How do we liberate the body from systems of representation?
What is left of us when the assemblage of images surrounding us disappears?
What can we become when desire is transformed into erotic power?
The documentation follows the residency of Masako Matsushita (Bando AiR 2024) through the lens of Campi Gravitazionali: the exchange between the projects took place on the weekend of the 26 and 27 of October, where the research of Masako was multiplied into a kaleidoscope of practices, each observing the ambiguous power dynamics between representations, identities and bodies. How does the media, oversaturated by signs and images, subjugate bodies to its iconography? How, in turn, is it possible to reverse these power relations?
The practices proposed by Masako were the “Museum of Personal Identities”, which invited the participants to unpack their backpacks and curate their personal belongings into an exposition and a collage-making with magazines, scissors and glue. The practices were translated into other practices that included transforming or abandoning the original materials. With that in mind, the documentation elongates the choreography of transmutations by assembling the materials and reflections from the weekend into a narration of the knowledge that emerged.
NOTE:
The text is a cut-up of the participant’s reflections that emerged during a collective brainstorming session with the created collage. All the images refer to the practices that we generated.
Il manifesto poetico della residenza artistica a scuola con le pratiche estetiche di Comunità dal progetto Eco del Mondo. Scrittocon gli studentidella sezione Scenografia e Design del Primo Liceo Artistico Statale Torino nel febbraio 2024, in una dimensione rituale, dove affioravano narrazioni collettive, rapsodie imperfette, memorie e immaginari che osservavano e testimoniavano il presente frantumato: litanie, elenchi, metafore, canti, nuovi sensi… Scarnificando la parola di tutte le sue ‘croste’ storiche e culturali, si tenta di riscrivere e risemantizzare un erratico, frantumato e discontinuo fraseggio poetico.
Che fare davanti allo spettacolo del mondo in frantumi? Come è potuto succedere? Ricostruire? Cosa può rinascere dalle macerie?
Queste domande sono al centro della creazione dal titolo “Eco del Mondo”, un lavoro sulla frammentazione delle identita’, a cura di Compagnia Tecnologia Filosofica (Fransesca Cinalli, Amalia Franco, Erica Pianalto, Paolo De Santis).
In the ambient of the On Mobilisation International Symposium, the School of Wish students Beatrice Sunny Brero, Tommaso Giachino, Elisabetta Lava, Alice Mariotti, Gabriele Totaro and Alessandra Vaccina celebrated the end of the Forever Young project. On this path, they were guided by the artists Francesca Cinalli, Paolo De Santis, Fabio Castello and Valentina Roselli to build an imaginary school based on their likes and desires. The teenagers took the adults back to school with an alternative lesson plan: one class immersed the public in play and imagination by inviting them to build ephemeral and soft landscapes, while another one opened the adults to an experience of tremble and vulnerability when dividing them into pairs and asking them to exercise losing themselves in each other’s eyes.
The poetic diagram above centers on materials from the second class. It has assembled the expectations and outcomes that were written by the audience before and after steeping in eye contact with their partners. With the expectations and outcomes facing each other on the paper as the adults faced each other during the exercise, the focus of the diagram intensifies on what unfolds in the middle, when after a few nervous smiles the partners relaxed into a shared experience: when embarrassment transformed into a sense of calm and discovery. The diagram can be read from left to right, right to left, diagonally, from down to up or the other way around, allowing the gaze to take a walk, similar to how the students made the drawings used here to emphasize the in-between space of two bodies: by practising walking on paper.
How could the transformation of vulnerability into bravery inspire an educational paradigm?
What do the needs that were made visible by the students’ imaginary lesson plan say about the current, normative school system?
How to cultivate trust instead of self-awareness in a classroom?
Expectations and outcomes written by the School of Wish audience on the 31st of May, drawings made by the School of Wish students during the workshops, data collected and arranged into a diagram by Kadri Sirel.
La metafora dell’acqua, con la molteplicità dei suoi volti, fa risuonare l’abisso oscuro della violenza coloniale e al contempo emergere le domande che possono aprirci al futuro.
