Publishing Practices 3
Weaving the Inner Bark

Archive Berlin
Reinickendorfer Str. 17
13347 Berlin

Weaving the Inner Bark Festival is an invitation to unpack, share, and inquire more broadly on how library projects can reflect on experiences of resistance, create ground for transnational solidarity, and participate in the unwriting and unfixing of hegemonic knowledge systems. Weaving the Inner Bark inhabits the physical space of the exhibition In the Inner Bark of Trees and activates it. The exhibition, imagined as an ensemble of potential libraries, is made of many voices and mediums. Each object in the exhibition calls for a haptical and multisensorial reading breaking away from the hegemonic fixity of the printed matter.

Weaving the Inner Bark embarks on forms of archiving and editing that defy canonical and standardised notions of publishing and prompts ancestral techniques such as oral storytelling, embodied literacies, and texturalities, a compound term for textiles interwoven into/as texts. These modes of knowledge inscription and transmission trouble the dominance of the book and inform the idea that libraries can become spaces of affective reading and experimental laboratories for practising hapticality. The Greek root of “haptic” is “haptein,” meaning to touch or grasp an object. Weaving the Inner Bark thus explores haptic experiences and experimentation, connecting somatic knowledge to contemporary bodies, spaces, worlds, and imaginations.

Curatorial ensemble   Leila Bencharnia, Chiara Figone, Miriam Gatt, Samira Ghoualmia, Paz Guevara, Beya Othmani, Savanna Morgan
Curator in residency   Salma Kossemtini
Graphic design   Archive Appendix
Production   Miriam Gatt
Production assistance   Malab Alneel, Iman Salem
Tech   Rey Domurat, Benjamin Nash

Publishing Practices 3. Weaving the Inner Bark festival is supported by Spartenoffene Förderung für Festivals und Reihen.

 

Festival schedule
August 25–27, 2023
(full program below)

Friday 25 August 2023

1.30 – 3:30 pm
Tattoo as self-publishing
Lara Fonderico

7.00 – 9.00 pm
Transbluesencies:
poetics you can see through

Performance workshop by Savanna Morgan and Jumoke Adeyanju

Saturday 26 August 2023

3 – 5 pm
Multisensory Readings of Olive Oil
Workshop with BROUDOU collective Emily Sarsam and Yasmine Houamed
Followed by a conversation with Samira Ghoualmia
Limited capacity: max. 9 participants
By registration: samira@archivesites.org

5 – 6.30 pm
Reading Circle
Workshop as part of
Unpacking our Library #6
Mohamed-Ali Ltaief
By registration: malab@archivesites.org

7 – 8 pm
Unpacking our Library #6
Poeisis, Praxis, and Cultures of Resistance or the non-established Histories of Art in Tunisia
Mohamed-Ali Ltaief
Lecture performance

8 – 10 pm
Convivial dinner

10 pm
DJ set by NaN

Sunday 27 August 2023

3.30 – 5.30 pm
Ipalnemoani
(from Nahuatl into English, for what you live for, the force that makes you move)

with Gabriel Rossell Santillán
Workshop of story-telling and cooking
Limited capacity: max. 10 participants
By registration: malab@archivesites.org

4.30 – 5.30 pm
Untangling Wool
with Karina Griffith
Activation

6 – 7 pm
The dispersed body:
re-membering the archive

with Dior Thiam
Audio-visual lecture

7 – 8.30 pm
I have flown to you like a child to her mother
SOUL Series (2021-ongoing)
with Dina El Kaisy Friemuth
Storytelling session with Maha El Kaisy-Friemuth and Duygu Ağal
Carpet print on textile with the art direction by Workout Services

Pre-launch of the zine SOUL Stories 
with the collaboration in the graphic design by Sibel Beyer

8.45 – 9.15
Poems by Amora
Performance

Friday 25 August 2023

1.30 – 3:30 pm

Tattoo as self-publishing
Lara Fonderico

Lara Fonderico invites us to imagine our bodies as a text of scar tissue, burns, cuts and marks, all of which betray our most private lives. Tattooing one’s flesh becomes an editorial process on the body’s inherent capacity to carry stories, secrets, and meanings. Today our bodies are becoming showrooms, branded, trendy and hot. Tattooing has become an exclusive artistic practice that takes place in aseptic studios after processes of googling designs, booking an artist, surrendering one’s body to a professional and sealing the ritual with a monetary transaction. In contrast, Lara’s tattooing practice stems from her engagement with underground movements and trans-feminist political collectives that share how to communise technologies, transmit knowledge openly and trespass the authoritarian concept of intellectual property by deconstructing the gatekeeping approach of professionalising practices. Through a workshop in DIY tattooing techniques, Lara creates a space for an intimate ritual of traversing our personal bodily archives. Suggesting the art of tattooing as a self-publishing practice, the artist invites us to return to our bodies as archives. Questioning our relationship with pain and healing, she asks: Can self-inflicted pain become part of healing?

7 – 9 pm

Transbluesencies:
poetics you can see through
Performance workshop by
Savanna Morgan
and Jumoke Adeyanju

Transbluesencies originates from a Duke Ellington jazz composition on his 1946 Carnegie Hall LP, and is also the title of Amiri Baraka’s body of poetry published in 1995. The term invokes the blues, a centuries-old African-American form of poetic storytelling, as a carrier of joys, sorrows, and knowledge – with the understanding that music and rhythm are the only containers big enough to hold the vast complexity of Black histories. Is an invitation to witness multidisciplinary artistic practices that question written texts/printed matter as the central modality of poetic expressions. Artists from different mediums present poems at the intersection of poetry, music, and film in this performance workshop, where the audience is invited to join in on conversations between minds and bodies.

