volunteering for an eco-anarchist server collective frontend

December 2022 Residency in Kempten with Katya Volkova and Alina Belyagina.

2022 Preparations for future congresses in Bologna and London; more Shell cooperations with activists such as Michelle Zhang and Maya Cohen; also creating movingAcrossThresholds.com and designing the related newsletter with Renae Shadler

Jul-Aug 2021 First International Congress on Shells, in the Garden.

2021 connecting with fellow curators in the Young Curators' Academy.

since 2021 re-visiting cyberfeminist writing and starting the SHELL process with some comrades around the world.

Aug 2020 undressing: experiment with audience and cops in public space, at Alexanderplatz, Berlin.

Sep 27, 2019 first installment of «material memory», practicing a non-symbolic body language.

Oct-Apr, 2018-19 living in Buenos Aires, collaborating with local dancers on «genet.space» and «mud body».

Jul 17, 2018 graduation performance at UdK Berlin, with «solo for my body»; received Meisterschüler degree in fine arts.

Mar-Sep, 2018 facilitating four small residencies (with Pauline Payen, Dorota Michalak, Evgenia Chetkovka and others) to dive into economies of space and coexistence with material, as material. Ongoing project with excursions into places.

Feb-Jun, 2018 organizing regular dance improvisation sessions on «material cyborgism», my dance practice for liminal bodies in liminal spaces, inspired by Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto and contemporary political witchcraft.

Sep-Dec, 2017 initiating project «allegory of economy»; Allegory as model for understanding and unlearning economic dispositifs.

Mar-Dec, 2017 «future witchcraft», a collaboration with Josephine Witt, Judith Förster and Pia Achterkamp; permanent performance lab in Aarhus, a show at Volksbühne, a «framing ritual» workshop and experiment on body-and-frame awareness; final workshop in the artists' space betOnest.

2017 working as performer for Alexandra Pirici, Rebecca Goyette and others; studying critique of frames and spaces around performance and body art.

2016 initiation of the network compagnie sorcellerie and research on the inscription of witch-hunts in the body; formulation of a gift economy («gift economy network», or genet.space).

2015-18 learning to dance; attending classes with Alice Chauchat, Benoît Lechambre, Keith Hennessey, Isabelle Schad and others; several collaborations with SODA and MA students.

2014-15 project group «sociétés in the city without environs» on urbanism and self-⁠indulgence; giving regular workshops in public spaces; exposition «disconnected spaces» in Berlin and Tehran.

2014 project group «strange movements» to explore motion, mechanisms and encounters in a fictional space.

2013-18 study fine arts and performance art at UdK Berlin; ever-recurring themes of ephemeral spaces that invite utopia; new name: Flupsi.

2010-15 co-creating several feature films (camera, scenography, costumes, postproduction).

2010 founding the noncommercial filmmaking collective Filmgeschichte.

2009-12 film studies at FU Berlin; participating in various political street theatre groups.

2008-9 working at Armes Theater Chemnitz (material theater / children’s theatre).

1999-2008 switching school to a rural, violent village; later: robotics, many theater and design projects.

1988-96 born and grown up in Frankfurt (Main).

process companionship

Since dance became my life, I am accompanying performance and dance projects. As a process companion, I help with writing, critique, framing, and creative decisions, contribute my experience with collaborative work, and propose fruitful approaches to develop artistic material.

Contact me if you have a process going and need an outside ear/eye/heart! I’m usually available for a spontaneous, free coffee.

price structure: My hourly price is 0.1% of your private property. If you have negative capital (debt), I will pay you. Sometimes I can offer free service, just ask. I'm also more than happy to share with you our means of production, e.g. camera, computer, knowledge, servers, bodies, taste.

And this is what I can offer you:

Pauline Payen

Ready Mad, Berlin, 2018-19.

Grantwriting; research; translation; assistant of production.

This buffonesque play has been in development for several months. I helped Pauline writing texts and applications and flesh out the presentation of her artistic approaches. Additionally, I translated the a final grant application from English to German, thereby reevaluating and sharpening several key concepts.

Deva Schubert & Juan Felipe Amaya Gonzalez

Grand Opening: Ein Euphemismus, Berlin, May-Jun 2019.

Concept and Grant writing; support in the early stages of creation; research on materials.

