ARIA: Public programme (lectures, discussions, screening)

Florin Flueras, Michael Marder, Špela Petrič, Protektorama toxica, JP Raether, Simon Speiser, Subash Thebe Limbu, Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás, Lea Vene in Lovro Japundžić

22 – 23 August 2023 | 17:00 - 20:00 @ Cukrarna, Poljanski nasip 40, Ljubljana

ARIA (Algo-Rhythmic Ideation Assembly) is a summer school designed as a role-playing game. It takes place through the lens of a fiction-theory narrative. Bringing together artists, critical thinkers, and experts from diverse fields ARIA explores theoretical, artistic, and curatorial approaches to imagining, crafting, and inhabiting alternative futures in the context of a changing planetary ecology.

During five-days of intensive, ARIA blends closed-door workshops for selected participants and a public programme of lectures, discussions and a film screening.

The public programme will take place at Cukrarna, Ljubljana on 22 & 23 August from 17.00 to 20.00.

Speakers:

Florin Flueras, Michael Marder, Špela Petrič, Protektorama toxica, JP Raether, Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás, Simon Speiser, Subash Thebe Limbu, Lea Vene & Lovro Japundžić.

SCHEDULE

  • Tuesday, 22 August

17:00 ➤ Lecture / Florin Flueras: Unsorcery, practiced concepts

Unsorcery composes and explores ways of sorcery that can eventually surpass or undo some of the contemporary realities and subjectivities. It is an Artworld involved in a productive alienation from concepts through experience and from experience through thought. It is the embrace of an impossible cognition and a horrific affect, it is a “via negativa” that starts where the hopes end and the remaining options are rather negative, dark, and dead. Unsorcery was an environment in which Alina Popa and Florin Flueras were working together, each following their own path, doing their own practices, texts, and performances around the concepts: Life Programing, Artworlds, Second Body, Dead Thinking, Eternal Feeding, Black Hyperbox, End Dream.

18:00 ➤ Discussion / Curating and Worldbuilding Practice

Speakers: Florin Flueras, Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás, JP Raether, Lea Vene & Lovro Japundžić. Moderated by Tjaša Pogačar and Brandon Rosenbluth.

19:00 ➤ Film screening and Q&A / Subash Thebe Limbu: Ningwasum

Set in the Indigenous Yakthung nation in Nepal, Ningwasum follows two time travellers, Miksam and Mingsoma, who return to the present from a future where interplanetary civilisations are thriving and living sustainably by adopting Indigenous knowledge and technology. The fragility of our current ecosystem is portrayed in aerial shots and documentary footage of Himalayan glaciers, imbued with an ethereal blue filter. These are woven with digital cosmic landscapes and an immersive soundtrack, which includes electronic sound, spoken word, and folksongs. Inspired by ancient oral traditions, the film is narrated entirely in the Indigenous Yakthungpan, which the artist imagines as a vital language for the future. Ningwasum – which loosely translates as “memory” in Yakthungpan – explores notions of time, memory and space, and the way in which these shape reality. Limbu has theorised his approach to science fiction as “Adivasi Futurism”: a space where Nepalese Indigenous people and artists can imagine themselves in a future of their own making, driven by their culture and traditions.

  • Wednesday, 23 August

17:00 ➤ Talk / Špela Petrič: “The Auf Wieder Schnitzel Tasted Like Infrastructures of Care” – Field Notes from Performative Ethnographies

The talk will address various current (horti/agri)cultural technologies to critically analyse the tropes of food scarcity, peak soil, colonisation of Mars, and other ideological shorthands that are shaping imaginations about futures.

18:00 ➤ Lecture / Michael Marder: Disentangling the Phoenix Complex

The talk will travel through the mechanisms of natural and social reproduction and replication, especially those ingrained in our individual and collective lives. Along the way, we will survey and explore the limits, both internal and external, to the seamless phoenix-like reconstitution of the same (organism, psyche, society, environment) across the gap of death, total destruction and devastation.

19:00 ➤ Discussion / Anthropoforming For a Weird Planet

Speakers: Michael Marder, Špela Petrič, Protektorama toxica, Simon Speiser. Moderated by Tjaša Pogačar and Brandon Rosenbluth.

Mentor

ARIA (Algo-Rhythmic Ideation Assembly) is a summer school designed as a role-playing game that takes place through the lens of a fiction-theory narrative. It hosts an international cohort of mentors – artists, critical thinkers, and other experts to explore ways of imagining new possibilities for what our world can be in the time of changing planetary ecology. ARIA is developed by Tjaša Pogačar and Brandon Rosenbluth and organised in the framework of More-than-Planet project.

 

How to apply

No registration is needed to attend the public programme. The event is free of charge.

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Production

ARIA’s programme is curated by Tjaša Pogačar and Brandon Rosenbluth, and produced by Projekt Atol in collaboration with Cukrarna and Šum Journal. The programme is supported by the Ministry of Culture, Ministry of Public Affairs, the Municipality of Ljubljana – Department for Culture, and Igor Zabel Association for Culture and Theory.

ARIA is organized as part of the More-than-Planet project and co-funded by the European Union.

Find more information about ARIA and a full list of mentors here. 

