Timeline

Towards a Shimmer on the Horizon #2

(c) Fertig Design

A post-capitalist summer series, outdoors with sounds, performances, shared meals, and collective activities.

18.00 - Alice Lambert and Kaitlyn Davies - Gardening Utopias: readings & repottings

Gardens as open spaces for democratic participation: talk & film by Fetesh Tarekegn

19.45 - Fetesh Tarekegn: traditionally inspired Ethiopian Cuisine

20.30 - Paige Emery - A Garden for Intercommunications: an interwoven music performance and plant ritual for dreaming outside of capitalist linear-progressive timescapes


>> Bring a plant that you would like to repot for the Gardening Utopias session with Alice and Kaitlyn.

Towards a Shimmer on the Horizon aims to explore steps, practices, thoughts and sounds that could shift consciousness towards post-capitalist desires, that may illuminate new structuring elements of society, that open up wishful imagination, that could give a glimpse of shimmering possibilities. The series is not about the distant utopia, but rather about exploring a next step towards a shimmer of a world that is not structured by extraction and power, from different positions, and acknowledging existing damage, precarity & complexity. (full concept here: www.zku-berlin.org/timeline/towards-a-shimmer-on-the-horizon/)

How can we ever move beyond established extractive structures, if all our desires and attention are captured inside? If we never have enough time, if moving within is what's rewarded, or even tied to immediate survival? 


Looking for the shimmer via the GARDEN on evening #2, with different perspectives, readings, sounds, experiences, and practices.

A Garden of Intercommunications - Paige Emery

Artist Paige Emery will share sound and practice for recalibrating relationships with the dominating linear-progressive timescape, for healing with plants, and engaging in deep listening with our environment. She will open with a poetic talk on political and philosophical implications of relationships with time and nature through the lens of the garden, and then offer a guided plant ritual accompanied with live performed music that will reverberate through radios scattered among plants.

Paige Emery is an artist exploring the ecological body and the ritual interactions that weave worlds.  Her work bridges poetics and praxis, mysticism and theory, healing rituals and environmental science. This takes shape through a variety of works: art installations for intercommunication between humans and nonhumans, sound pieces for deep listening between the psychic and physical realms, and healing gardens for nonlinear time and regenerative metabolism. Her work often inhabits site-specific natural spaces such as the closed ecological system Biosphere 2 in Arizona, guerilla gardens on sites of political unrest, and an upcoming show at Mt. Wilson Observatory in Los Angeles, where it was discovered that the universe is expanding.

Paige is also an embodied gardener and plant practitioner, currently working on a regenerative ecology project with a Regen Network grant and working on art and science intersections as a Supercollider SciArt Cohort. Her poetic rituals have been published by Ignota books.  https://paigeemery.com/

 

Gardening Utopias: Plant repotting and readings with Alice Lambert and Kaitlyn Davies

‘Utopia’ was coined in 1516 by Thomas More in his work about his perfect imaginary world, in which gardens are abundant and maintained by individual stewards participating in collective upkeep. But do utopias have to be imagined? There must be aspects of utopia in everyday life if we so strongly believe in the potential. We’ll look to examine these small everyday utopias and their link to gardening.

Inspired by the “dynamic between selfish and social gardener” in More’s writing on utopia, and the gardening practices and writing of artists from Jamaica Kincaid to Derek Jarman, this session will allow participants to collectively find small joys and utopias in the tending of their everyday gardens. And a presentation by Fetesh Tarekegn on gardens & open spaces for democratic participation.

Together we will re-pot plants in need of rejuvenation using this as a starting point to explore broader ideas around radical gardening, extractivism and self-sufficiency. We ask participants to bring overgrown or exhausted houseplants to the workshop (we’ll have some on hand too!), and we’ll provide the tools to bring them new life. 

Kaitlyn Davies (she/her) is a Lisbon-based Canadian, where she works and collaborates at the forefront of music and technology. She explores this nexus through research, facilitation and community organising, and hosts radio shows on Refuge Worldwide and Cashmere Radio.

Alice Lambert is originally from the UK and has been living in Berlin since 2017. She is interested in design, urbanism and left politics, as well as music and gardening.

 

Gardens & open spaces for democratic participation, and traditionally inspired Ethiopian cuisine 

Fetesh Tarekegn is an artist, urban gardener, creator and host of a radio show focused on the experience of migration and migrations to the western world. Born and raised in Ethiopia, he graduated with a degree in animal sciences from an agricultural university in Ethiopia in the mid-2000s. He moved to Germany in the late 2000s for further studies in environmental protection and food production in a university near Stuttgart. He has lived in Berlin since 2015, pursuing new ways of creating sustainable urbans spaces that can foster gardening & greenery and promote intercultural connections. He consults various projects in this field and produces radio shows and documentaries on this and many other subjects. - fetewei-tarekegn.de