Casting Creature
materialism of the encounter
Host: Iza Tarasewicz
Concept: Susanne Husse, Michaela Richter
Workshop: 2 September – 3 September 2014
In contrast to the well-known coaching workshops in business and other fields of social life where leaders hold result-oriented trainings with a strong emphasis on individualization, professionalization of units, and increasing resources, our two-day program for curators proposes taking a few steps back. Lets consider the kind of qualities coming from the clinamen, a concept described in Titus Lucretius carus’s philosophical poem De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things) that accentuates the role of indeterminacy in the universe, and articulates the ways in which minimal and unpredictable deviations are generative in nature. Lucretius believed that the clinamen is a situation where things come into being not through a rationalized ordering of elements, but rather through the spontaneous swerves that motivate fusion and fission. Matter is regarded instead as the result of a meeting of different qualities motivated by the random, turbulent, and unpredictable crash of smaller constituents. A new quality arises from the incalculable and uncertain collision.
This workshop emphasizes the social, aesthetic, philosophical, and political possibilities in this “materialism of the encounter”, where knowledge flows from the compilation of qualities that are often conflicting, accidental, marginal, and/or subconscious. We would like to try to capture the reality of irreducible complexity and combine curatorial experiences from each participant into a single, constantly redeveloping, interface. Our intention is to show the possibility of unexpected and marginal events, cracks, deviations, fractures, indigenous conjunctures, errors, conflicts and other difficult questions as ciphers for new knowledge. The workshop will be a place for experimenting with different forms of acquiring knowledge as a deviation from normalized working processes in curatorial and artistic practice. In other words, our meeting will become an attempt to open a new area of opportunities for theory and curatorial practice based on experimental and open exchange. Hence, we would like to build our meeting like a bridge between stability (the grounded curatorial experience of participants) and changes (resulting from unforeseeable contacts), connecting theory and practice and order and chaos. Our goal is to create an alternative taxonomic model of knowledge, testing and building new language and vocabularies based on gaps in knowledge, breaks in senses of purpose and courses of action. Loss of control over a predetermined plan of action will be accentuated, with crisis situations and inhibitions forming a particular opportunity for the emergence of new qualities of relation-oriented knowledge. Swerves and deviations in social and material compositions will be identified, exaggerated, and deconstructed. A non-anthropocentric approach, the research will even border on a certain hylozoism, the concept that all matter and non-matter has life, where objects or arrangements will be explored through the affecting and unpredictable nature of their material makeup and the shifting relations such qualities produce. The workshop will also challenge the participants to consider both the vital energetic relationships in all matter and how objects can articulate their own relations to each other outside of human thought or projection. All those processes will lead us to a new field- the plasmaticity of knowledge and information, a sense of elements constantly reconfiguring, transforming, interrelating, and chaotically evolving. Such an exercise will explore how systems of organization affect our understandings of information and will treat moments of exhibition like living creatures, leading to new understandings of the body as a medium.
SCHEDULE
CASTING CREATURES – towards a materialism of the encounter
Sep 2, 2014: 4 – 8pm, followed by participants dinner
Sep 3, 2014: 4 – 8pm
Iza Tarasewicz (*1981, near Bialystok, Poland) has graduated from the Faculty of Sculpture and Performing Art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznan, Poland in 2008. Her work has been presented internationally at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (2014), Dunikowski Museum of Sculpture, Warsaw (2013), Platan Gallery, Budapest (2011) and as part of the ARTISTERIUM, Tbilisi, Georgia (2011) and others. She lives and works in Berlin.