Savanna Morgan is a poet, musician, and performance artist from East Texas. She came to Berlin for a Master’s in Performance Studies in 2020, and has since joined the Archive Ensemble where she publishes and curates anti-colonial literary and performance practices. Her recent publications include debut poetry book, cow tripe (Hopscotch Editions, 2022). Her performances, ranging from concerts to choreo-poems, have been presented at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (The Whole Life, 2022, O Quilombismo, 2023), Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien (Freistaat Barackia, 2021), Gropius Bau (GABAN, 2022), ChertLüdde (Bungalow Berlin, 2022), Villa Romana Florenz, Savvy Contemporary, TanzFabrik (KoShebeen, 2021), amongst other socio-cultural institutions. Her creative process is very much rooted in time, place, and memory of home in the North American South. Her work aims to foster conversations within the black diaspora centring on its histories, triumphs, joy, and healing.

Jumoke Adeyanju is an interdisciplinary, multilingual writer, curator and dancer. Under her alias, mokeyanju, she occasionally performs as a vinyl selector and aspiring sound artist. Jumoke is the founder of The Poetry Meets Series [est.2014], co-curator of Sensitivities of Dance and hosts her radio show Sauti ya àkókò and the Breakfast Show on Refuge Worldwide. Her multidimensional sound, words, and movement art have been commissioned by Majestic Casual, MARKK Museum Hamburg, NCAI Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute, Dak’Art Biennale OFF 2022, LagosPhoto 2022, Arthouse Foundation Lagos, AAF Lagos, Image Afrique Basel, African Crossroads Mombasa, CUNY NYC, Kölnischer Kunstverein and Deutschlandfunk Kultur Klangkunst amongst others. In 2022, Jumoke Adeyanju exhibited her sound-based ‘dreams’ research project OTA – outreaching transfigurative alterations at Nairobi Contemporary Art Institute in Kenya. She has presented her artistic works at international literary festivals performing in English, German, Kiswahili and Yorùbá. Her live-writing poem was featured in the award-winning short Leave the Edges (2020) by Baff Akoto. Jumoke’s poetry and translation work were published in the anthology Kontinentaldrift: Das Schwarze Europa (ed. Fiston Mwanza Mujila) in 2021 and The 1619 Project by Nikole Hannah Jones. In 2022, her first Sci-Fi short story 77. Weltstille was published in the anthology Kollaps und Hope Porn: 13 Zukunftsaussichten by Maro Verlag. As an all-round-artist, Jumoke’s approach touches on topics like diaspora nostalgia, memory, spiritual liminal spaces, sonic tonalities, and how various elements of expressive art forms interrelate and incorporate the potential to (re-) create moments of reviving other or displaced selves.

Saturday 26 August 2023

3 – 5 pm

Multisensory Readings of Olive Oil
Workshop with BROUDOU collective Emily Sarsam and Yasmine Houamed
Followed by a conversation with Samira Ghoualmia
Limited capacity: max. 9 participants
By registration: samira@archivesites.org

The BROUDOU collective invites you to a workshop around deconstructing taste through a multisensory olive oil experience. We will begin by questioning the local context of olive oils in Berlin. What different types of olive oils can we find, and what information can we decode from their labels? The political reality for many non-EU olive oil-producing countries, such as Tunisia, is that their contribution to the EU market supply is entirely unacknowledged. Together, we will discuss the potential for labels to shape truths, realities and notions of value.

Approaching taste from different angles of the multi-sensory through sight, smell, imagination, movement, and memory, we will consider and practice using different tools to help us expand our tasting muscles while stretching our imaginations. A guiding question will be: How do we value a product without a predetermined value?

Returning to the notion of labels will practice constructing them differently. What if we taste first and then imagine a label? Through sharing tastes and our responses, we will play around with ideas of how our personal experiences and sensory knowledge colour our relationships with the foods we consume.

BROUDOU is an independent collective, publication, and research platform founded in 2021 by artists Aziza Gorgi, Emily Sarsam, and Yasmin Houamed. Working alongside researchers, farmers, and creative practitioners, the collective conducts original research organises immersive and embodied workshops and hosts culinary experiences inspired by the Tunisian foodscape.

Aziza is an artist and designer based in Tunis and works with various mediums such as ceramics, painting, photography and publishing. She is the main designer behind BROUDOU Magazine.

Emily is a cultural programmer and artist. Her work revolves around independent publishing, sound, poetry and food.  Through her research, she develops and facilitates embodied forms of learning and relating within the arts.

Yasmin is currently pursuing an MA in the Anthropology of Food at SOAS, University of London, where she is researching consumerism and sustainable development. She received her BA in Political Science from Stanford University.

5 – 6.30 pm

Reading Circle
Workshop as part of
Unpacking our Library #6
Mohamed-Ali Ltaief
By registration: malab@archivesites.org

Based on the ongoing research-based project of an artist that confronts and expands the meaning of sonic archives, Mohamed-Ali Ltaief offers a Reading Circle to share and discuss the genealogy of early ethnomusicological field recording in Tunisia, while reassembling cartographies of interwar artists in North Africa and in the diaspora. In the Reading Circle workshop, Ltaief will share a selection of readings that he refers to in his lecture performance‘Poeisis, Praxis, and Cultures of Resistance or the non-established Histories of Art in Tunisia’, re-contextualizing cuts and ruptures during colonial times, and unravelling the multiplicity of sonic performative practices. The Reading Circle is open to everyone interested in African performance art histories and sonic performative art practices, anti-colonial and anti-fascist early political movements in North Africa, decolonial theories, and practices of transformation of archives.

