TOWARDS PERMACULTURAL INSTITUTIONS: CURATING TRANSFORMATION
Earth Care: Grounding
1—2 December 2023

 

Language: English
Free Admission
Registration until 28 November: info@medienwerk-nrw.de
(No registration required for the lecture on Friday)

How can institutional practices lead to a grounding and rooting in land, place and community in times of climate breakdown and neoliberal devastation? What kind of practices are there to cultivate restorative care, inclusivity and hospitality towards humans and more-than-humans? How can institutions become custodians and act in reciprocity with their surroundings?

With:
Giulia Bellinetti, Head of Future Materials Lab, Jan Van Eyck, Maastricht
Biljana Ciric & Madeleine Collie, Study Pattern Collective
Paula Erstmann, artist & cook, Berlin
iSaAc Espinoza Hidrobo & Darya Myasnikova, maiskind, Cologne
Lucia Pietroiusti, Curator of Ecology, Serpentine, London

The event is part of a series of workshops TOWARDS PERMACULTURAL INSTITUTIONS: CURATING TRANSFORMATION on social and ecological transformation in art institutions. The focus is on the question of what role art institutions can play in urgent transformation processes towards ecologically just and decolonial societies and what first steps towards structural change could be. The workshops aim to transfer the content into your own institutional practice and offer the opportunity to analyze the institutional/individual status quo, outline visions and strategies and identify first steps for action. Following the summer seminar “Towards Permacultural Institutions: Exercises in Collective Thinking”, organized by the Stiftung Künstlerdorf Schöppingen in cooperation with CCA Temporary Gallery, the “Curating Transformation” series creates space to critically question contemporary institutional models. What could a permacultural (= socially and ecologically just) art institution look like?

Schedule:
Friday, 01.12.23
2—6 p.m.

Composting
With Giulia Bellinetti

Giulia Bellinetti will engage with the voices, experiences, questions that will emerge during the two days and offer a further layer of reflection on processes of regrounding as well as on the support structures and conditions needed to nurture them.

Somatic Impulses
With maiskind (iSaAc Espinoza Hidrobo & Darya Myasnikova)

Through somatic impulses and imagination, we embark upon celebrations of our body communities; urging us to acknowledge the intrinsic interconnectedness that pervades our existence. It serves as a reminder that we, as individuals, are far from being solitary entities; rather, we share a profound kinship with plenty of other life forms and temporal dimensions.

The Thousand Ideas Forum
With Lucia Pietroiusti

Drawing from her recent investigations into holistic, adaptive models for embedding environmental purpose into the fabric of a cultural institution, Lucia Pietroiusti facilitates a conversation about art's possible roles in the face of environmental breakdown, and invites participants to devise practical steps towards organisational transformation.

The session includes a conversation with Florencia Pochinki, sociologist and curator, about her research on regenerative museum practices and fieldwork at the Museo Jallpha Kalchakí in San Carlos, Salta Province, Argentina.

The Unanswerable Questions Forum
Reading and discussion with Lucia Pietroiusti

A reading session, discussion and imagination exercise centred around Vanessa Machado de Oliveira's publicatio, Hospicing Modernity, focusing on the relationship between palliative care, cultural institutions and the environment.

6 p.m.
Dinner
With Paula Erstmann

7:30 p.m.
The Sacred, the System and the Place of Shelter
Lecture by Lucia Pietroiusti

Reflecting on learnings from recent projects, curator Lucia Pietroiusti discusses the possible roles art, culture and cultural organisations can play towards environmental justice and balance in a time of ends of worlds, beginnings of worlds and profound transformation. Inspired by the work of educator and writer Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, the lecture will also consider questions connected to mourning, sheltering, facing and naming (or not).

Saturday, 02.12.23

10 a.m.—6 p.m.
Somatic Impulses
With maiskind (iSaAc Espinoza Hidrobo & Darya Myasnikova)

Attuning Metabolisms
Workshop with Study Pattern Collective

Study Pattern Collective will lead a workshop exploring exercises of attuning and connecting to metabolic life that enervates the fields of cultural practice. Our workshop focuses on individual and collective metabolisms to learn about how we can face the shit that we make as a product of modernity. Focussing specifically on metabolism both as a literal and affective metaphor makes visible the deeper relations between ecosystems and our daily working rituals. We will look for the cracks within which more than human life is possible. We consider instituting practices that inform relations of grounded custodianship, to rethink how institutions could participate in the flourishing of more than human worlds within intergenerational situated ecologies.

