New Alphabet School/ Systems, Organisms, Symbiosis

 

Method (Window Tree)  2021

Wood, gesso, acrylic , oil

105 x 56 x 3 cm

 

 

What could processes of self-organizing and collective making look like in the current landscape? In what ways might they affect public processes of social improvisation? How might such forms of “instituting” give rise to other forms of institutions? Inviting theoretical as well as practical approaches, this edition of the New Alphabet School studies “instituting” as an incomplete, fugitive and thus continuous process that constantly seeks out ways to interact with evolving strictures of the here and now. In their book Now (2017) the Invisible Committee argues that “in reality what we need are not institutions but forms… Everything that lives is only forms and interactions of forms”. How to begin to study this process, this evolving mutation and redefinition of forms as social improvisation, inseparable from emergent imaginings and imaginaries of a livable life?

To REGISTER FOR WORKSHOPS (free of charge but with registration only): https://www.hkw.de/en/programm/projekte/veranstaltung/p_163830.php

Preliminary Programme

Thursday 24 June 2021

Δωρεάν (απαραίτητη η δήλωση συμμετοχής) iris.asimakopoulou@goethe.de

7pm Opening @Goethe-Institut Athen (Omirou 14-16)
7.30pm Lecture by ruangrupa
8.15pm Lecture by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney
9.00pm Discussion

Friday 25 June 20213 

11am–2pm Online Workshop – fully booked
Feminist Instituting for Ecological Futures
With Berit Fischer

10am–1pm Workshop with registration only @Eight (Polytechneiou 8), Athens
To Listen Is to Preserve, the Transmission Yet to Come
with SAVVY Contemporary (Lynhan Balatbat-Helbock , Sagal Farah, Kelly Krugman)

3:30–7pm Online workshop – fully booked
Practices of Attunement
With Simon Fleury, Moritz Gansen, Sam Nightingale, Gala Rexer, Chara Stergiou, Aslı Uludağ

7.00-11.00 Public Program @ EIGHT (Polytechneiou 8)
-Opening of the group exhibition: Systems, Organisms, Symbiosis & performative Interventions

Arbit City Group, Nikos Arvanitis, Brackets [Pegy Zali, Panagiotis Lianos], Zoe Chatzigiannaki, Forensic Architecture, Eva Giannakopoulou, Andreas Ragnar Kassapis, Yorgia Karydi, Theodora Malamou, Angela Melitopoulos & Angela Anderson, Foteini Palpana, Leda Papakonstantinou, Kostas Roussakis, Myrto Stampoulou, Katerina Stefanidaki & Zafos Xagoraris, Eleni Tzirtzilaki, VASKOS (Vassilis Noulas & Kostas Tzimoulis), Paky Vlassopoulou, Kostis Velonis, Mary Zygouri

-Launch of the fanzines “Urban Ecologies”, “Alegal Fields”, “Entangled Resistances” and informal discussions
Fanzines with contributions by: Nikos Anastassopoulos, Dimitra Andritsou, Balkan Can Kino, Julia Chrissostalis, Eirini Efstathiou, Sofia Dona, Christos Giovannopoulos, Iris Lykourioti, Mariela Nestora, Murto Stampoulou, Constantina Theodorou, Steriani Tsintziloni, Hypatia Vourloumis, Christos Vrettos.

Saturday 26 June 2021

10am–1.30pm Workshop in Athens, with registration
Institutional Hacks for Reclaiming Urban Space
With Constantina Theodorou in collaboration with CoHab Athens and Guest: Dimitra Siatitsa

3–6pm Workshop online & in Athens, with registration
In Portuguese with English translation
Sex Workers Creating Institutions to End Institutionalized Violence
With Associação das Prostitutas de Minas Gerais (APROSMIG) and melke

8pm Discussion @ Tainiothiki (M. Alexandrou 136)
Instituting Otherwise
Gigi Argyropoulou, Filipa César, Bernd Scherer, Adania Shibli, Savvy Contemporary(Sagal Farah, Kelly Krugman, Lynhan Balatbat-Helbock)

9.30pm Film screening @Tainiothiki (M. Alexandrou 136)
Scola Di Tarafe
D: Filipa César and Sónia Vaz Borges, Guinea Bissau 2020, 30 min, Kreol with English subtitles
With an introduction by Jonas Tinius

EIGHT – Polytechniou 8, Athens
A critical institute for arts and politics

EIGHT is an autonomous self-organised space that operates without any funding or support from public or private resources.

