Itinerant geographies- a proposition for radical unbelonging
November 2022, Frankfurt am Main & April 2023, Berlin
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A curatorial and pedagogical project by Diana De Fex
I invited a group of friends and colleagues to unbelong together and to respond, through their practices, to the premise that the garden/gardening could be the lens, the place, the set of practices, the impetus and/or the systems through which to address questions of belonging/estrangement. This invitation led to an exchange of practices, first, just among ourselves for a week in Frankfurt am Main and then, for a week in Berlin with a wider public.
Why unbeloging?
Unbeloging is a response not only to state coercion, but also to the identity politics and determinisms that have become hegemonic within the alternative cultures of the global North, while ignoring a multiplicity of epistemologies of the global South.
Why together?
I understand this project in terms of affective curating (Kekena Corvalán), which she defines as “a device to show us in our contradictions [...] guided by an affective logic instead of the logic of the market [...] While contemporary art seeks enunciation (singular), affective curating seeks enunciations (plural, collective), although always from our contradictions.”
Unbelonging together in a radical way, implies conceiving the uprooting and estrangement of subaltern identities as places of curiosity and knowledge and creating an empathy that puts one's own identity and even one’s future at risk. It is, in other words, to conceive of other ways of being together and of making collectivity
Why gardens?
From the beginnings of modernity in Europe, when there was a desire to return to communion with nature and the pleasure of the senses. Gardens were conceived as utopias, both for aristocrats, who sought to reproduce in their English gardens the Italian country landscapes they had seen in their travels, and for the working class, who could theoretically access similar experiences in public gardens. From early modernity, gardens were the utopian counterpoint to increasing industrialization and were funded, ironically, by those primarily responsible for industrialization.
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On the other hand, gardening, as a material practice, far from dealing with utopia, which is what, by definition, never takes place and is postponed ad infinitum, deals with the present articulated to potentiality (the time of the could be) and failure (the time of the could have been). In The Gardener's Year, Karel ÄŒapek portrays the gardener as someone who cares for fragility and is always confronted with his/her helplessness to prevent something from going wrong: if the soil is plowed too hard and a root is accidentally pulled up, if it snows too much and the flower buds are ruined, etc. In a similar way to this small narrative situated in the corners of the garden, I situate my curatorial practice as a counter-narrative to the canon of contemporary art production, which Corvalán describes as a “factory and fortress of utopias.” While “the main characteristic of mainstream curating is the dispute for the market, in affective curating, what moves us to think is the dispute for territories”.
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Within this exchange of practices I shared the following workshop:
Dreaming devices- a practice of collective mapping
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Starting from a conception of landscape in an expanded form, which can be rural or urban, microscopic, pictorial, sonorous, tactile, etc., and maps as devices for dreaming and creating new territories (as opposed to objective representations of reality), this is an invitation to feel-think the landscape we inhabit and that inhabits us, through a practice of interpersonal and collective mapping. This includes guided meditations, collaborative drawing, deep listening, experimentation with touch and movement of our own bodies in space.
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Initially developed during an artist residency at Tribu Trueno in Bariloche, Argentina (January/February 2023, with further iterations/developments at Spore Initiative in Berlin (June 2023), Sommerwerft Festival in Frankfurt am Main (July 2023) and Garage Ost in Leipzig with the support of Leipzig Kulturamt (November/December 2023).
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Supported by Fonds Darstellende Künste with funds from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media within the program NEUSTART KULTUR. In cooperation with Oyoun.
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Full program of public events within the frame of this project