November 22-24, 2020 | ONLINE
with works by Christina Ciupke & Darko Dragičević, Trigger Collective, Julian Weber and Siegmar Zacharias
Can you cut out noise in order to listen to what you are neglecting?
"Listening Out Loud" is the 3rd iteration of Montag Modus’ "Ecology of Attention" series that looks for ways to disengage from the attention economy.
Today, "hyper attention"[1] - a cognitive state characterized by the need to switch focus rapidly among different tasks - has become the predominant state of mind. Our attention is manipulated for political and economic purposes by means of widespread advertising and algorithms. This “battlefield” environment, as Yves Citton calls it, created by constant changes in stimuli, makes it very difficult to be engaged in activities such as thinking, reflection and contemplation. Activities that are crucial for a deeper understanding of our surroundings.
With this project, we try to find ways to distance ourselves from the ecosystem of the "battlefield". Not only by simply slowing down the pace, but also by cultivating processes of listening and sensing through our entire body. Engagement in the listening processes resonates very much with the practice of "Deep Listening" developed by composer Pauline Oliveros as a reaction to the violence and unrest of the Vietnam War. According to her, Deep Listening is “a heightened state of awareness that connects to all that there is.”[2] A new understanding of sensuality and the body.
In this spirit, we invite artists who will experiment with practices of radical attentiveness.
DETAILED PROGRAM
Trigger Collective:
Manual for Collective Play
This project is aligned with the values we try to uphold within our collective, where our aim is to always try to create safer spaces and non-hierarchical structures that help and support us in our lives and personal practices. For this reason, we are creating a "Manual for Collective Play". We are inspired by old folklore practices that treat art as communal craft (rather than art for art’s sake) and by the idea of a creative playground. Looking at the world today, we are strongly aware of the fact that art as we know it and art as an institution cannot continue in the well trodden tracks of contemporary tradition. There is a pressure on us as people within our respective occupations to create and to produce - constantly and without the opportunity to experiment and to explore for the sake of joy alone. It can be a solitary, lonely task. Our Manual aims to tear us away from the expectations and demands placed upon us and to create a space where together, through following (or maybe not following) suggestions, we can take a moment to be silly and to explore the possibilities of sound and communal making with joy. For Montag Modus, we would like to introduce an online beta of the Manual, which presents us with opportunities to interact with virtual space in a different way than what we are used to.
PLAY HERE
Trigger Collective was founded in 2018 within the Synth Library as an open collective of women and trans* people working in the field of music. It manifests in the form of different projects. The collective revolves around the topics of re/search, un/learning, respect, equality and studying various systems of control, not only within the realm of music technology. Their first projects included a learning circle for women in electronic music, a series of events and the publishing of a magazine. Trigger organizes regular meetings to connect and to empower women and trans* people in the music scene and to collectively find ways how to create a sustainable safer space. You can also tune in to Trigger ON AIR - a selection of music, discussions, thoughts, emotions and transformations - on Radio Punctum Prague every first Wednesday of the month from 7 pm. instagram.com/triggerarchive
Julian Weber:
SOFTWARE
"SOFTWARE" is situated in a collaged landscape, a sensory archipelago, in which a group of players mold the space and its containing materials and are retrospectively influenced by the agency of these materials, which become players themselves. They translate and decode their states from liquid to gaseous, from soft to hard and vice versa. The players look at possibilities of encounter and intimacy through distance in these restricted times. Thereby a network is created, in which the players craft proximities, listen to boundaries, archive sensations, make material ancestors, pass on forms and use these experiences as fuel for their dancing.
conception/set/costume/dance: Julian Weber dance: Judith Förster, Ronald Berger, Justin Thesis Smith, Lyllie Rouvière, György Jellinek; music: Thomas Proksch; music contribution: Fjóla Gautadóttir; assistance: Anne Wencelides
Watch SOFTWARE
Listen to the mastered soundtrack
Inspired by the overarching topic of Montag Modus’ Ecology of Attention, the format of SOFTWARE experiments with strategies of adapting the quality of attention and time of a durational live work to a digital space. Therefore, we suggest to experience the work as a screensaver that, in contrast to algorithm-driven online-structures, becomes active in a state when one doesn’t interact with it.
