ITINERANT GEOGRAPHIES – A PROPOSITION FOR RADICAL UNBELONGING

I have invited a group of friends and colleagues to „unbelong together“, which resulted in the exchange of practices that make up this program. Following an intuition that gardens, as places of the „could have been“ and the „could be“, that is, of failure and hope, could be the lenses, the place, the set of practices, the impetus, and/or the systems through and by which to approach issues of belonging/unbelonging, away from state coercion and other identity politics and determinisms, I invited them to respond to this intuition with their own practices.

I hope this exchange will create resonances and conjunctions for new territories, though it might as well (miss)lead us to dead ends and false connections. Practices of „unbelonging together“, if they are to be radical, conceive of displacement as a place of curiosity and strive to create empathy that puts identity and even futurity at risk and, most importantly, help us conceive of other ways of being together, of making collective.

We invite you to be part of this experiment, take part in our practice propositions, and bring your own practices and your own ways of being or „unbelonging together“.

Diana De Fex
(Curator/project initiator)

Free Entry!

6th to 14th of April

No registration required, except for the open sessions. Please write to daydreamingthearchive[at]gmail.com at least one day before the open session you plan to attend.

PROGRAM:

Thursday 6th of April

14:00-17:00 Workshop: Word Compost
17:00-20:00 Workshop: Memory gardens and social gardening (preparatory session 1)
15:00-22:00: Interactive Object: The forest indoors: moss carpets for feet.

Friday 7th of April
14:00-17:00 Workshop: Embroidery
17:30- 21:00 Experimental cartographies (Workshop: Dreaming devices: a practice of
collective mapping from 17:30 to 20:00 + Participative installation: Cartography of the
disappeared cosmos from 20:00 to 21:00)
all day: Interactive Object: The forest indoors: moss carpets for feet
all day: Video installation: Cotton Flowers Exist
all day: Video installation: Making a fuss

Saturday 8th April
15:00-19:00 Experimental cartographies (Participative installation: Cartography of
the disappeared cosmos from 15:00 to 16:00 + Workshop: Dreaming devices: a practice
of collective mapping from 16:00 to 19:00)
20:00 Willow Trees Exist – a performance by Maria Tsitroudi
all day: Interactive Object: The forest indoors: moss carpets for feet
all day: Video installation: Cotton Flowers Exist
all day: Video installation: Making a fuss

Sunday 9th of April
13:00-14:00 & 14:00-15:00 Participative installation: Cartography of the disappeared
cosmos
14:00- 17:00 Open session (share your practice, show a work-in-progress)
17:00-20:00 workshop: Memory gardens and social gardening (preparatory session 2)
all day: Interactive Object: The forest indoors: moss carpets for feet
all day: Video installation: Cotton Flowers Exist
all day: Video installation: Making a fuss

Monday 10th of April
11:00-15:00 Workshop: Memory gardens and social gardening (planting session in the
garden)
11:00-12:00 & 12:00-13:00 Participative installation: Cartography of the disappeared
cosmos
10:00 -15:00: Interactive Object: The forest indoors: moss carpets for feet
all day: Video installation: Cotton Flowers Exist
all day: Video installation: Making a fuss

Tuesday 11th of April
17:00-20:00 Open session (share your practice, show a work-in-progress)
all day: Video installation: Cotton Flowers Exist
all day: Video installation: Making a fuss

Wednesday 12th of April
15:00- 18:00 Workshop: Dreaming devices: a practice of collective mapping
all day: immersive installation: The labyrinth of our existence
all day: Video installation: Cotton Flowers Exist
all day: Video installation: Making a fuss

Thursday 13th of April
all day: immersive installation: The labyrinth of our existence
all day: Video installation: Cotton Flowers Exist
all day: Video installation: Making a fuss

Friday 14th of April
all day: immersive installation: The labyrinth of our existence
all day: Video installation: Cotton Flowers Exist
all day: Video installation: Making a fuss

Full program with event descriptions in English and German here.

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_About the performers: 

Maria Tsitroudi works in the field of performing arts with a focus on Choreography and Performance since 2003. She studied Applied Theatre at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (2003), Dance at Rallou Manou, Athens (2011), and Choreography and Performance at JLU in Germany (2019). In her work she focuses on the relationships among identity, current events, and poetics, experimenting with how geographies can be expressed by the utopic medium of performance. Her works Willow trees exist, Cotton flowers exist, Apricot Trees exist or an Impossible walk, Don’t kill the messenger, Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility, Nekri Fysi, Icono-Stasis have been presented in Giessen, Frankfurt, Kassel, Darmstadt, Mannheim, Berlin and Athens. She lives and works in Giessen.

Nitish Jain (b.1989) is an immersive storyteller working across the mediums of architecture, performance art, and installations. He is the founder of Studio MoreThanThat, an artistic [agency/practice] that makes multi-sensory experiences. They invite audiences to sense rather than see their works by incorporating touch, taste, smell, listening, and seeing in different ways. Nitish trained as an architect and as a scenographer. He was born in India and he currently lives and works in Prague, Czechia.

Diana De Fex is a performer, choreographer, and art pedagogue using artistic methods (narrative storytelling, autoethnography, somatics) to explore human- environment relations and politics beyond identity and representation. They is interested in researching non-binary and non-linear logics and perceptions, freedom of speech and of dissent as well as restorative justice. She/they is currently completing an MA in Choreography and Performance at the Institute for Applied Theatre Studies-Giessen.

Olga Popova is a Ukrainian artist educated in film, theater, and acting and based in Germany. Her interest lies in the plasticity of the environment and its translation and transformation into the stage or other non-theatrical spaces. She is currently enrolled
in the MA  Applied Theater Studies program in Giessen with a specialization in Performing Arts Practice.

Christian Maturana describe themselves as a drop of water in the ocean.

Fabián Franco Márquez is a visual artist working in scenography and painting (murals, billboarding, and street art) as well as art pedagogy. He graduated from the University of Cluj-Napoca and currently lives and works in Leipzig.

Vincent Viala works as a musician and music educator in various formats, and in theatrical-performative contexts backstage. In addition to solo and band projects ranging from garage-punk to singer-songwriter, to experimental improvisation, Viala works on compositional experiments and fragments, which go in various directions of acoustic/time-based art. „Misappropriation“ of conventional instruments, or electronic and sample-based are preferred techniques here, which also come to bear especially in the musical accompaniment of performing art. Thereby he moves in the absurd, in experiment and noise, in improvisation, in melancholy and dissonance, as well as in the fragile, in the little, in repetition, in the atmospheric. Spontaneity, expressivity, freedom of means and material, and the unique capacity of sound to create emotional meaning are important themes in his work. Since 2017, Viala has been studying B.A. Music Education with minors in Musicology and Sociology at the JLU in Giessen.