7 – 8 pm

Unpacking our Library #6
Poeisis, Praxis, and Cultures of
Resistance or the non-established
Histories of Art in Tunisia

Mohamed-Ali Ltaief
Lecture performance

Unpacking Our Library invites Tunisian artist and author Mohamed-Ali Ltaief to re-entangle and negotiate the meaning of a North African sonic archive collection recorded during the first decade of the 20th Century by the Prussian Phonographic Commissions in North Africa, and now stored dispersed, in part at the Berliner phonogramm archiv(SMB)at the Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin and in part at the Ennejma Ezzahra in Tunis (CMAM). Ltaief’s Lecture performance ‘Poeisis, Praxis, and Cultures of Resistance or the non-established Histories of Art in Tunisia’ questions the dispositive of sonic archival material in those collections by displacing the Ethno-musicological illusion. Through the lecture, Ltaief revoices extended biographies and foregrounds sonic performances, confronting the static sonic archival materiality and the corporate identity of the Western aesthetic taxonomy. By shifting the sonic archive into a spatialized and performative practice, Ltaief opens those archives to art histories across Berlin, Beirut, Cairo and Tunis. Acknowledging the intrinsic multiplicity of art as a concept of “Poiesis and Praxis’, the lecture is composed by acts of translating lyrics, retracing movements-body language, and re-locating biographies and counter archives. This lecture performance ‘Poeisis, Praxis, and Cultures of Resistance or the non-established Histories of Art in Tunisia’by Mohamed-Ali Ltaief is a sonic-visual and geo-philosophical narrative that combines sonic testimonies with spatial strategies, border studies, and decolonial aesthetic methods. ‘Poeisis, Praxis, and Cultures of Resistance or the non-established Histories of Art in Tunisia’ by Mohamed-Ali Ltaief is part of ‘the Striated Time’ performance trilogy project and publication. With the kind support of Mophradat Consortium Commissions 2023/2025,  Jaou Festival Tunisia and Ennejma Ezzahra Tunis.

Mohamed-Ali Ltaief is an artist and author. His practice draws from cross-disciplinary and post-colonial perspectives at the intersection of theatre, performance, sound, conceptual and visual art, alongside essays and fiction. Ltaief studied philosophy in Tunis and graduated from the Institute of Fine Arts Tunis, and is currently at the MA Spatial Strategies at Weißensee Academy of Art Berlin. In 2011, he co-founded in Tunis the independent art group Ahl Al-Kahf (SevenSleepers), the anonymous collective created common murals and presented public performances throughout the country. From 2013, Ltaief continuously collaborated with Motus Theater Company performed, artwork and text in Nella Tempesta(performance), Caliban Cannibal (performance), and Call me X (video-installation) as a part of 2011>2068 Animale Politico Project with Silvia Calderoni on stage. In 2019, he presented the performative manifesto “Ghosts of Meaning” at The Present Is Not Enough festival at HAU2 Berlin and the play “Hundert Jahre” in Theater Basel.

10 pm

DJ set by NaN

NaN is a non-binary DJ/Selector originally from London. Like their surroundings growing up, they pride themselves on being a mosaic made up of multi-dimensions, and this is reflected in their eclectic music collection. As the name suggests, they are not a number, not to be put in a box, not to be tied to one genre.

Sunday 27 August 2023

Ipalnemoani
(from Nahuatl into English,
for what you live for,
the force that makes you move)
by Gabriel Rossell Santillán
Workshop of story-telling and cooking
Limited capacity: max. 10 participants
By registration: malab@archivesites.org
3.30 – 5.30 pm

Departing from the story-telling practice of his collabrative textile work Flowers Beneath Our Feet/ die Toten überqueren Inseln (together with Keiko Kimoto, 2022) at the exhibition, Gabriel Rossell Santillán offers a workshop on Nahuatlcooking and story-telling, as a humble and active way to dive into indigenous knowledges. By practicing ollin(fromNahuatl into English, the circular energy), the artist will tell and do a recepy composed by permanent movement – the circularity of many layers that tells also of the energy that the cook transmit into nurturing a community. The meal will be created and shared with the workshop participants.

Gabriel Rossell Santillán is an artist that traverses media -from drawing through textile, performance, story-telling, cooking, photography, video, and installations– as formats to create and engage with narratives and collaborations.  He studied at the National University of Mexico and then in the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK). Throughout twenty years of residencies and collaborations with the Wixárika indigenous people in Mexico, his practice has been dedicated to the knowledge of indigenous critical thinking, feminists of colour and queer thinkers. His recent exhibitions include: the Fellbach Triennial, Fellbach (2022); Transition Exhibition, Brücke-Museum, Berlin (2021-2022), and For the Phoenix To Find Its Form In Us. On Restitution, Rehabilitation and Reparation, SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin (2021). In 2020, he published the book de todos colores menos plomo, Oaxaca, Mexico.

4.30 – 5.30 pm

Untangling Wool
by Karina Griffith
Activation

Together with the installation Homecoming (2015), Karina Griffith offers the performative workshop Untangling Wool, to collectively reconnect to African knowledges through the haptic senses related to the practice of chrochet. In the artists’ words: “Through this meditative practice, I am repatriated across the Black Atlantic to my confiscated African roots”.

