Thz event risking repetition

Special

Carolina Mendonça, Avgi Saketopoulou, bela, Ronce & gotgha

Symposium: Risking Repetition. Aesthetics of «Survival»

This two-day polyphonic format looks at how «survivors» of sexualised violence perform «survival». The aesthetic strategies and performative modes in the works of many of those affected often undermine melodramatic expectations of the performance of traumatic aftereffects. Instead, there is a tendency towards «underperformed emotion» (Lauren Berlant) in such works and many artists are «risking repetition» (Ann Cvetokovic) rather than avoiding the revision of trauma. Such aesthetic strategies complicate the notion of «survival»: instead of yearning for a state of integrity and healing, they integrate negativity and incompleteness, and employ aesthetic strategies of confusion, dissociation and underperformance.

The symposium will be opened on Saturday evening with the performance Zones of Resplendence by Carolina Mendonça, concerts by bela, gotgha, and Ronce and a late-night lecture by psychoanalyst and theorist Avgi Saketopoulou entitled Lingering in the wound: sadism and confusion as aesthetic practice.

This will be followed on Sunday by an open, participatory roundtable discussion about these topics starting with Avgi Saketopoulou, Carolina Mendonça and Joshua Wicke. This experimental discussion format invites everybody to become an expert of their own experience and join the discussion at the roundtable. There will be soup and nettle-tea that awaits you in the kitchen, giving the opportunity to strengthen yourself, decompress or just be together.

Saturday October 26th, 2024

20:30 – 21:30 Concert performance Ronce
21:30 – 22:30 Concert performance bela
22:30 – 23:30 Performance Zones of Resplendence by Carolina Mendonça
00:00 – 01:00 Lecture Lingering in the wound: sadism and confusion as aesthetic practice by Avgi Saketopoulou
01:00 – Concert performance gotgha

Sunday October 27th, 2024

16:00 - 19:00: participatory roundtable discussion with Avgi Saketopoulou, Carolina Mendonça, Joshua Wicke and other guests

Please note: The event involves and centres practices of artists that deal with experiences of sexualised violence in their work - sometimes explicitly. Some of the works employ high sound volumes as aesthetic means.

Risking Repetition takes place upon invitation by Tanzhaus Accomplice Joseph Baan, and occurs within the framework of Structures of Unfeeling: a performative learning environment that uses the exhibition format for the formation of a public culture around sexualised violence. Initiated by SOHERE (Joseph Baan, wolf engelen, Vanessa Jane Phaff) and taking place in BINZ39 and Tanzhaus Zurich, Structures of Unfeeling brings together a diverse group of practitioners from the fields of art, education, music, performance, dramaturgy, and academia, who have all in different ways been impacted and inscribed by histories of sexualised violence. By means of spatial interventions, works of art, a reader, an open-access archive and printing room, seminars and workshops, a symposium, and a programme of concerts, night vigils, and film screenings, the programme provides a diverse and comprehensive environment to foster conversation, collective thinking and making, and a discursive framework to encounter the topic of sexualised violence through aesthetic, material, embodied, and theoretical means. For more information on the programme visit: josephinebaan.com/Structures-of-Unfeeling

Concert performance
Ronce
Blending predatory ASMR, field recordings and distorted frequencies, Ronce's performance is a crude first hand experience of what’s like to be a young woman constantly subjected to the eyes and the hands of men. The aim of this musical and performative project is to cause extreme uneasiness in the listener, frequently breaking the threshold of catharsis.

Concert performance
bela
An unintelligible voice erupts over cybernetic beats in the darkness. The voice, the language, and the Korean tradition of pungmul are all pushed to extremes, pressurized into a blackened queer rage ritual. Broken letters and pansori lyrics talk of the marginalized and their oppressors, reliving and destabilizing the personal and traumatic moments of life in non-linear time. Every bodily and sonic gesture is staged to untangle the knots on the existential axis. This performance is bela's presentation of healing by repetition.

Performance
Carolina Mendonça: Zones of Resplendence
Wie sähe die Welt aus, wenn Sie Ihre eigene Waffe wählen könnten? Zones of Resplendence erforscht die Erscheinungsformen einer möglichen feminisierten Armee. Carolina Mendonça und Lara Ferrari untersuchen, ob man einen Krieg mit Verletzlichkeit führen kann, und erweitern so die Perspektive auf Gewalt. Indem sie ihren Körper auf unterschiedliche Weise einsetzen, bereiten sie sich auf eine mögliche Konfrontation vor. Wird diese Science-Fiction-Tanzperformance eine neue Art von Armee hervorbringen?l

direction, text & performance Carolina Mendonça⎮performance & collaboration Lara Ferrari⎮dramaturgy Carolina Bianchi & Joshua Wicke⎮sound design Miguel Caldas⎮lighting design Laura Salerno & Leticia Scrycky ⎮costume design Miguel Peñaranda Olmeda & Stef Assandri ⎮supported by radical hope, hot bodies studio, wpZimmer, workspacebrussels, Fonds Darstellende Künste in the frame of the programme NEUSTART KULTUR #TakeHeart Residenzförderung, and El Caldo by Gessenerallee 

Lecture
Avgi Saketopoulou: Lingering in the Wound: Sadism and Confusion as Aesthetic Practice
Contrasting the logic that wounds only produce suffering and that, therefore, the proper approach to trauma is the reparative, Saketopoulou introduces the concept of traumatophilia. Traumatophilic art lingers in the wound not to address/heal the injury but to graze against it, even to risk re-opening it in the interembodied space of the theatre. Such art is not after healing or repair: it risks, rather, an exposure to traumatic intensities that cannot be captured through anamnesis, intensities that have a fugitive relationship to being grasped or understood, and which exert a sadistic force on the artist and the audience. That such sadism is also tender is not a contradiction, but the very condition of a kind of sadism we might think of as aesthetic. Drawing on the first part of the Cadela Força trilogy by Carolina Bianchi and the art collective Cara de Cavalo, Saketopoulou explores how wound and aesthetics meet through an ethical form of sadistic practice conjugated not through clarity or understanding but through the courting of confusion. 