While this essay on metamodernity (a contemporary language that reappropriates postmodern forms for affective and romantic storytelling) never came to realization, its development proved fruitful to rebase and frame Deva’s practices, and to shine light on the material that Juan and Deva are working on in their current and upcoming projects.

Eleni Danesi

Walling Practice; Molding the Void, Berlin, Sep 2018—May 2019.

Research, dance and videography.

Towards a series of workshops, Eleni researched how to dance the negative and ‘in-between’ spaces, both inside and outside our bodies, and how bodies form a collective sculpture of these voids. She invited me to bring my camera, my body and my playfulness, and we investigated the voids of Veolodrom (Berlin).

Mmakgosi Kgabi

The Shape of Emotion, Berlin, Nov 2018.

Mentoring (via HZT Berlin); stage and projection models; dome structures.

In preparation of her graduation performance, Mmakgosi approached me with the idea of projecting her mouth into the inside of a giant dome. We recycled cardboard and researched spherical projection. While the dome never made it on stage, our collaboration reaffirmed and informed the artist’s approach of an accessible, i.e. nonexclusionary production.

Akseli Aittomäki

Actors of production, Berlin, Dec 2017.

https://vimeo.com/207170296

Documentation and cinematography; stage projections.

For his piece on the absurdity of economics in the light of the so-called debt crisis, Akseli devised a unique stage design. Life-size dancers are crawling up and down a giant number-board, seemingly defying gravity and the linearity of time. I was happy to realize this idea with my lighting, recording, dewarping and projecting tecniques. Furthermore, I documented the whole process and contributed to the trailer video.

Paula Zacharias, projects on CI and Alexander technique. Buenos Aires, Verano 2018/19.

Videography and production, framing and critique.

Josephine Witt, Ein bisschen Julia und Romeo. Berlin, Sep 2018.

Video documentation.

Stephanie Hanna, Die Weisen (interactive sculpture). Jun 2017.

Translating an interactive audio-sculpture into the virtual realm.

Visit Stephanie's app.

Elisabeth Wood and her Gray Voice Ensemble, The Prayer for Community. Berlin, Summer 2017.

Camera operation.

Watch the video.

Caroline Kühner, folifoli (performance). Berlin, Dec 2016.

Video documentation.

Watch the video.

Alon Stoler (Trombone), pieces from Leopold Mozart and Luciano Berio. Berlin, Apr 2016.

Multichannel video with synchronous sound.

Asaf Hameiri, Franny and Zooey (theater play). Berlin, Jun 2016.

Lights, stage design, video documentation.

Guiselt Thaiz, Trash Life (animated still life from trash found in the ocean). Berlin, Jan 2016.

Lights, videography, post-production.

Lisa Müller-Trede, crash (performance with live video). Berlin, Mar 2016.

Video documentation.

Upcoming actions:

Fantastic Figures of the Shellscapes

Serial Filmmaking in nature

The Shellscapes lie at the edge of our imagination. Let's travel there together, let's play with the fantastic beings living there.

Share your practices of embodied imagination: dance, acting, singing, poetry, crafts. We collaborate without barriers or hierarchies.

We discover the figures and their world, build oversize masks, and produce and publish a tiny episode each day.

We go to Paschenfeld together and put up our tents in the forest. Sauna, showers and dance room are open to us at Kesselberg next door.

Magic Hat: If you have no €€, then everything is for free. Else put some into the hat. Remaining money is for the Kesselberg community.

Contact me for an individual call/meeting

All participants gather in Berlin and prepare

A week in nature, one weird video every day

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Flupsi Upsi (@flupsiupsi)

Recent actions:

Agency of Sadness (I & II) All material on tiny.cc/sadness

In the two Sadness celebrations in December '23, we created a cosy space for sharing grief and all sorts of emotions. With singing, rituals, food, sweatlodge, exercises, collective storytelling, consent.

Naked Limit Jam Find the invitation with all details here.

For Sunday, 29th January 2023, I invited you to join the naked limit jam from 9:30-13:00h, and explore other ways of encountering each other. More info in the invitation. The practice was open and free.
Click here to read the schedule and consensus

Thinking, Dancing, Imagining - with Shells!

On Saturday, 18th February 2023, I hosted a workshop at altes finanzamt where I will share my recent practices with Shells, and we can move with them and have fun and unknow lots of hegemonial knowledge thanks to how weird the Shell is! The practice was open and free.

Click here for more info on the Shells Workshop at altes

Workshop Schelldule

1.