Karina Griffith is an artist and researcher who uses moving images, performances, and installations to question archives and conditions of spectatorship. Griffith’s works have been shown at international galleries and festivals, most recently including Gallery TPW (2023), SINNE Gallery (2022), Hebbel Am Ufer (2022), HIAP Studios (2020), Moscow Museum of Modern Art (2018), Arsenal Gallery Poznan (2018). Griffith has curated film and interdisciplinary programmes for the Goethe Institute, Ballhaus Naunynstrasse, Oberhausen Film Festival, VTape and the Berlinale Forum. In 2021 she led the curatorial team of the 1st Black Reels Festival at ACUD Macht Neu. Her writing can be found in the Darkmatter Journal, Texte zur Kunst, German Quarterly, Shadow & Act, the Rosa Mercedes journal of the Harun Farocki Institut and the Berlinale Forum Magazine.

6 – 7 pm

The dispersed body:
re-membering the archive
by Dior Thiam
Audio-visual lecture

Each form of violence has its own way of contaminating, haunting, touching, caressing, and whispering to the other. Their force is particular yet like liquid, as they can spill and seep into the spaces that we carve out as bound off and untouched by the other. —Tiffany Lethabo King, The Black Shoals (2019)

Drawing from Dior Thiam’s artistic practice and a series of artistic and literary references, Thiam offers an audiovisual lecture that departs from the body as an entry for re-thinking the archive as Diasporic. Based on an analogy between the Sea and the body, Thiam proposes an artistic experiment that emulates fluid strategies of healing and recovery: “the attitude of someone trying […] not to be dispersed, one member of the body here, another there. One tries to recover, to be once more in good shape, to become whole again.” (Thich Nhat Hanh). By weaving disparate pieces of audio-visual research into one another and exploring the body as a fragmented archive, Thiam’s audio-visual lecture intends to conceptualise the Diasporic Black Body. The body as dismembered by force, historically ever-dispersed, the wandering, the unmourned and unburied body – fragmented and cohesive simultaneously.

The audio-visual lecture emerged from the earlier project Recueillement or Shapes from the Sea, an audio-visual installation developed and first shown during the exhibition Gorée Regards Sur Cours in Senegal (2021).

Dior Thiam is a multidisciplinary visual artist. Through painting, installation and photography, she explores untold histories, otherness, exoticism and the specific historical knowledge held by social and individual bodies. Born to German and Senegalese parents and raised in Germany, she draws inspiration from historical events and occurrences, from poetry and prose, as well as from personal experiences, which, in a process of aesthetic layering and interweaving, she arranges into new contextual meaning. Among others, her work has been at the 14th edition of the Dakar Biennale; the Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg; the Galérie Cécile Fakhoury, Abidjan; the Atlanta Museum of African Diaspora; and Habitat Contemporary Gallery, Kansas City. Over the last few years, she has collaborated with organisations such as Dekoloniale-memory culture in the city, Savvy Contemporary, Berlin and Archive Ensemble, Berlin.

7 – 8.30 pm

I have flown to you like a child to her mother
SOUL Series (2021-ongoing)
by Dina El Kaisy Friemuth

Storytelling session with
Maha El Kaisy-Friemuth and Duygu Ağal
Carpet print on textile
with the art direction
by Workout Services

Pre-launch of the zine SOUL Stories, 2023
Graphic design by Sibel Beyer

Dina El Kaisy Friemuth engages with her mother Maha El Kaisy and author Duygu Ağal in a story-telling session. Together they weave inter-generational oralities from their migratory lineages, activating a genre that is passed on from mothers to daughters and to friends. They narrate on migratory feminism through stories of love, war and queerness. By dedicating the session to tales that remember women’s paths and their everyday political and spiritual worlds, figures such as Nefertiti or Shajarat Al Durr return. While gathering on a circular carpet, inscribed with symbols, animals or amulets, they invite us to listen to the worlds they tell, which continue to resonate and live in us. In El Kaisy Friemuth’s work, the collective and enliven revision of history through our told stories holds a feminist practice: that the personal is also always political, and that stories can be those persistent and connecting paths.

The title “I have flown to you like a child to her mother” is a sentence by the lesbian poet Sappho who, thousands of years ago, held feminist gatherings on Lesbos with music and poetry readings. Soul Stories pays homage to these spaces and weaves  narratives across time and space, creating its own plot patterns and moments of togetherness.

SOUL Stories is a series, whose first iteration, What cannot be said will be wept, was presented at KW Institute for Contemporary Art (Berlin, 2022). The zine SOUL Stories (2023) is a publication conceived by Dina El Kaisy Friemuth; edited by Nadja Cassidy; graphic design by Sibel Beyer; texts by Agnieszka Roguski, Duygu Ağal, María Berríos; and funded by M1 – Arthur Boskamp Stiftung, the Berlin Programme for Artist and the Danish Arts Foundation.

Dina El Kaisy Friemuth‘s critical and collective artistic practice unpacks the complexity of collectivity and belonging. Their work aims to create environments that center feminist figures through storytelling. Their practice is often created in collaboration with other cultural workers and involves artistic, curating and writing practices. El Kaisy Friemuth holds a MFA from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts (Copenhagen) and Berlin University of the Arts. Since 2016, El Kaisy Friemuth has worked as part of the artist collective FCNN (Feminist Collective With No Name). Recently, they exhibited at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin,  O–Overgaden Institute for Contemporary Art, Copenhagen; Gasworks, London; the 11th Berlin Biennale; and 1-1, Basel. They were the recipient of INTRO, O–Overgaden’s development program for young artists in 2021 and was awarded the Enhancement Award from M1 Arthur Boskamp Stiftung for 2021/2022.