Composting (Wrapping Up)
With Giulia Bellinetti

6 p.m.
Dinner
With Paula Erstmann

Giulia Bellinetti is a researcher and cultural programmer, interested in the power/knowledge relays and political ecologies of contemporary art institutions. She runs the Nature Research Department and the Future Materials programme at the Jan van Eyck Academie, in The Netherlands. Her institutional practice is supported by a theoretical investigation on the epistemic function of art institutions in the age of ecological crisis, pursued in the form of a PhD project at the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis (UvA). Previously Giulia was coordinator of the Production Department at the M HKA, Museum of Contemporary art of Antwerp, Belgium.

maiskind (iSaAc Espinoza Hidrobo & Darya Myasnikova) "it is not about you, it is about all of us". maiskind is embodies a dynamic queer community that since 2020 unites dancers, musicians and art aficionados in a powerful movement to reanimate the streets of Cologne. With their innovative, transdisciplinary rituals, they channel the spirit of celebration and unity weaving a tapestry that embraces the vibrant spectrum of human multiplicity. Hand in Hand with dedicated partners like SOFRA Queer Migrans, Baraka - Rubico and InterFemme they work to empower and make visible the 2SLGBTQIA+ Migrant community in the city.

iSaAc Espinoza Hidrobo is an Ecuadorian performerx, choreographer and violinist based in Germany. Her Works deals with transdisciplinary constellations and experimental quests of real- time composition, decoloniality, queerness and ritualism empowering local activism. She is the artistic director and funder of the "maiskind" community in Cologne. Her Solo and collaborative works have been featured in prestigious locations throughout Europe & the Abya-Yala - Americas. 

Darya Myasnikova (she/her) is a Siberian dancer, mover and performer based in Cologne. She dances a lot and works with the poetry of movement. Among the languages she speaks are dance, playfulness and individual expressions. Her interests lie in instant composition, interdisciplinary collaborations, performance and accessibility of dance.

Study Pattern Collective is a group of cultural workers Biljana Ciric, Madeleine Collie and Susie Quillinan who share an interest in imagining and practising different modes of instituting within the arts. Since 2021 our gatherings have been composed of invisible and visible encounters as a need to learn with each other, and from peers in intersecting fields.This workshop will draw from the first program of discussions Pedagogies of Transition and will be led by Biljana and Madeleine.

Biljana Ciric is an interdependent curator. Ciric was also curator of the Pavilion of Republic of Serbia at the 59th Venice Biennale, presenting Walking with Water, a solo exhibition of Vladimir Nikolic. In 2018 she established the educational platform What Could/Should Curating Do? She was nominated for the ICI Independent Vision Curatorial Award (2012). Currently she is developing a long-term project reflecting on China’s Belt and Road Initiative titled As you go . . . the roads under your feet, towards a new future. She collaborates with Study Pattern collective on the ongoing enquiry into Pedagogies of Transition and since 2021 she has been teaching courses at China Academy of Art, International Master of Fine Arts Program.

Madeleine Collie is a writer, researcher, and curator with a focus on plants, poetics, and living relations in the fields of art and culture. She established the Food Art Research Network (FAR) in 2020 as an international platform for slow practice in which artists trace connections between contexts through research that connects ecosystem change to broader social and political forces. She collaborates with Study Pattern collective on the ongoing enquiry into Pedagogies of Transition and she teaches and publishes regularly on contemporary art practices.

Lucia Pietroiusti is Head of Ecologies at Serpentine, London. As a curator, Pietroiusti works at the intersection of art, ecology and systems, often outside of the exhibition space. She was the founder of Serpentine’s General Ecology project (2018-ongoing) and the curator of the Golden-Lion winning opera-performance Sun & Sea by Rugilė Barzdžiukaitė, Vaiva Grainytė & Lina Lapelytė (2019 Venice Biennale and 2020-25 international tour). Current and recent projects include the research and festival series, The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish (with Filipa Ramos, since 2018); Persones Persons, the 8th Biennale Gherdeïna (May-September 2022, with Filipa Ramos) and Back to Earth (Serpentine, 2020-ongoing). Pietroiusti teaches and lectures in universities internationally, and leads the Interior Ecologies course at HEAD Geneva’s MA Interior Architecture (2023-24). Recent and forthcoming publications include The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish (with Filipa Ramos, forthcoming), More-than-Human (with Andrés Jaque and Marina Otero Verzier, 2020); Microhabitable (with Fernando García-Dory, 2020-22) and PLANTSEX (2019). 

Paula Erstmann is an artist who primarily works with food as an artistic medium. Her performances, menus and food installations negotiate the social context of the food used and are artistic research works between art and everyday life. The Berlin-based artist's culinary work opens up both sensual and social spaces. With her work and the idea of eating together, she wants to break down distances and create space for dialogue. What fate does the food we eat tell us? The dishes, the textiles, the table from which we eat? What collective memories does food evoke in us?

Curated by Aneta Rostkowska and Nada Rosa Schroer

The workshop series is a cooperation between Office medienwerk.nrw and the Temporary Gallery. Center for Contemporary Art in Cologne. The work of the Office medienwerk.nrw is financed by the Ministry of Culture and Science of North Rhine-Westphalia, on whose behalf it organizes coordination, professionalization and consulting in the field of media art. The Office medienwerk.nrw is located at HMKV Hartware MedienKunstVerein, Dortmund.

Image:
Dirt Writing, workshop led by Madeleine Collie for WCSCD? (What Could Should Curating Do?), in Goran Gorevnica, Serbia.