Una volta scesi nel cuore dell’abisso, come desideriamo tras-formare ciò che vediamo?
Chi ha diritto all’archivio?
Chi decide chi entra e chi non entra nell’archivio?
Come il rapporto con l’archivio ci tocca?
Da punto di vista ci sentiamo implicati tra passato, presente, futuro?
Come mantenere il potere di scandalo di archivi latenti, di tracce, dei materiali, perché aprano altre possibilità?
Cosa può una istituzione culturale?
Vulnerabili
alle domande,
i corpi in movimento
radicano il sogno futuro,
nella mescolanza
nello sguardo molteplice
nel coraggio di tenere tra le mani
le proprie e altrui rovine.
Cosa raccontano?
I pezzi sparsi
i frammenti occultati,
i silenzi,
in un nuovo assemblaggio
possono creare una nuova narrazione?
Eugenia Coscarella
NOTE:
Questi video e la restituzione sono stati ispirati dal mio rituale mensile di preparazione e tintura con henné, dove le polveri tintorie si trasformano grazie alla mescolanza con l’acqua.
Il processo di preparazione, lavaggio e risciacquo sono stati il set di ripresa dei primi due video.
La documentazione di questi eventi del Festival d’inverno, arrivano ora, a lento rilascio, così come richiede il processo descritto.
When playing with the term shadow library, a concept often used to describe guerilla databases of contents that are otherwise not readily accessible, the out-of-the-shadow library claims the prominence of knowledge that is often obscured, stigmatised and pushed into the margins of cultural consciousness. Following Lavanderia a Vapore’s dramaturgical line from the Dark Matters Winter Festival, through the Spring Rolls Spring Festival and towards the On Mobilisation Symposium, the books and references proposed here, take the reader on a path in and out of the shadows: to dig in and immerse in the darkness and resurface seeing the present and the future through other lenses. Specially designed chapters guide the reader through an open-ended pathway, through themes of blackness, darkness, archives, temporalities, the body, desiring and mobilising in collective action. The library, co-curated by Nora Book&Coffee, calls to join in protest: in reading, pleasure and rest to discover the collective dimension of dreaming and to craft alternative visions for the present world.
The library is not finished. If you have books, articles and other references to recommend, send an email with your suggestions to documentazione@lavanderiaavapore.eu Thank you!!
absorb live feed from the marine ecosystem located below the Frying Pan Tower, 34 miles off Cape Fear, North Carolina,
allow the underwater sounds to accompany your reading.
Unlike most other underwater webcams, this one does not show the animals in captivity but in their natural habitat. It connects us to the marine ecosystem that the artist Valerie Tameu interacted with in her work Metabolo (2023), where the unique textures and movements of the ocean world were translated through machine learning into data that modified the soundtrack on which the artist created the performance, in Europe, in real-time. In her work, the human-machine interaction evoked a more spiritual layer, represented by the myth of Mami Wata, an aquatic divinity worshipped in West, Central and Southern Africa and in the Afro-American diaspora, halfway between a human and a fish, a hybrid and alien being:
The cyanotype prints and drawings are edited into videos and accompanied by text from Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Animals* by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. A mutant documentation creating fictional underwater scans and seabeds, calling to imagine those adapted to living deep in the ocean as well as the lives lost there: evolving throughout centuries into hybrid creatures to re-surface with knowledge about breathing in unbreathable circumstances.
The above proposes a multi-media ritual of it’s own that, through the movement of colors and symbols, seeks to give body to the imagination of Mami Wata, the half-fish half-woman aquatic goddess, kindred with sea mammals and amazing at not drowning.
As one of the winners of the Residenze Digitali 2024, Tameu will continue her cyber-magical ritual of animating the legend of Mami Wata. While remembering her residency in September 2023, the traces collected here are an archaeology of the future – a constellation of imaginations, technologies and memories that will possibly be re-awakened, studied and modified in November 2024, during Digital Residencies Week.