Maha El Kaisy-Friemuth is a professor for Islamic-Religious Studies with Practical Focus at Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuernberg, Germany. She is specialized in early islamic thought with an interest in feminist and gender studies in Islam.

Duygu Ağal (she/he) is an author and presenter. His debut novel “Yeni Yeşerenler” (Berlin, Korbinian Verlag, 2022) deals with friendship, new forms of family and lesbian love.

8.45 – 9.15 pm

Poems by Amora
Performance

Amora C. Bosco is a Kenyan born writer, poet, multifaceted artist, performer and activist based in Berlin, Germany. She has established various platforms that give voices and raise awareness for diverse issues and situations in the everyday life of the Black diaspora community. Amora’s work is deeply personal and political. Her performances are powerful and emotive, engaging audiences with her lyrical language and raw honesty. Amora Bosco is the pioneer of ‘Poetry_Lab’ an extensive creative writing mentorship program for BIPoC writers in Berlin. Bosco is part of the *foundationClass*collective and was part of the Lumbung Artists invited to Documenta 15 in 2022, she holds a teaching position at the *foundationClass educational platform.

Publishing Practices 2
In the Inner Bark of Trees

Archive Berlin
Reinickendorfer Str. 17, 13347 Berlin

Opening July 29,
From 14:00

Exhibition dates
July 30, until August 27
Opening hours Thursday – Sunday 14:00 to 19:00

With contributions from 

Amina Agueznay, Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Sara Bouzgarrou, El Warcha, JuanPedro Fabra Guemberena, Aziza Gorgi, Karina Griffith, Raisa Kabir, Gladys Kalichini, Gabriel Rossell Santillán and Keiko Kimoto, Teresa Lanceta, Machi Mashy, Mallory Lowe Mpoka, Rah Naqvi, Katy Lèna N’diaye, Merve Elveren and Çağla Özbek, İz Öztat, Zineb Achoubie and Lorenzo Sandoval, Farkhondeh Shahroudi, Shireen Taweel, Cecilia Vicuña.

Curatorial ensemble   Soukaina Aboulaoula, Mistura Allison, Chiara Figone, Paz Guevara, Beya Othmani
Curator in residency   Salma Kossemtini
Visual identity   Aziza Ahmad and Lilia Di Bella for Archive Appendix with Yvon Langué
Scenography and head of production   Nancy Naser Al Deen
Structures design   Ola Zielińska
Production assistance and hospitality   Malab Alneel, Miriam Gatt, Iman Salem
Forum of co-learning curator and coordinator   Samira Ghoualmia
Light design   Emilio Cordero
Carpentry   Santiago Doljanin
Exhibition mounting   Ayham Allouch, Fai Chung, Waylon D’Mello, Rafał Łazar, Jessie Omamogho
Tech   Bert Günther

Program 

16:00 ACTIVATION AT NETTELBECKPLATZ 

Open Class

Juan-Pedro Fabra Guemberena

 

Referencing Aurelio Gonzalez’s photographic archive and its series of photos of ‘openclasses’ in the 1970’s,  done by the Teachers Union in Uruguay, the artist will activate an‘open class’ at Nettelbeckplatz, in the immediate areas of the exhibition. By engaging the knowledges and practices of some of the exhibition participants, the Open Classintends to socialize knowleges, while connecting the passers-by and the concerns of today.

 

Juan-Pedro Fabra Guemberena  is an artist that works across media on histories of forced migration, tackling historical and ongoing forms of violence and injustice while proposing formats of critical reflection and reunion in the public space. He studied at the Royal College of Art in Stockholm (M.F.A). His exhibitions include: Semiotics of Confinement, Gothenburg’s Konsthall (2020); National Pavilion Bosnia & Herzegovina, the 57th Venice Biennale (2017); The School of Kyev, Kyev (2015); 1st Biennale of The Americas, Denver (2013); Favored Nations, 5th Momentum Biennal, Moss (2009);Delays and Revolutions, 50th Venice Biennale (2003); My Private Heroes, Marta Hereford Museum (2006), The Moderna Exhibition, The Modern Museum of Art, Stockholm (2006).

 

18:00 SCREENING, 58MIN

The world like a Jewel in the Hand – unlearning imperial plunder II

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay

Followed by a conversation with Beya Othmani

 

The film travels over open books, looted objects, and postcards to look for the imperial foundations of the world in which we live. Within this wide landscape, the film focuses on the destruction of the Jewish Muslim world in North Africa, making it imaginable and inhabitable again. Narrated in the first person by an Algerian Jew and a Palestinian Jew, the film refuses the imperial histories of those places. Objects held captive in museums and archives outside of the places from where they were looted are only the visible tip of the iceberg of the mass colonial plunder of Africa. The film explores the substantial wealth accumulated by extracting raw materials, labor, knowledge, and skills, including the “visual wealth” attained by putting people in front of the colonizers’ cameras.

