reboot: responsiveness
Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne and Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst, Aachen jointly announce the launch of reboot: – a collaborative, multi-cycle, anti-racist, and queer-feminist dialogue encompassing performance and research based practices.
The first cycle, reboot: responsiveness, departs from desires, anxieties and hopes amplified by the current pandemic. Hosted in two different yet aligned sites that mutually interact with one another as much as they support, complement and challenge each other, reboot: responsiveness provides infrastructures for provisional stagings, rehearsals, processual choreographies, and encounters around notions of presence, intimacy, care, and responsibility. reboot: responsiveness develops activities together with a core collective comprised of Alex Baczynski-Jenkins, Gürsoy Doğtaş, Klara Lidén, Ewa Majewska, Rory Pilgrim, Cally Spooner, and Mariana Valencia. Embracing diverse formats, and working together with further invited guests and audiences in Cologne and Düsseldorf, these artists and thinkers will explore ways to dedicate time to one another and to perform in time, to develop alternative vocabularies, archives, gestures, movements, and translations, to share and transmit resources and ideas, and to find modes of resistance and togetherness in response to the current situation we are living in.
reboot:
Conceived by Eva Birkenstock, Nikola Dietrich, and Viktor Neumann
Core Collective comprised of Alex Baczynski-Jenkins, Gürsoy Doğtaş, Klara Lidén, Ewa Majewska, Rory Pilgrim, Cally Spooner, and Mariana Valencia.
Graphic design by Sean Yendrys
reboot: responsiveness presents
Asynchronicity. A symposium-like gathering, hosted by Cally Spooner.
With Paul Abbott & Will Holder, Alex Baczynski-Jenkins, Taina Bucher, Elizabeth Freeman, Hendrik Folkerts, Irena Haiduk, Dana Luciano, Martina Roß-Nickoll, Cally Spooner with Sanna Blennow and Melody Giron, Mark von Schlegell, Jesper List Thomsen, Jackie Wang and films by Pierre Bal-Blanc and Frances Scholz.
Saturday, May 7, 2022, 8.59 am – 6.30 pm
Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne
Free Admission, no registration required
Sunday, May 8, 2022, 11 am – 8 pm
Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst, Aachen
Free Admission, no registration required
All contributions are in English. In Aachen, simultaneous translation into German is provided.
Please find the detailed program here as [pdf]
Asynchronicity is a symposium-like gathering of choreographies, lectures, sounds, screenings, and discussions assembled by artist Cally Spooner with reboot: responsiveness at Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne and Ludwig Forum, Aachen. Asynchronicity takes as its backdrop the neoliberal paradigm of an always measurable performance. In this climate, performance manifests at once as a regime of disciplinary power and a condition of everyday life, in which subjects constantly quantify, manage and stratify themselves until the social imagination and desire is deadened. Asynchronicity probes how such draining quests can be subverted by collectively fostering a resistance towards chrononormativity. Coined in 2010 by seminal scholar Elizabeth Freeman (one of the gathering’s contributors), the term chrononormativity describes the prevalent use of time to organize human bodies toward maximum productivity.
Asynchronicity responds by unraveling the resistant potentials of becoming or remaining asynchronous. Over the course of two days, collaborators–artists, performers, musicians, theoreticians, dancers, curators and designers–are invited to unfold a diverse set of propositions for alternative, fugitive temporalities, affects and bodily practices that bend and subvert familiarity and which deliberately, or naturally, remain out of sync. Jointly introducing the notion of asynchronicity as an alternative, non-sequential mode of texts, movements, encounters and thoughts will collide across the partnering institutions in Aachen and Cologne. Asynchronicity is part of Cally Spooner’s long term research project Deadtime (since 2018) in which she finds and handles temporal structures beyond the clock-time standardizations that force labor, bodies, nervous systems, and digital technologies into a completely metric-orientated future. The gathering is conceived as the first of five assemblies hosted by the artist, that challenge the chrononormative order and the performance imperative implied.
While you may enter the symposium-like gathering in your own time– any moment or time span of preference–we suggest you experience its choreography in its entirety and in both cities, if possible.