Check-in circles (sound, gesture, gaze, word)

Limit Gaze Fishbowl

Consent and Boundaries.

Shaking

Warming up shells, bones, senses, names, floor by surprise, proximities and other companions,  voices in the body places,  inner chimera , becoming sand, becoming moss.

Fake Butoh

Practicing co-presence with the Shell.

Teatime & Wishing circle

2.

Assembling a collective toolbox

“Know-how-to-know-with”

Break

One of the following experiments:

“Case study”  
Boundaries we encounter in our activist practices

“Tableau Vivant”  
Growing a collective exoskeleton

“Switching the Shell”  Experimental body-replacement

Reflection & Documentation

3.

Open Stage

“Shell we?”

Closing circle & After care

Check out altes'insta here!
SHELL: "Where does your body encounter uncanny gaps, conflicts between adjacent codes? Such voids harbor amazing expanses which I call SHELL. Together we can inscribe defiant cyborg-corporealities on them."

Past actions:

material memory

I want to share and receive memories stored in the body, from body to body, not with spoken language in academic or social frames. I want to perceive my body and yours and our collective body as material, not as signifiers and tokens of oppressive and oppressed identities.

This language has no symbols. It is a precarious language of our precarity. It has no meaning other than our bodies and their encounter. I think, in the long term, that's how we can organize and become the Leafy Proletariat that Donna Haraway envisioned.

«material memory» is a practice based on the tiny movements and oscillating tensions that run through our bodies, shaped and modulated by the memories that inhabit our muscles, fascia, fat tissue.


We are now in the process of opening the archive we have been building since September 2019 and making it publicly accessible. Find updated info on the the material memory practice here.

cuerpo de barro

«mud body» started in Buenos Aires, in February 2019, with «Coro», a score that can be superimposed on any public space. As we were improvising in the parks and playgrounds of Buenos Aires, we found ourselves drawn to the wet earth, so we decided to embark on a 15-months journey into mud, mud-bodies, and the body-political imbrications of playing in this matrix.

tableau vivant

In tableaux vivants, ‘living images’, actors represent a concept through staging a scenic figure taken from a known text. It fell out of use amidst the onset of industrialization due to a somewhat ribald excess: a body is always more than what it supposedly marks. In particular, excessive pleasures may transcend narrative frames and bear yet-unwritten myths from the cyborg worlds. A gallery exhibition with the working title «tableau vivant» is afoot, based on my graduation work «solo for my body» (July 17, ‘18)

collection of ephemeral art

An ephemeral artwork is the product of artistic labour that ceases to exist some time after the labour. The relation between the art industry and ephemerality is peculiar as an ephemeral artwork is hard to commodify. Oral histories, documentation and theatrical reenactment are strategies to keep an ephemeral artwork's aura, i.e. its impact on the sphere of symbolic capital, and thereby retaining the principles of authorship and private property. Embodied memory functions as the medium by which a dance-work is preserved in such a way that it can be restaged. This makes the dancer's body literally a currency.

On the other hand, forgetting and unlearning, false memories, ageing and physical processes in the body transform the artwork. And when an artist is performing for the now, is not every reenactment and every memory a different artwork in a different context?

My collection of ephemeral artworks attempts to undo the aura and highlight the actual work, the labour that produces an ephemeral artwork. Read it as a contribution to an economy not based on conditional exchange and conventional evaluation but on the uncountable appreciation of lifetime and engagement.

The collection is currently being digitized. For inquiries, contact me and stay tuned until the documentation appears here.

performing economies

Economies of space underlie every choreography. Bodies serve as currency and token in economies of representation. And finally, art is a market in which I am a freelancer.

During the «sand residency» in July ‘18, Pauline, Dorota and me explored the mutualities that emerge within an improvised dance. Several workshops throughout June have produced a comprehensive codex of practices.

The collective research project «allegory of economy» (December ‘17, ongoing) aims to leverage allegory as a tool to understand and reassemble economies in relation to bodies, transactions and customs

«future witchcraft» (feb-dec ‘17) comprised of a residency with an open lab, several performances and rituals, workshops and a theatre play, all approaching the political struggles of early modern women in Europe that ended, as we all know, in mass gynocides. Can we, in our situation, join these witches’ emancipatory stategies of magic practice, ritual, and direct action, and eventually undo the historic establishment of female gender as economic marker?