 

20:30 SOUND PERFORMANCE

Re-imagining in conversation

Hannan Jones and Shamica Ruddock

 

They shared a basement studio as 2020-21 Associate Artists of Open School East. Here they began the ongoing project Re-Imagining in Conversation’ (RIC). In 2021, the Annex platform of Contemporary Centre of Art Glasgow commissioned an iteration of‘Re-Imagining In Conversation’ in the form of a sonic and visual essay that culminated their research and response to ‘Female Voices in Revolution: Autobiography and Collective Memory in Assia Djebar’s Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade and Merle Collins’s Angel’; a text placing the orality of Algeria in relation to the oral traditions of the Caribbean. Supported by A/C Projects, Jones & Shamica shared the live performance of RIC at Counterflows 2022. In 2023, they performed at Counterflows and Cafe OTO alongside mentor and celebrated improviser Pat Thomas. The Shift marked their debut duo gallery exhibition at Well Projects, Margate (2022) and their contribution to ‘Seeking Channels,’ an anthology. Their essay ‘Speculation is the Vehicle’ has been published with Un Projects’ issue 17.1 in response to the theme‘Resist’. Jones and Ruddock are currently Web Residents with Akademie Schloss Digital Solitude x Liquid Architecture.

 

Hannan Jones is an interdisciplinary artist whose research motivations encompass peripheral narratives. Drawing parallels of personal and collective histories; and navigating these intersections from the perspectives of hybridity through language, rhythm, and psycho-geography. Hannan is of Algerian and Welsh origin raised in Binjareb Noongar Boodja, Australia. 

 

Shamica Ruddock is an artist-researcher often found working between sound and moving images. Through sound, Shamica considers the ways Black diasporas are engaged and presented. Shamica has been particularly interested in how black technosonic production functions as a form of speculation, narrativizing and space-making. 

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay presents the following series of activations Muscular memory — Rehearsing ancestral craft with others, as part of her installation The Rise of the Jewels(2023)

 

AUGUST 2, 16:00 WORKSHOP 
Redrawing/withdrawing the lines of colonial drawings, with Ariella Aïsha Azoulay
Pre-registration required: malab@archivesites.org
Please bring your pencils and colorful pens.

 

AUGUST 3, 16:00 WORKSHOP 
Stringing coins/Jewelry, with Ariella Aïsha Azoulay
Pre-registration required: malab@archivesites.org
Please bring with you coins from different places in the world (we will pierce them), small found metallic objects (nuts or keys) and beads.

 

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay is an author, art curator, filmmaker, and photography and visual culture theorist. She is a Modern Culture and Media and Comparative Literature professor at Brown University and an independent curator of archives and exhibitions. Most recently, her work The Natural History of Rape was shown at the Berlin Biennale in 2022, Errata at Tapiès Foundation in 2019, and HKW, Berlin, 2020. Her most recent book, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism, was published by Verso Books in 2019. the world like a Jewel in the Hand is her fifth film.

A multivocal, translinguistic, and transnational project, In the Inner Bark of Trees, reflects the necessity of continuously challenging pathways to knowledge inheritance, production, and transmission. In presenting art libraries, texturalities, performances, and co-learning sessions that defy histories of oppression and colonialism,  the project reunites publishing practices that seek to simultaneously unsettle knowledge systems from dominant symbolic cultures and release themselves from the confines of the material medium of modern colonial libraries. Instead, it fosters the imagination not only of libraries that are no longer limited by the printing system or canonical classification but crafted and nurtured by the intergenerational techniques, modalities, and feelings needed to sustain the alternatives of insurgent practices.

Although the performative nature of alternative libraries and archives has been extensively discussed, the project aims to question and reclaim the tools that allow the realisation of spaces and modes of cultural production and their maintenance and circulation in a transnational context. By virtue of virtual communication that flows like the vital lymph that passes through the inner bark of trees, the program interconnects different art libraries across regions and practices to share books and non-book cultural materials and immaterial figurations with Berlin practitioners and communities. 

A broad spectrum of performative, aural, textile, and bodily artistic practices are addressed within In the Inner Bark of Trees in conjunction with the context of the extensive research stream of Publishing Practices, which analyses other meanings and outcomes of publishing, such as descent, belonging, and dissemination. By drawing inspiration from collective, anti-disciplinary, and reflexive perspectives—which emphasise how knowledge production is always becoming participatory and contradictory, as well as how the hierarchies of learning can be disrupted—this set of research embraces artistic, publishing and curatorial practices calling for awareness of often unquestioned aspects of publishing and seeking alternative pathways to inhabit and engage with forms of knowing and sensing. 

Download the Exhibition Handout and Conceptual Framework below

Activation #5

Unpacking our Library

Saturday, May 6, 19:30

The fifth Unpacking our Library activation departs from the practice with and against archives of artist Eli Cortiñas. Cortiñas’ lecture performance ‘I’d Blush if I Could’ questions the gender bias of contemporary digital archives and it tackles the increasing feminisation of technology through devices like voice-activated systems and other forms of artificial intelligence. Navigating archival footage and different audio-visual imagery surrounding various sentient beings (humanoid robots, voice activated systems, chat bots, gynomorphic and zoomorphic social devices),the artist experiments with critical uses of archival and found footage, drawn from the generic images of commercial platforms. Through interventions into such neo-liberal archival vessels, Cortiñas’ artistic practice reveals something ominous at play -simulations, power, surveillance-, while also stimulating ways to de-center and shape-shift their hegemonic prerogatives. 

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Eli Cortiñas, Walls Have Feelings, 2019, video still.

what it feels like is good enough

Unpacking our library

June 4 with Onyeka Igwe
May 6 with Edna Bonhomme
April 2 with S*an D. Henry-Smith
March 5 with Mayra Rodríguez Castro

 

“In the inclusive sense, my politics, you’ll find all of the atypical features of my character. I may run, but all the time that I am, I’ll be looking for a stick! A defensible position! It’s never occurred to me to lie down and be kicked! It’s silly! When I do that I’m depending on the kicker to grow tired. The better tactic is to twist his leg a little or pull it off if you can. An intellectual argument to an attacker against the logic of his violence — or one to myself concerning the wisdom of a natural counterviolence — borders on, no, it overleaps the absurd!!”

