Alternative Futures (3rd panel)

Diana Lelonek (film screening without the artist present)
Maja Smrekar  
Ida Hiršenfelder 
Sophie Allerding
moderated by Iva Kovač

In this session, we will look closer into different artistic practices engaged with issues of ecology, feminism, and care by presenting (segments of) artworks within a conference format. Introducing artistic strategies such as Live Action Role-Play, collective performance, film, video, and sound, we will learn about speculative future scenarios in works by Diana Lelonek and Sophie Allerding. We will encounter posthuman feminist perspectives in Maja Smrekar's collective performance, as well as existing coping mechanisms employed in the framework of subsistence economies and the legal frameworks that enabled exploitation in the first place in the films of Marwa Arsanios. We will also engage in an attentive listening session with the Ida Hirsenfelder sound works.

After the panel, there will be a screening of films by Marwa Arsanios, where we will become acquainted with existing mechanisms of subsistence economies and legal frameworks that enable the exploitation of nature and labor.

Diana Lelonek: Forms of Survival

Film screening

The video Forms of Survival was inspired by the numerous emails Lelonek received from various cultural institutions, festival and biennial organizers about exhibitions and events cancelled because of the pandemic. The short stories based on them are visions of the potential future of art institutions in the face of climate, economy, democracy, and other crises. In the film, these institutions begin to take on various new roles in an attempt to adapt to the present-day conditions or to face future challenges. The exhibition spaces are transformed into housing for climate refugees, gallery workers re-naturalize rivers in a community effort, beehives are erected on the roof of the museum, and the surrounding areas are transformed into agrarian fields. The only thing that is no longer present in the once white and now decaying museum spaces are artworks. The work was created as part of the “micro-procurement” series carried out by Jasna 10: Political Critique’s Club in Warsaw (part of the Jasna Centre programme financed by the Capital City of Warsaw) and as part of an artistic residency at the Arsenał Gallery in Białystok in July 2020.

Maja Smrekar: Manifesto on mOtherness; a participatory public reading

Performative collective reading of the manifesto

The participatory performance will take place in the form of a reading of Maja Smrekar’s Manifesto on mOtherness together with the public. The manifesto derives from the artist’s Hybrid Family (2016) project. In this durational performance, she nurtured a puppy. By submitting herself to two and a half months of physiological training, she achieved milk production in her breasts. The artist refers to this process as the process of becoming a mOther. Hybrid Family was an existentialist feminist project that sparked a discussion on identity and difference. It was also a biopolitical statement through an intervention with the investment of the artist’s body. Its purpose was to regain the position of power, that is to perform an act of resistance to bio-power on and through bodies. Its display served as a paraphrase that corresponded to the dichotomy of a subject being merely their body’s inhabitant instead of being the owner of their own body. Through the collective reading of her manifesto, Smrekar addresses women of all genders to keep surviving, not only through their reproductive role, but, most importantly, through the homeostatic role of their bodily processes. She therefore calls for a start and/or (continuity) of breastfeeding!
 

Ida Hiršenfelder (beepblip): Wind Will Blow Us Away

Lecture performance

In my small night, ah
the wind has a date with the leaves of the trees
in my small night, there is the agony of destruction
listen
do you hear the darkness blowing?
I look upon this bliss as a stranger
I am addicted to my despair.
listen
do you hear the darkness blowing?
— Forugh Farrokhzad, The Wind Will Take Us

The wind has no sound of its own. Instead, it produces sound in contact with other organisms. The wrinkled surface of the planet is the wind’s vocal cord. It catches in taut strings, roars in tubes, whistles through cracks in edifices, blows away tiny grains of sand and rustles on soft surfaces. Every atom in the atmosphere changes its place. 

The lecture performance is based on Hiršenfelder’s “Wind Will Blow Us Away” (2022–3) multichannel composition following in the footsteps of Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad. It marks the trail of Luce Irigaray, whose respiratory philosophy looked from the West to the East with an innocent gaze of deep ecology in the hope that it would outgrow dualities and reconcile with the world as a whole. It also paves the way with the Sounding Bodies by Ann J. Cahill and Christine Hamel who instead proposed respiratory responsibility, which calls for an obligation to be socially and politically accountable for the air that moves through all our bodies.

Sophie Allerding (she/they): LARP as a Tool for Environmental Storytelling

Experience based presentation 

LARP (Live Action Role-Play) is a participatory medium in which players enter a fictional scenario and collaboratively weave narratives. While the scenario might be fictional, the emotions experienced in it are real, making it an ideal medium for experience-based exploration and engagement with topics addressed in the play. Allerding will give a short introduction into LARP as a tool for environmental storytelling by showcasing two examples from their practice: The Webconference Imagining the Arachnopocene, an online role-play experience for collectively imagining a non-human-centred world, and Project Exogen, an urban role-playing game fostering critical engagement with smart city technology.