Through the «framing ritual» (Jun 9, ‘17), I related the apparatus’ frame (such as central perspective) through spontaneous gestures and inscriptions (lines painted on skin) to inner foci, in an attempt to exclude conventional interprlay between these three layers. The awareness of five foci in the body which mold the appreciation of surroundings proved a useful ingredient for all successive practices.

Can dance crack codes of deprivation?

“This is the first discovery: that patriarchy is not a construction, an order or a structure, but an economy, for which women are the first and founding commodities”, Sadie Plant writes in her essay «On the matrix: cyberfeminist simulations». And then she quotes Luce Irigaray: In this economy, “Women, signs, commodities, and currency always pass from one man to another”; their existance being reduced to what it signifies: “the possibility of mediation. transaction, transition, transference”. And adds: “Women have served as his media and interfaces, muses and messengers, currenties and screens, interactions, operators, decoders, secretaries… they have been man’s go-betweens, the in-betweens, taking his message, bearing his children, and passing his genetic code.”

In retrospect, allegories and emblems of the early modern age are blatantly sexist, and nescessarily so as they were to depict interfaces of circulation as female-marked bodies. The project of gendering the symbolic realm, a foundational effort of modern patriarchy, has, despite resistance from women, been successful, and continues to inform image production in the contemporary fields. And, in a not-⁠so-⁠ironic reappropriation, “Twentieth-century scientists call on this earlier visual technology for insisting on a specific kind of reality, which readily makes today’s observers forget the conditions, apparatuses and histories of its production. Especially in computer an information sciences and in biotechnology and biomedicine, representations of late twentieth century technosciences make liberal use of iconic exemplars of early modern European art/humanism/technology. Current images of technoscience quote, point to, and otherwise evoke a small, conventional, potent stock of Renaissance visual analogues, which provide a legitimate lineage and origin story for technical revolutions at the end of the Second Christian Millenium”, as Donna J. Haraway describes in her «Virtual Speculum». Deeper motivations may have stayed the same for 500 years as the extended-shelf-life visual apparatus canonized in the Renaissance still, in distinct ways, serves the production and reproduction of gender.

The visible spill of early modern emblems into cyber-⁠science throughout the 90s has inspired me to revisit contemporary body representation through the lens of Allegory. I discovered this word in many critical texts on 20th century feminist performance art as well as on early modern construction of gender, and despite its demise in the 19th century, Walter Benjamin’s seminal essay on Allegory seems to have spurred a slow but lasting reassessment of this concept throughout late modernity right into post modernism. Allegory, with its ternary structure and its figure’s superfluity, helps uncover myths that contemporary symbols would keep implied.

Economy is the other side of the model I work with, and it appears in three guises. First, as the circulation mediated by the figure-as-sign. Rebecca Schneider, in «The Explicit body», asserts that female-marked bodies in capitalism serve as “allegory for commodity circulation”, and to form the ternary structure of allegory, the text in this case is the ‘dreamscapes’ of ‘insatiable desire’, an economy itself, in which touch is impossible and gaze is infinite. Second, economy is instrinsic to my process of working, where resources, transactions and symbolic evaluation determine what I can produce. And third, the volatile space I summon through performance/dance is itself structured by an economy of bodies-⁠as-⁠material, even before any score is noted.

Allegory is a model to scutinize and construct approaches to alterity, i.e. what T. W. Adorno called ‘mimesis’. The explication of code/myth as requisite allows for normative assessment. It allows me to create images without conceding my judgement to the seductive affirmativity of the symbol, and it potentially gives the Other a language.

genet.space

Can extended choreography inform software models? We research the bijection of category theory and dance as we are implementing a tool to generate accessible and non-competitive virtual spaces. An ongoing collaboration with Katherine Evans and Alejandro Karasik.

genet, the gift economy network, is a garden of knowledge. It is a virtual space in which each avatar (a group of users, an individual, or a bot) is invited to plant their compositions. Paths from one space to another are not generated by algorithms but by curatorial activity of the avatars, i.e. by invitation. Virtual spaces are the commons of the present and the future, and they may serve an invaluable role in facilitating the enormous logistical challenge of distributing goods for everyone, thereby replacing capitalist ways of structuring access.

Dancability makes software models tangible.

In its current form, the interface to genet allows avatars to compose and edit collaboratively. In contrast to any other content management system, it bases its ontologies on a language derived from dance improvisation practices. In fact, any program written in ambilang is an easy-to-grasp score for a dance improvisation jam.