– George Jackson, Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson

what it feels like is good enough is a series of conversations about black and anti-colonial praxis inspired by the activities of artists and thinkers of the black radical tradition, and by Katherine McKittrick’s deep engagement with Sylvia Wynter. “I learned from [Sylvia Wynter] that sharing stories is creative rigorous radical theory,” McKittrick writes. “The act of sharing stories is the theory and the methodology.” Hosted every first Sunday of the month at the Archive Berlin space in the Wedding, this series intends to foster discussions about how we fashion our tools for liberation.

what it feels like is good enough is a part of the Unpacking our Library strain of Publishing Practices is a recurring program committed to an expanded idea of publishing not confined to the production and dissemination of printer matters but open to a multi-sensorial reflection on other ways to know and exist.

Publishing Practices curatorial ensemble: Soukaina Aboulaoula, Mistura Allison, Chiara Figone, Paz Guevara and Beya Othmani

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Rawsht Twana is a photographer and archivist. He started taking photos in 2006 following in his father’s footsteps. In 2009, he started working as a photojournalist for Metrography – an independent photography agency based in Iraq – documenting social events through intimate and long-term projects in Iraqi Kurdistan. His images have been published in many international magazines and media outlets.

Heba Hage-Felder is the outgoing director of the Arab Image Foundation in Beirut. She joined the foundation in September 2020 and as of January 2023, she continues her engagement as a general assembly member. She has over twenty-five years of experience in institutional building and management of cultural and developmental initiatives, and holds a Master in International Relations. Born in Ghana, she grew up between West Africa and Lebanon. She currently oscillates between Bern and Beirut and is pursuing writing and visual storytelling.

The Twana Archive

Archive Berlin

Saturday
25.02.2023
7–9 pm  (CET)

Public program

With contributions by Rawsht Twana,
Caterina Erica Shanta, Heba Hage-Felder,
and Nazand Begikhani

 

The Twana Archive project consists of the study, indexing, digitization, and documentation of Twana Abdullah’s photographic archive. Twana Abdullah was a photographer active in Iraqi Kurdistan between 1974–1992, and was killed on June 22nd. The archive, contains around 20.000 images and is currently under the care of his son, Rawsht Twana.

The public program will provide an introduction to the research process, the content of the archive, and the recent archival residency at the Arab Image Foundation in Beirut. The participants will reflect about the importance of such a photographic archive in illustrating the history of a community and the photographer’s practice in his particular social and political context.

The Twana Archive project is initiated and led by the Kurdish photographer and archivist Rawsht Twana, the Italian artist and film director Caterina Erica Shanta, and is coordinated by Grazia Sechi

Crossings #2

Archive Berlin

Friday, September 16, 2022
13.30–19.00

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The body archives stories­­: it saves them from oblivion and at the same time gives them new life. What languages of the body come into play to articulate the stories of those inter-generational chains of memory? How does the performance of embodied knowledge transform us and the space around us? What humble and active role can these gestures play in transforming infrastructures and reimagining social conditions? Confronting the violent material and psychic fragmentation inherited from colonial modernity, Crossings engages with the complex archival practices of remembering and grounding that happen in the body.

 Aiming at inhabiting archives collectively, intersubjectively and in enlivening ways, Crossings is a series of encounters that opens up permeable formats to civic engagement and diasporic memory. Crossings # 2 is dedicated to feminist inter-generational traces, resistance and migrant knowledges and the politics of the body –in readings, performances, social displays and food-sharing.

Crossings establishes spaces to traverse knowledge divisions, rehearse forms of togetherness and engage with complex consciousness. Driven by a genealogy of feminist thinkers, these spaces recall M. Jacqui Alexander’s pedagogies of crossings that remembers the fragmented stories of the diasporic experience that still yearn to be told and pine for wholeness in the midst of dismembered life. They also invoke Gloría Anzaldúa’s strategy of crossings as the experiences of actively going beyond those (national) boundaries and the consequent diversification of consciousness and knowledge.

Crossings is part of Archive’s research stream (re)memberings and (re)groundings.

Full program

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Sunday, June 12, 2022
3–10 pm
HKW riverbanks and roof terrace

How do vital forms, such as plant and water worlds, archive stories? What role do they play in political struggles and in reimagining society? How can those stories defy oblivion, alienation, and objectification? Confronting the violent material and psychic fragmentation inherited from colonial modernity and the damage of its ongoing extractivism.

Aiming at inhabiting archives collectively, intersubjectively, and in enlivening ways, Crossings is a series of encounters that opens up permeable formats to life, civic engagement and diasporic memory – including political gardens, river stories, transatlantic entanglements and Afro-sonic transmigrations – in collective readings, social displays and food-sharing.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Crossings establishes spaces to traverse knowledge divisions, rehearse forms of togetherness and engage with complex consciousness. Driven by a genealogy of feminist thinkers, these spaces recall M. Jacqui Alexander’s pedagogies of crossings that remembers the fragmented stories of the diasporic experience that still yearn to be told and pine for wholeness in the midst of dismembered life. They also invoke Gloría Anzaldúa’s strategy of crossings as the experiences of actively going beyond those (national) boundaries and the consequent diversification of consciousness and knowledge.

Crossings is part of Archive’s research stream (re)memberings and (re)groundings.

