Penny Travlou: Speaking about collective care and common wellbeing…
Covid-19 has revealed the importance of looking at care infrastructures as a common good for collective wellbeing, living together and caring for each other. The presentation focuses on the South American concept of ‘Buen Vivir’ (‘good living’), which relates to ideas of ‘wellbeing’ and the ‘commons’, and builds on ancestral knowledges such as ‘Sumak Kawsay’ and traditional local practices in Colombia.The key question of the presentation is: how can care provide solutions for collective wellbeing in times of crisis? From this perspective, collective wellbeing is holistic and inclusive of all, regardless of race, ethnicity, gender and sexuality, as well as nature and other species. The presentation extends its focus to contemporary feminisms where care is also considered a communal responsibility and a collective act, performed and embodied by a community.
Penny Travlou is a Lecturer in Cultural Geography and Theory (Edinburgh School of Architecture & Landscape Architecture, University of Edinburgh). Her research focuses on politics of public space, social justice, the commons, collaborative practices, cultural landscapes and ethnography. She has been involved in international research projects funded by the EU and UK Research Councils. Since 2011, she has been doing ethnographic research on collaborative practices in emerging networks (e.g. digital art practitioners, collaborative economy initiatives, translocal migrants). Her most recent research is on cultural commons in Colombia and solidarity networks in Athens. Alongside her academic work, Penny is an activist on social justice and urban commons. She is Co-director of the Feminist Autonomous Centre for Research (https://feministresearch.org/).
Nadja Verena Marcin
#SOPHYGRAY is a new project by performance and media artist Nadja Verena Marcin. It aims to point to our human strength, culture and intelligence over and against the proposed ‘technological solution’ through AI and its forms of humanoid representations in language, audio and chatbot, and physical robots. The artist is committed to using exemplars from the source material of feminist literature and theory to break through the culture of consumer language and embedded trajectories of (gender) discrimination from an intersectional perspective. On the project, she collaborates with Greek post-doc Jason Basset of the Max Planck Centre for Human Development in Berlin.
Nadja Verena Marcin is an artist of German-Slovakian descent who explores psychology and human behavior via an intersectional analysis of feminism and emotional architecture. Her works have been shown worldwide at Fridman Gallery (NY), ICA Philadelphia (PA), Garage Museum (Moscow), and ZKM | Center for Art and Media (Karlsruhe). Marcin won grants from New York State Council for the Arts, Franklin Furnace (NY), Film- and Media Foundation (Düsseldorf), holds a Fulbright and an MFA from Columbia University, and has lectured at Wellesley College (MA), Christie’s Education (NY), as well as been reviewed in HuffPost, Hyperallergic, and Artnet News.
Eleni Riga’s curatorial practice focuses on the intersection of feminism and ecology. Recently, she developed the public program Ecología y Feminismo based on the practice of Regina José Galindo and Ana Mendieta for MoMA. Her current exhibition Radical Empathies further explores this subject featuring artists from Guatemala, where authoritarian regimes and western interventionism have brutally inscribed their politics on all bodies. In preparation for her upcoming residency at Atopos CVC, Eleni sets out to investigate ‘new ecofeminisms.’
Eleni Riga is an independent curator. Her practice focuses on the intersection of feminism and ecology and the politics of care.
Joulia Strauss and Marc Müller will offer an insight into work in progress of their film Transindigenous Assembly, which is about artists who have stayed in their indigenous communities, or have rediscovered them for themselves, and are active beyond Western art institutions: Masters who have made their outstanding teachings of Light as precise as mathematics available to the Western world; Australian aboriginal cultural workers who have emancipated themselves solely through the power of their art;Amazonian curanderos who work miracles despite the shaman business; and also simply people who see themselves as a collective, no longer as individuals, and who creolize the latest psychological techniques.with spiritistic ancestor cults.
Joulia Strauss is an artist, activist and multimedia sculptor. She was born in the Soviet Union as Mari, one of Europe’s last indigenous cultures with a shamanistic tradition, and now lives in Athens and Berlin. She stands for a chord of artistic media, resonating in a deep bond with philosophy, technology, politics and environmental activism. Her sculptures, paintings, performances, drawings and video works have been seen in solo and group exhibitions, for example, at the Pergamon Museum and Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin, Tate Modern, Tirana Biennale, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Athens Biennale, Kyiv Biennial, Moscow Biennale, ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe and at documenta14 (Parliament of Bodies). Strauss is the founder and organiser of Avtonomi Akadimia in Athens.
Marc Mueller was born in Heidelberg in 1980. in 2002, he ventured to Berlin to study Film and Animation at the legendary Anstalt, where he also met future allies. Ever since, he freelances here and there, mostly involving a pen or a keyboard and usually a mind.