In my experience, the hardest errors in computer programming arise once the implementors are no longer sure about what the program is actually doing, i.e. when they give up understanding of the model that their software realizes. In this case, dancing this model makes the software tangible again.

Allegory of Economy

Umbrella project over somatic, art-historic, and performative research and experiments. Since December '17.

In collaboration with numerous choreographers, facilitators and performers, we set to link our economic struggles as freelancers with a performative approach to economic systems, informed by the three occurances of economy in our practices as stated above.

Sand Residency

The overarching theme for the Moss and Sand practices (Summer '18) was: how to connect as material. Why? Well, while we are already cyborgs, we are isolated. We need to learn affinity to connect and to become the global Proletariat. Donna Haraway specifies this Proletariat as «leafy». I want to learn from moss and from sand how to connect! This is a radically different 'economy' than patriarchal capitalism.

Framing Ritual

The framing ritual was part of 2017's future witchcraft series of experiments (July, with 12 participants and 4 preparational workshops). My questions are: 1) can the 'framing' of the body through visible lines make our motivations more transparent? 2) How does this 'inscription' (Federici) relate to patriarchal inscriptions such as ableism, gender, skin color?

 

machine pleasures

In «tableaux vivants», ‘living images’, actors represent a concept through staging a scenic figure taken from a known text. It fell out of use amidst the onset of industrialization due to a somewhat ribald excess: a body is always more than what it supposedly marks. In particular, excessive pleasures may transcend narrative frames and bear yet-unwritten myths from the cyborg worlds. My graduation work «solo for my body» (July 17, ‘18) assaied the concept.

«machine skills» was a workshop performance I gave in several frames. Tackling D.A. Haraway’s enigmatic assurance that “intense pleasures” were to arise from “machine skills”, I created a garden for cyborgs, and invited the participants to embark on counterpoint singing, affirming they have the according skills.

The «cyborgism» practice was the result of my first interpretation of Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto as a choreographic score. In several workshops and jams, the guests explored the pleasurable implications of being a cyborg in a shared space.

How would a cyborg perceive and engage the material world? Sensations of touch and gravity guided the «moss residency» with dancer/artist Pauline Payen that comprised of somatic practice as well as felting interfaces, and talking about our economic situations.

An aspect of cyborgs’ spacial economy is how we perceive limits. In recurring «limit jams», the invitees explored resistance and presence through malleable, contracting and expanding boundaries with tools from meditation, contact improvisation and martial arts.

The touch of material became very visceral when rain was pouring during the participative installation of «river species», part of the «future witchcraft» series of events.

«my stillness with the garden», a technique for grounding and preceiving everything as material began to develop in early ‘16 within ritual retreats I organized on the basis of Starhawk’s emancipatory witchcraft writings.

Throughout summer ‘14, I met with three fellow artists to move like animals. We called ourselves the «crawling group». What started as a development process towards the production of a butoh-inspired performance, eventually became a deep dive into an alternative way of encounter, with both the environment and each other.

Tableau Vivant

River Species Ritual

Make a long river. create 3 or 4 shapes (Water Lily, bridge, Stone…). Go into the river, feel the current, take a shape until the current throws you off balance. Float until you find a new shape.

This participative installation was part of the 2018 annual exhibition at the HZT campus of UdK Berlin.

myth container

What I call myth container («Fabelcontainer», ‘12-⁠13) is a site-⁠as-⁠figure. Armed with the hieroglyphic fragments of an abandoned, or counterfeit discourse (they are always latent), we can enter this site-⁠as-⁠figure and practice the dislocation of our dance into a parallel world. Historical discourses depend on models of societies, and, in retrospect, evoke fascinating myths, stories within ideal societies. I stumble upon heterostopies, sites that are both what they are, i.e. material, and ideal, as if they were hosting imaginary parties of societies in a parallel world. This nourishing relation is mutual; the choice of a site juxtaposed with an abandoned discourse produces an ideal society, and in many ways this production covertly mirrors allegorese (allegorical interpretation), where a vessel that is more than its function, the figure of the body as marked by gender and other attributes, invokes meaning through a conventional myth. Conclusively, just as we commonly dance to produce a volatile space, through latent narratives, the volatility of a space arouses a dance in return.