Full program

Forum of co-learning

Publishing Practices 1
Cycle 2
June 10 – July 10, 2022

Publishing Practices is a yearly program committed to an expanded idea of publishing not confined to the production and dissemination of printer matters but open a multi–sensorial reflection on other ways to know and exist.

As part of the program a group of residents are constituting a forum of co-learning conceived as a site of knowledge production and transmission. The second cycle of the forum with take place from June 10th to July 10th 2022 in Archive’s space in Berlin. Various sessions will be open to the public.

15.01.2022
Study day #1
With and Against Archives

Ongoing
Unpacking our library

Unpacking our Library consists of a series of hybrid collective reading practices both digital and physical inhabiting the Archive Inventory library, in collaboration with accomplice libraries in Berlin. How do we inhabit a library collectively? How does a library become a medium for connecting readers’ trajectories, struggles and potential alliances? What are the strategies that collective readings set-up to create moments of exchange, solidarity and citizenship? The program engages with communal formats of readership – from workshops, reading groups, community libraries to reading clubs –, as well as with cultural practitioners, librarians, activists and artists. Each session put into play shared structures of archiving and reading, from digital collections, re-publications to translations and on-going investigations. By socializing collective models of library activations, the program collectively unpacks Archive’s library at its new home in Berlin. Each encounter fosters and nurtures a net of accomplices with whom to engage with in the long-term, weaving a format in which collaborations beyond the scope of this project are welcomed. The very word ‘accomplice’ stems from the Latin complicare which means to “fold, weave together” and bears the meaning of complexifying. By folding a network of accomplices, the program aims to create a kind of virtual publishing space, bringing together complex and multiple perspectives, a platform for research and a convivial web to collectively activate proposals of readership and archiving.

Unpacking our Library is a strain of Publishing Practices, core formation of Archive’s program, committed to an expanded idea of publishing, that triggers and holds a space for study, action and multisensorial gatherings. Publishing Practices is curated by Chiara Figone, Paz Guevara and Beya Othmani.

The fourth Unpacking Our library activation invites Algerian writer and feminist Wassyla Tamzali to experiment and explore strategies of collective readings and library activationsin conversation with the Intilak research team composed by artist Touda Bouanani, curator Léa Morin and publisher Maya Ouabadi. Intilak is an on-going research committed to a feminist and decolonial rewriting of the History of Cinema. The research focuses on a series of minored texts, manifestos, essays, interviews and books produced by women filmmakers, theorists and critics of the cinematic avant-gardes of the 1960s and 1970s in North Africa, such as Mouny Berrah, Wassyla Tamzali, Farida Benlyazid, Assia Djebar,Monique Martineau Hennebelle, among others. Intilak seeks to unearth, collect, study and bring those essential texts on cinema out of the margins, to put them back in the centre and facilitate their circulation. Read more.
Taking as a starting point the pages of crucial feminist periodicals from Turkey, Sosyalist Feminist Kaktüs/Socialist Feminist Cactus (1988-90) and Feminist Politika/ Feminist Politics (2009-today), Özlem Kaya, sociologist, feminist activist and human rights archivist, and Onur Çimen, writer and researcher, will experiment and explore strategies of collective readings and library activations. While reading and translating the archival materials, they will make connections between different generations of feminist positions and present today’s challenges and cultural practices. Read more.
Ausgehend von den Praktiken der Community Bibliothek Each One Teach One (EOTO) e.V. in Berlin-Wedding und der legendären Afro-deutschen Magazins Afro-Look (1987-1999) werden Michael Götting, Autor, Bibliothekar und Kurator, und Ricky Reiser, Aktivistin, Redakteurin und autodidaktische Künstlerin, mit Strategien des kollektiven Lesens und Bibliotheksaktivierungen experimentieren. Beim Aufschlagen der Seiten von Afro-Look, dem Archiv der Aktivistin Vera Heyer, u.a. Archivematerial, werden sie Verbindungen zwischen Ansätzen früherer Generationen, und den heutigen Stimmen, Positionen und Kontexten herstellen. Read more.

Departing from the pages of the largest feminist periodical in the mid 1970s in Turkey, Kadinlarin Sesi / Women’s voice, Pinar Öğrenci, artist and filmmaker, and Övül Ö. Durmusoglu, curator, writer, and educator will experiment and open up strategies of collective readings and library activations. While reading the archival materials, they will make connections between the experiments of former women generations and today’s artistic and cultural practices. Read more.

Vulnerable Archives

On silenced archives
and dissenting views

Savvy Contemporary
Invocations

17–18.09.2021

Archives – the fragile, vulnerable ones we are addressing here – are not silent per se. They do have a voice, but one that can be silenced. They do have a voice, but one whose potent airing might not be listened to. In this project – initiated by Savvy Contemporary – we collaborate with archives and organizations that engage in strategies of alternative history writing, dissent, self-organization, and participation via practical solidarity. The project Vulnerable Archives understands vulnerability as a method, with the potential of continuous recreative sources of knowledge.

Since 2020, the work of Vulnerable Archives has been taking place in Germany with research partners and communities in Turkey, Italy, and France. The aims of the project is to build dialogues among the communities that have been silenced and denied from archival practices in order to make visible the overlooked efforts and unconventional ways of storing collective memories.

In the frame of the Invocations taking place on September 17th and 18th – whose aim is to enhance archival networks and infrastructures through workshops, readings, discussions, performances, screenings and more – Archive Berlin will introduce a body of materials tracing feminists publishing practices in Turkey and its diaspora as part of Archive Inventory and a performance by Muna Mussie staging the archaeology of one’s body, a corporeal archive, repository of historical practices, fragments, and traces.