Download SOFTWARE as a screensaver
Julian Weber is a choreographer/dancer, visual artist and set-designer. He studied sculpture at HBK Brunswick, Academy of Arts Vienna and choreography at HZT Berlin and the Theaterschool in Amsterdam. He works intensively on spaces of interaction involving body, material and movement. He collaborates with artists such as Meg Stuart, Boris Charmatz and Tino Sehgal and creates his own work at the intersection of visual and performance art. In 2015, he received the Berlin Art Prize.
Christina Ciupke and Darko Dragičević:
Silent Trio
Chapter#5: Digital Postcards
"Silent Trio" is an ongoing project of Christina Ciupke and Darko Dragičević that unfolds in different chapters. It started in January 2020 and it will expand until October 2021. Throughout the project, the two artists explore the interrelation between nature and man-made objects.
For this chapter, Christina and Darko relate to different layers of their research and to the experience of their trip to former Yugoslavia when they visited the Spomenik monuments that were built during the Tito years, between 1960 and 1985. These monuments were meant to last and outlive human generations, political turbulences and social upheavals. The Spomeniks left an impression on the two artists with their enduring and architectural appearances, reminding them of the presence of trees.
Christina and Darko worked with the resonations these monuments triggered in their bodies. Their focus is on different qualities of movement, activated by their internal and external states of consciousness.
Due to the current pandemic and the impossibility to perform live during Montag Modus, the artist duo has decided to capture this specific Chapter of their ongoing research in a short video format which will be followed by a conversation with an audience on Zoom. This format will contextualize and summarize the outcomes of the previous chapters of their project from 2020.
Christina Ciupke lives and works as a choreographer and performer in Berlin. She develops her projects in close collaborations. Within that arise specific spaces and situations, where the encounters between audience and performer are constantly re-negotiated. She collaborates with choreographers such as Ayse Orhon, Jasna Vinovrski, Mart Kangro, Nik Haffner, with the composer Boris Hauf, the dramaturge Igor Dobričić and visual and performance artist Darko Dragičević. She received a MA in Choreography at the Amsterdam School of the Arts (AHK). From 2016 to 2020, she was represented as an artist in the European network apap-advancing performing arts project at Tanzfabrik Berlin.
Darko Dragičević is a Belgrade-born, Berlin-based visual and performance artist and filmmaker. He works on interdisciplinary projects and cross-media collaborations as the expanded practices within the fields of visual arts, performance, choreography and film. This year Dragičević is collaborating with Christina Ciupke, Jasna Layes Vinovrški, Siri Jøntvedt, Jasmina Založnik, Martin Sonderkamp and Zeina Hanna on different projects. He is an Artistic Director and Editor of the project Lie & Theft as Practice done in collaboration with the Goethe-Institut in Belgrade.
Siegmar Zacharias and Steve Heather:
ANIMAterialities
Performance artist and theoretician Siegmar Zacharias researches collective grieving practices and will host intimate somacoustic listening sessions on Zoom. The psychosensory binaural sound explores intimacy and alienation as two dynamic forces of grief work and the possibility of being together otherwise. Touch by sound waves and the presence of those absent.
Siegmar Zacharias builds her practice between performance and philosophy, between satellites and between the sheets. She explores the politics of alienation and intimacy in embodied thinking/being, in collaboration with both humans and non-humans. She develops formats for performances, installations, discursive encounters and curation. Her work has been shown internationally at festivals, in galleries, and up in the sky. She is a research fellow at THIRD DAS Research, Amsterdam and a TECHNE Scholarship recipient working on her PhD in posthuman poet(h)ics.
Listening Out Loud | Ecology of Attention #3 Curators: Léna Szirmay-Kalos & Jasna L. Vinovrški (Berlin) in collaboration with Petr Dlouhy & Anna Chrtková (Prague)
Producer: Ben Mohai | Graphic Design: Adrienn Császár |Technical team: Sanja Gergoric & Bátor Tóth