The expression ‘double in a parallel world’, liberally borrowed from Alice Chauchat, may grasp a grounding concept in several of my works. Those include the theatre script «K-⁠Gruppen» set in a looping 1972 election night shifting between ‘limits to growth’, radical agit-⁠prop, and cyberneticized popular front politics (‘13), as well as the «Luftschiff» and «Architecten» narratives (with related works since ‘13) which are both set in a never-⁠ending WWI in Europe in the years 1917 resp. 1999, and inspired by the heterotopicity I experiences in the film-⁠sets I had been working in. In the context of my Fine Arts studies occured the ‘democratic pleasury’ («ein demokratischer Lustgarten»; ‘16-⁠17) and the precursury 19th-⁠century «Akademie» world (‘12-⁠13), both inspired by Prussian garden architecture, which would later inform my practical approaches to an aesthetic of Tableau Vivant. The «Sociétés in the city without environs», finally, took the epinymous space not as figure but as rhetorical means to the end of informing a volatile space in which we’d find our ‘Other’, in Lacanian terms. Finding one’s double in these parallel societies nescessarily incurs a surrender towards fragments of a theory ethic-⁠esthetic, orphaned discourse looking for its debaters. Joy lies in connecting these pieces, mending the fissures, still failing a nod towards history’s actual tale, to create an iridescent mosaic. The latter’s mimetic like(li)ness and spatial fidelity to the architectural sediment (as in ‘take the hyroglyph for text’) carries a promise, a gesture of deference to normative reality effects, and this gesture is what I am trying to cultivate in all my projects.

«Luftschiff» and «Architecten», as well as the «Akademie» and «Lustgarten» take place in a fictional socialist Europe that has never embraced the steam engine. While the latter two are situated in a stratified but affluent late (and long) 19th century, the airship in «Luftschiff» crosses the Baltic sea in 1917, and hosts the author of a fiction, «Architecten», that projects WWI up int the year ‘99, including a slimy communications network based on biotech. The paradigmatic topos from which discourses evolve is that of neoclassical sculpture. The European discourses of rationality, humanism and misogyny find a lasting expression in gardens with statues, especially of the ‘pleasury’ variety. A 21st century European may find it hard to reconcile masculinist Enlightenment rhetoric with the tactile qualities of Baroque and Classicist sculpture, in which the human figure poses as some mythical emanation. The unease is caused by the ‘too-⁠much’ that Walter Benjamin ascribes to (Baroque) allegorical figure. Classical and neoclassical aesthetics petrify allegory to an unbearable extent during the ‘Sattelzeit’ (early 19th century). This conflict warrants a nonfactual scenario, in which the early modern forms around allegory would have been rescued into modernity. How would the first modern world war be staged through this hypothetical setup? Which art corresponds to a society that perpetually reperforms long-⁠forgotten antique myths? Very likely, we may develop a sensibility for the history of that world in our’s—after all, has the early modern age in Europe ever ended?

In «Sociétés in the city without environs» (‘14-15), the myth begins with the endlessness of a periphery (the site), and the self-⁠sufficiency of local secret societies (the hypothetical discourse), and then asks the site for fragments of a text. Which is the practice, or ritual, that a ‘city without environs’ lends itself to? The paradigmatic sprawl speaks of urban-⁠social indifference. How would the Sociétés ‘other’ each other? Through a compartmentalization: a history of labyrinthine entrenchment through an infinite, malleable concrete fabric, etc. Our performative explorations into the «Sociétés in the city without environs» started with bygone spaces rhetorically appropriated in order to summon the double of our troupe in another world, such as the (re)constructed labyrinth as synecdoche, or the abandoned Iraqui embassy building taken as metonym for the «bureaucracie».

The site-⁠as-⁠figure in an allegorical equation is a device I find myself using all the time. But similarly, the solutions to the equations are developing their own lives as inquiry devices: they illuminate the contingency of today’s specific patriarchy. As they intergrow, their shared world, a ‘parallel’, raises issues of our’s. This is the cradle in which my inquiries in ‘18—«allegory of economy», «my stillness with the garden», and the performances around «cyborgism» and «machine pleasures»—would form: they are all questions that other world poses us.

my stillness in the garden

Workshops and experiments in remote sites. ‘15-⁠18.

The basic assumption is that a certain stillness facilitates the appreciation of wind, moisture and presence towards a sense of mutuality: my stillness in the garden is my “with-⁠ness”.

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