Concert performance
Gotgha
With their recent work Gotgha opens up space for the unresolved and unspeakable to resonate, revolving around sadness, trauma and unhinged, faceless joy. Through non-linear sonic fabric of field recordings and Central European zither, pulsating electronics and layers of noise formulate proxy-screams where the voice fails. In their piece they strive for a performative state in which their own memories and the inner feedback of their instruments manifest themselves as para-spacial entities. This opening of spaces is an invitation to transformation through repetition.

Curated by Luc Häfliger (music) and Joshua Wicke (discourse) in dialogue with SOHERE (Joseph Baan, wolf engelen, Vanessa Jane Phaff)
With contributions by Ronce, bela, Carolina Mendonça, Avgi Saketopoulou, gotgha

Photo of Zones of Resplendence by Carolina Mendonça, photo by Mila Ercoli

Carolina Mendonça, Avgi Saketopoulou, bela, Ronce & gotgha

Carolina Mendonça is a choreographer, performer and dramaturge. She holds a Master in Choreography and Performance from the University of Giessen in Germany and graduated in Performing Arts from ECA-USP. She works as a dramaturge with Carolina Bianchi, Marcelo Evelin, Marcela Santander and Dudu Quintanilha among others.

Avgi Saketopoulou, Psy.D. is a Cypriot and Greek psychoanalyst practicing in New York. She serves on the faculty of the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis and her publications have received numerous prizes including the Ralph Roughton Award and twice the annual JAPA Essay Prize. In 2021, she was co-recipient of the IPA's first Tiresias Essay Prize, which appears in the co-authored volume Gender Without Identity (2023) with Ann Pellegrini. Avgi’s interviews on psychoanalysis are in the permanent holdings of the Freud Museum (Vienna). In her monograph, Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia (2023), she puts psychoanalysis to work through performance studies, philosophy, and queer of color critique to explore the vicissitudes of overwhelm, to track the seductions of consent, and to resist the allure of the reparative. She is currently working on her next book project provisionally titled: Sadisms and Performance: Sovereignties of Confusion and Opacity.

bela is a musician and a performance artist based in Berlin and Prague. They are known for a performance merging pungmul - a Korean folk act rooted in agricultural traditions and linked to past social movements - and vocals inspired by extreme metal. bela shapes pungmul into the ritual for queer rage and grief with sub-heavy distortions and cries. Their LP Noise and Cries, co-released on Subtext UK and Unsound PL in April 2024, debuted their raw vocals for the first time. Spanning over 5 basement ritual songs and 2 grounding ambient scenes, it comprises a fierce reflection on the precarity of life back in South Korea, queer identity, severance of relationships, and endurance. bela participated in the SHAPE+ Platform 23'-24'. They have performed in experimental music festivals CTM Festival (DE), Norbergfestival (SE), Unsound Kraków (PL), Lunchmeat (CZ) etc. They also premiered their works in European art festivals transmediale (DE) and EVA International (IE).

Zoë Villerd is a Paris based musician and started working under the name of Ronce in 2017. She explores the relationship between sound and gender-based violence, aiming to translate traumatic feelings into music as well as performance, with a particular interest in confrontation.

Gotgha aka Luc Häfliger is a Zurich-based composer, performer and sound artist. In their practice they circle around the question of how we can recode space through sonic experience. Through the lens of noise they investigate the sonic and performative states in wich the boundaries between control and exctasy become fluid. Their pieces seamlessly interweave the composed and the improvised. They are part of doxa shroti, a collective that organizes monthly concerts in underways as listening practices and community building effort for the experimental music scene in Zurich. Their pieces have been shown in national and international contexts such as les Urbaines, Drifts festival Helsinki, Kunsthalle Zürich, Kunsthalle Baselland, Tanzhaus Zürich, ZKM Karlsruhe und LAC Lugano Arte e Cultura.

Joshua Wicke is a curator and dramaturge working in the fields of performance, dance, and theatre. His collaborations include work with Moved by the Motion, caner teker, Carolina Mendonça, and Alexander Giesche. Projects featured the curation of the series Poetics of Refusal, which explored artistic and political strategies of withdrawal, nonperformance, and negativity, as well as the co-curation of Palast der Republik at Berliner Festspiele. For several years he co-facilitated Dirty Debüt, a platform for emerging performance artists in Berlin. Joshua has taught on topics such as collaborative dramaturgy, the history of dramaturgy as a practice of policing, and aesthetics of ecology at institutions including the Zurich Academy of Arts, Academy of Media Arts Cologne, Free University Berlin and Castro Projects Rome. After working as a dramaturge at Schauspielhaus Zürich, he co-programmed  Gessnerallee Zurich as a curator till summer 2024 culminating in the Festival Tune In Drop Out. 

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