 

SPEAKERS’ BIOGRAPHIES

Florin Flueras’s work expands into spheres of politics, philosophy, spirituality, health care, media, education, and literature – affecting conventions and certainties, producing performative meetings between art and its outside. With Alina Popa, he created alternative art environments, artworks as Artworlds (Unsorcery, Clinica, Black Hyperbox). With Ion Dumitrescu, he initiated Postspectacle, applying performative tools outside art, like in the Candidate’s presidential campaign. In Love, Unexperiences, Unimages, Unhere, he introduces into public spaces presences and states that can affect what underlies the conceptual and perceptual, what it is possible to think, see, and feel in different contexts. In certain prestigious art events, the works appear uninvited as Unofficial Unworks. Flueras doesn’t see his recent practice as visual or conceptual but rather as affect art. His writing is part of his works, and his works part of his writings. https://www.fflueras.ro/p/florin-flueras.html

Michael Marder is an Ikerbasque Research Professor at the Department of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country (UPV-EHU), Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain. His writings span the fields of ecological theory, phenomenology, and political thought. He is the author of numerous scientific articles and monographs, including Plant-Thinking (2013), The Philosopher’s Plant (2014), Dust (2016), Energy Dreams (2017), Heidegger (2018), Political Categories (2019), Pyropolitics (2015, 2020), Dump Philosophy (2020), Hegel’s Energy (2021), Green Mass (2021), Philosophy for Passengers (2022), The Phoenix Complex (2023), Time Is a Plant (2023), and, with Edward S. Casey, The Place of Plants (2023). https://www.michaelmarder.org/

Lívia Nolasco-Rózsás is a curator and art historian. She has been curating exhibitions around themes such as the genealogy and social impact of planetary computation or electronic surveillance and democracy at institutions of contemporary and media art – including ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Chronus Art Center (Shanghai), Nam June Paik Art Center (Seoul), Tallinna Kunstihoone, and the Ludwig Museum Budapest – since 2006. In 2019, Nolasco-Rózsás started her curatorial research into the “virtual condition”. She is also the initiator and head of the international collaborative project Beyond Matter at ZKM | Karlsruhe, which brings together several institutions, such as Centre Pompidou (Paris) and the Aalto University.

Špela Petrič is a Slovenian new media artist with a background in the natural sciences. Her artistic practice combines biomedia practices and performativity to enact strange relations between bodies that reveal the underpinnings of our (bio)technological societies and propose alternatives. Petrič has received several awards, including the White Aphroid for outstanding artistic achievement (Slovenia), the Bioart and Design Award (Netherlands), and the Award of Distinction at Prix Ars Electronica (Austria). https://www.spelapetric.org/

Protektorama toxica is an Artificial Identity, crystallised in 2011, and the root vessel of the lifeline of Protektoramae, a herd of WorldWideWitches. She has worked as a Smartphone Sangoma and an Unholdenschar. In 2014, she forked to become a travelling witch (called globalis), and in 2016, evolved into a Rare Earth Occultist (toxicae). She continuously develops her ritual practice, and in the past, was seen exploring mountaintops, stone circles, and other natural sites without reception, as well as visiting places of advanced technology (such as Times Square in 2014 or Berlin’s Apple Store in 2016). Protektorama’s interventions expose the reality that our most advanced technology is interwoven with what we call archaic or nature, despite our illusion of human mastery over nature and environment. https://www.instagram.com/protektorama/

JP Raether lives and works in Berlin. He attended Berlin University of the Arts and is currently holding a professorship for MA Live Art Forms at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Nuremberg, Germany. JP Raether and aLifveForms are supported by the Fellowship Programme 2020/2021 of PACT Zollverein (Essen). http://www.johannespaulraether.net

Simon Speiser is an artist who conjures fictional concepts that merge nature with technology. Speiser grew up between Germany, Ecuador, and Bolivia. His experience with nature in South America, especially on his father’s cacao farm in Esmeraldas, Ecuador, has had a significant influence on his practice. He closely follows the development of emerging tech while placing a variety of media and disciplines, ranging from writing, sculpture, weaving and printing to video and VR installations, in dialogue with one another to explore the intersection of art and science fiction.https://www.simonspeiser.de/

Subash Thebe Limbu is an Indigenous Yakthung (Limbu) artist from what is currently known as eastern Nepal. He works with sound, film, music, performance, painting, and podcasts. Subash has an MA in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins (2016), a BA in Fine Art from Middlesex University (2011), and an Intermediate in Fine Art from Lalit Kala Campus, Kathmandu. His works are inspired by socio-political issues, resistance, and science/speculative fiction, and feature the recurring themes of migration, climate change, and indigeneity or, as he calls, Adivasi Futurism. Subash is based in Newa Nation (Kathmandu) and London. https://subashthebe.com/

Lovro Japundžić & Lea Vene are independent curators based in Zagreb, Croatia. They work together at the Močvara Gallery, a nomadic exhibition/performance project that operates as a gallery division of the Močvara night club. This “boutique” curatorial programme is dedicated to site-specific installations, performances, and commissioned solo productions, which combine playful and often confrontational approaches towards normative structures. Recently, they have mostly been focused on performance art and productions that often imply provocation or performative situations, re-examining established definitions of choreography and the dynamics between a performer and their audience. Since 2019, they have explored the subversive potential of role play, working with artists such as Trakal, Ed Fornieles, Wojciech Kosma, Billy Bultheel, and Brody Condon; worked on anger as a positive and regenerative tool with collectives such as Young Boy Dancing Group and New Noveta; created a floating lexicon of marvels and catastrophes in a collaborative workshop as part of the R-Lab course at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm; and organized performances with artists such as Jaana-Kristiina Alakoski, Sanna Helena Berger, Candela Capitán, Mina Tomić, etc. https://www.instagram.com/mocvara_gallery