TIMEFULNESS: A GEOLOGIST'S STORY. INTERVIEW WITH MARCIA BJORNERUD

Geologist Marcia Bjornerud’s latest book, Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World, can easily capture your inner philosopher, scientist, activist, and writer. When I received this book from Princeton University Press, I was immediately intrigued by the book’s cover. I’ve always been fascinated by ideas that necessarily mix up life’s ingredients into creative nature stories, and this book does just that. The choice of title and cover design (with its elegant series of mineralogy lithographs) offers clues to the layered Earth-story within: unwrapping the scientific ways of knowing our home’s deep planetary history; how we humans have come to discover these stories; how knowing them can re-educate us and thus drive us to become better citizens as part of the whole community of life

Bjornerud’s title, Timefulness, intrigued me as a grander understanding of our current temporal limitations. The subtitle, “Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World,” shares how looking into the deep time of Earth’s rocks breaks open an opportunity for us to become more aware of the damage we have done while concurrently offering hope. Bjornerud offers tips on re-imagining how we can comprehend our humanness on this planet by coming to re-know ourselves as Earthlings. Marcia Bjornerud’s Earth story elaborates this interweaving of a deep past with a deeper future and explores how we might expand our human sense of temporal directions in order to arrive at some meaningful place of resilience.

Anja Claus (AC): In Timefulness, you breathed great life into this magical story of rocks; that’s a big feat in our flashy, fast-paced, capitalist culture.

Marcia Bjornerud (MB): In most people’s minds rocks are dumb, mute, and dull perhaps. So I tried to bring them back to life and share the stories that they have to tell us.

AC: In a way, your book is a storytelling of Earth—Earth’s past but also its now. You say in your book, “The dramatic narratives of the geologic past are perfectly suited to the human appetite for storytelling.” Why do you think that? What is it that makes for such good storytelling?

MB: I’m positioning the idea of storytelling in contrast to the physical, pure sciences of physics and chemistry, which are of course important fields—and I am partly trained myself as a physicist. But what’s lacking in them is this sense of narrative arc. The triumph of physics is that it has distilled out these universal, timeless laws and rules. But if something is timeless, there’s no story to really tell. There’s no character development.

Earth as a whole system has had a very interesting series of personalities, in a sense. It’s had a childhood, an adolescence, a middle-age. It’s seen cataclysm and wonderful, bountiful times as well. So that’s what I mean. That there are stories in the natural world, and they match our appetite for seeing how things unfold. I think that’s the way to draw people in: Tell these Earth stories, develop some kind of relationship with the protagonist, and they’re hooked.  

https://www.humansandnature.org/timefulness-interview-with-marcia-bjornerud

Critical Zones. Observatories for Earthly Politics

Frédérique Aït-Touati, Alexandra Arènes, Axelle Gérgoire, The Soil Map (detail), Terra Forma, manuel de cartographies potentielles, 2019. © the artists.

By now everybody knows that there is an existential threat to our collective conditions of existence, but very few people have any idea of how to cope with this new Critical situation. It is very strange, but citizens of many developed countries are disoriented; it is as if they were asked to land on a new territory, an Earth that they have long ignored having reacted to their action. The hypothesis we want to propose is that the best way to map this new Earth is to see it as a network of Critical Zones, which constitute a thin skin a few kilometers thick that has been generated over eons of time by life forms. Those life forms had completely transformed the original geology of the Earth, before humanity transformed it yet again over the last centuries.

Over the years, scientists have installed multiple Observatories to study these Critical Zones and have made us aware of the complex composition and extreme fragility of this thin layer inside which all life forms, humans included, have to cohabit. They have renewed Earth science in a thousand ways and very much in a way that Alexander von Humboldt would have approved. Increasingly, scientists, artists, activists, politicians, and citizens are realizing that society is not centered solely on humanity, but it has to become Earthly again if it wishes to land without crashing. The modern project has been in flight, unconcerned by planetary limits. Suddenly, there is a general movement toward the soil and new attention to the ways people might inhabit it. Politics is no longer about humans making decisions on their own and for themselves only, but has become an immensely more complex undertaking. New forms of citizenship and new types of attention and care for life forms are required to generate a common ground.