Coronaseminar – reboot: edition
First session on May 12, 2021, 6-8 pm CET
The Coronaseminar by Dr. Ewa Majewska marks the first public meeting of reboot: responsiveness and will unfold over five sessions of reflexive being together in the second year of the pandemic:
For many of us, the last months have been those of fear, pandemic, danger, precarity and insecurity. The oppressive presence of the life-threatening virus changed our lives in every possible way, by means of fear most of us experienced, changes in the everyday routines, work, kinship and intimacy. Everything is different now, and yet – many things stayed intact. Solidarity networks still form, there is some hope for better addressing the ecological dangers, online formats have successfully replaced the in-situ presence in so many contexts that it might reshape our habits of traveling and consumption. However – distinctions, marginalization and exclusions not only stay with us throughout the pandemic, but also sharpen, at least in some important contexts.
In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic many theorists immediately jumped to their computers, ready to offer what Donna Haraway rightly qualified as “easy techno-fixes”, on the level of thinking. In Warsaw, we decided to open an online-space for thinking the pandemic together, and thus the first edition of the Coronaseminars opened in April 2020 already, conducted with the generous support of the MoMA Warsaw and the curator Natalia Sielewicz. In this online-space, we could be together in what proved to be one of the most stressful times, we were reading theory together, discussing it, sharing our strategies to survive the health risks, precarization and panic. It felt both comforting and strange to find such loads of intimacy and closeness in this highly-mediatized format (Zoom + Fb stream). Yet – for many of us this was not just a seminar, but also a safe space.
Now – opening the new series of the Coronaseminar – reboot: edition, we would like to open our space, support and need to connect with those who want to be together in the moment of the (hopefully) ending time of the pandemic. With this year’s main reboot: theme of responsiveness, we want to discuss the post-pandemic future, as in: a life we will be living, work-related changes, shifts and transitions of intimacy and kinship, new formats and distributions of care, and the questions of equality and redistribution. We would like to see to what extent the art institutions and culture producers can involve in such problems and whether we can bring some solidarity and change.
We invite everyone interested in such online-discussion format, with some prospects of meeting offline, if the situation allows. We will be reading some texts, usually available online, sharing our solidarity practices and solutions from the time of pandemic, challenging our assumptions, as well as practicing being together – despite the alienating modes of contemporary culture. Staying with the trouble – Haraway’s book title – is a motto of these sessions. Ewa Majewska’s concept of the weak resistance will be our welcoming context, then we will move further in the post-pandemic thinking and practice. We invite anyone who can join us.
—Dr. Ewa Majewska
Preliminary calendar of the Coronaseminars – reboot: edition #1-5
Coronaseminar #1. How do we reboot?
May 12, 2021
Online-Zoom, 18:00–20:00h (6-8 pm) CET (in English)
Co-hosts: Ewa Majewska, Eva Birkenstock, Nikola Dietrich, Viktor Neumann
Guest: Natalia Sielewicz, MoMA Warsaw.
Texts: Tithi Bhattacharia, Social Reproduction Theory And Why We Need it to Make Sense of the Corona Virus Crisis [Link]
RSVP to register, before May 10: info@reboot-responsiveness.com
Coronaseminar #2. Pandemic intimacies.
June 9, 2021
Online-Zoom, 18:00–20:00h (6–8 pm) CET (in English)
Guest: Alex Baczynski-Jenkins, artist and choreographer.
Participation link:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89666026766?pwd=cnJXVDNib2FGaVlQOWtpeTJ1L0lEQT09
Meeting ID: 896 6602 6766
ID Code: 462096
In this Coronaseminar we will discuss the basics of the pandemic being together – universality, breathing, intimacy, sex and the means of production and representation. Our Guest’s contribution, by the artist and choreographer Alex Baczynski-Jenkins, will focus on mediating intimacies, suspended time and foregrounding infrastructures. We will also discuss the following texts:
Achille Mbembe, The Universal Right to Breathe, in: Critical Inquiry, 2020.[Link]
Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, Sex in Public, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 24, No. 2[Link]
Eng-Beng Lim, “Queer Coronasutra, or, How to have promiscuity in a Pandemic”, 2020[Link]
Coronaseminar #3. On Motherhood. Bring your kids!
June 30, 2021
Coronaseminar #4. How do we stay with the trouble?
September 29, 2021
Coronaseminar #5. Reboot solidarity together.
October 20, 2021
coronaseminar_reboot_reading_list.pdf [Download]
Compiled by Ewa Majewska