The ZKM thus continues the comprehensive engagement and collaboration with local communities and institutions that was explored during the Open Codes exhibition (2017–2019), opening up a space for common action and discussion to recompose the world we live in: Over a period of five months ZKM will host an exhibition conceived as a scale model to simulate the spatial novelty of this new land as well as the diversity of relations between the life forms inhabiting it. It will serve as an Observatory of Critical Zones allowing visitors to familiarize themselves with the new situation. This special combination of thought experiment and exhibition was developed by Peter Weibel and Bruno Latour in their previous collaborations at ZKM. Iconoclash in 2002, Making Things Public in 2005, and Reset Modernity! in 2016 constitute the three former “thought exhibitions” (Gedankenausstellungen) that resulted from their intensive working relationship which now spans 20 years.

The ZKM website will soon publish the intense program accompanying the exhibition. We invite thinkers and scholars, activists and initiatives from all over the world to share and discuss ideas—please contact us at hellocriticalzones [​at​] zkm.de.

Critical Zones. Observatories for Earthly Politics
May 9–October 4, 2020 

ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe 
Karlsruhe

Curated by: Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel with Martin Guinard and Bettina Korintenberg

Curatorial Committee: Alexandra Arènes, Jérôme Gaillardet, Joseph Koerner, Daria Mille, and the Critical Zones Study Group at Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design (HfG)

Collaborating partners: Karlsruhe University of Art and Design (HfG), State Museum of Natural History Karlsruhe, Hydrogeochemical Environmental Observatory: The Strengbach Catchment

https://zkm.de/en

Reading Matter

Reading Matter 

 Hydrogeny by Evelina Domnitch & Dmitry Gelfand

Atoms and particles, rare earth minerals and hybrid composites, precious metals and microwaves, matter is commonly perceived as a passive commodity ought to be mobilised to become material. But when approached through a lens of human productivity, only certain facets of matter get recognised as valuable part of the market. In this event, Evelina Domnitch will address strategies for expanding the human perception of the material forces and agency of matter, from chemical and quantum to micro-gravitational. Through performative environments and phenomenological experiments that exceed the scope of applied science and challenge the disciplinary boundaries, Domnitch invites to rethink the nature of human relationship with matter.

Using material and the concept of conductivity as a lens, Füsun Türetken will explore a range of instances where conflict and capital can be read through matter, more precisely metal. Acknowledging ‘metal as conductor of all matter’, her work proposes a theory of the complicity of metals as quasi-agents that influence and register events, and addresses metal’s role in shaping the world of finance, belief systems, geopolitical relations, (digital) bodies, even the stratosphere and the ‘climate-engineered’ weapons. Türetken will screen her latest film ‘Alchemic Desire’, which examines the parallels between the practice of trading metals at the world’s biggest physical metals exchange, the London Metal Exchange (LME), deleuzo-guattarian models of psycho-social dynamics, and the practice of alchemy.

The evening is moderated by design critic and curator Alice Twemlow.

The event is part of ‘Matter’ series, exploring the relationship between design and matter. It imagines different forms of engagements with materiality, and inquires what it means to design with social and ecological sensitivity in the age of escalating environmental crisis. The event is organised in conjunction with the Neuhaus programme for more-than-human knowledge, opening at Het Nieuwe Instituut in May 2019.

https://thursdaynight.hetnieuweinstituut.nl/en/activities/reading-matter 

Ο Αναξίμανδρος στη Φουκουσίμα_ Γενεαλογίες της Τεχνικής

Στις απαρχές του τεχνικού πολιτισμού κάνει την εμφάνισή της η ανθρωπόκαινος εποχή. Η σύγχρονη ιδέα ότι η ανθρώπινη δραστηριότητα επηρεάζει και διαμορφώνει τη γεωλογική συγκρότηση και την εξέλιξη της γής, ενυπάρχει ήδη στα θραύσματα των προσωκρατικών κοσμολογιών. Στίς θεωρητικές υποθέσεις του Αναξίμανδρου ανευρίσκεται η σύλληψη του κόσμου ως τεχνικού κατασκευάσματος, όπως είναι μια κυλινδρική κολόνα ή ένας μεταλλευτικός κλίβανος.

Ο Αναξίμανδρος στη Φουκουσίμα είναι ταυτόχρονα εικαστική εγκατάσταση και ποιητικό δοκίμιο. Αφηγείται πρακτικές περιπλανήσεων, καταγραφών, ανοικτών αναγνώσεων των προσωκρατικών φιλοσόφων και γενεαλογήσεις εδαφικών ευρημάτων. Η επιτόπια περιπλάνηση γίνεται κάποτε ταξίδι στην οικουμενική γεωγραφία και ταξίδι μέχρι την σύγχρονη ιστορία, από τα παράλια της Μεσογείου ως τα παράλια της Ιαπωνίας. Οι αστοχήσαντες πυρηνικοί αντιδραστήρες της Φουκουσίμα είναι τεχνολογικές μεταμορφώσεις του αναξιμάνδρειου κλιβάνου.

Το βιβλίο απευθύνεται περισσότερο σε εκείνες και εκείνους που θέλουν να αδράξουν, μέσα από την “τοπο-στιγμή” τη γενικότητα, το βάθος της ιστορίας και την έκταση των “φυσικοπολιτισμών”. Να αδράξουν τη γενεαλογία της τεχνικής ως βίωμα και προσωπική ανάμνηση, μέσα στην βαρετή συνήθως αλλά καμιά φορά συναρπαστική διεθνή συζήτηση για τη γαία και το μέλλον του παρόντος της.

Παρουσίαση και συζήτηση για το έργο εν προόδω και το βιβλίο του Ζήση Κοτιώνη. Η εκδήλωση θα γίνει στο περιβάλλον μιας προσωρινής εγκατάστασης, η οποία συμπεριλαμβάνει προβολές βίντεο, αντικείμενα και επιτελεστική διάλεξη του συγγραφέα.

Ομιλητές:

Κωστής Βελώνης, Εικαστικός
Fabiano Micocci, Δρ. αρχιτέκτων, διδάσκων στο Πανεπιστήμιο Θεσσαλίας
Γιώργος Ξηροπαϊδης, Καθηγητής ΑΣΚΤ
Θεόφιλος Τραμπούλης, Ανεξάρτητος Επιμελητής
Γιώργος Τζιρτζιλάκης, Καθηγητής Πανεπιστημίου Θεσσαλίας
Εκ μέρους του Μουσείου Μπενάκη θα χαιρετήσει η Πολύνα Κοσμαδάκη, επιμελήτρια.

Επιτελεστική διάλεξη με απόσπασμα από το βιβλίο θα πραγματοποιήσουν ο συγγραφέας με τον Γιάννη Ισιδώρου, εικαστικό.

Η εκδήλωση θα πραγματοποιηθεί στο Αίθριο του Μουσείου Μπενάκη, Κεντρικό Κτήριο, στην οδό Κουμπάρη 1 και Βασιλίσσης Σοφίας, από τις 7:30 έως τις 9:30μμ, την Τρίτη 26 Φεβρουαρίου.

Picture Ecology: Art and Ecocriticism in Planetary Perspective

Picture Ecology: Art and Ecocriticism in Planetary Perspective

Growing awareness and concern about the pervasive and advancing scope of global environmental crises have in recent years prompted a new area of interdisciplinary research: the environmental humanities. Efforts have coalesced around the fields of anthropology, philosophy, history, literature, and now art history, as scholars seek to enlarge upon the traditional anthropocentrism of the humanities and embrace
a more expansive consideration of nature, ecology, and changing understandings of them. “Picture Ecology: Art and Ecocriticism in Planetary Perspective” engages this vital new trajectory, bringing together seventeen speakers from a variety of perspectives to explore environmental dimensions of artistic expression across a range of periods and cultures. The symposium is convened in connection with the exhibition Nature’s Nation: American Art and Environment, on view at the Princeton University Art Museum, which reinterprets American art over three centuries in relation to environmental history and evolving ecological perception. “Picture Ecology” extends the exhibition’s focus and approach to the visual cultures of diverse times and places, offering compelling ecocritical analysis of a broad spectrum of artists and objects. 

Organized by exhibition co-curator Karl Kusserow.

https://artmuseum.princeton.edu/calendar/2018-12/symposium-picturing-ecology-art-and-ecocriticism-planetary-perspective

http://artimage.princeton.edu/files/ProductionPdfs/2018_NN_Ecology.pdf