01 - 03 September

Stina Baudin & Abigail Toll:
A Fractal Manifesto - Exhibition and Performance 

Friday evening: 19:00 - 22:00 exhibition opening & performance 
Saturday: 11:00 - 19:00
Sunday: 11:00 - 19:00

3. September 2023

Allies for the Uncertain Futures (Shaunak Mahbubani with Blue P. Fleming): AUTOPOIESIS: Songs for Resuscitation - A peer-learning gathering 

14:00 - 19:00 - workshop (limited capacity, click for application)
20:00 - concert & poetry reading (public): Enana, Abul Kalam Azad, Blue Calypso

La Delicia  - Mexican family-style food 
19:00 - Exhibition & Workshop closing dinner 

Archives, memories and ways of creating knowledge are in the focus of the works that comprise this long weekend of REHEARSING MOVES ON HAZY PATHS. Participating artists consider practices of narration from lived experience, of songs or food to evoke memories, of nuanced, multifaceted and relational ways of documenting. They address archives wounded by oppression and histories reduced to datasets, look out for all that is missing in there, and propose ways of living memories. 

Stina Baudin and Abigail Toll combine weaving and sound in A Fractal Manifesto, exhibition and performance, distorting hierarchies of knowledge and exploring fractal ways of telling histories and lived experiences.

Allies for the Uncertain Futures organize Autopoiesis, Songs for Resuscitation, a day-long intimate gathering centered around the peer learning of non-dominant cultural auto-narratives and wounded archives, with a focus on the emotive power of a song. They carry forward the themes of the gathering with a public concert and poetry reading in the evening. 

La Delicia prepares a family-style dinner, reviving Mexican family recipes.

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Stina Baudin & Abigail Toll: A Fractal Manifesto

Sculptural and sonic quad speaker installation

Material list: six woven panels: used pleather, celluloid film, copper; motion sensor, projector, archive images. Sound installation: field recordings, bells, voice, flute, electronics, quad speakers. Track 2: 12-string guitar performed by Shub Roy. Music dur. 38:00 minutes.

A Fractal Manifesto

Data is a tool used to collect information and convey how social structures impact our lived experiences. The visualized recordings of our lives –  represented in the form of images, graphs, observations, symbols and numbers – are widely considered as fact. Yet categorisation often misrepresents marginalized people, or not at all.

In this visual sonic spatial installation, Canadian-Haitian visual artist Stina Baudin and British, Berlin-based experimental music artist Abigail Toll, attempt to break down the objective logic of a dataset. Through a process of what theorist Denise Ferreira da Silva terms fractal thinking, they “de-centre time and sequentiality to identify compositional patterns that reveal the structuring grammar of our world.” Through a process spanning almost a year, the artists collect truth values from their own daily experiences and co-create across the six hour time difference between Germany and Canada. Together, they distort hierarchies of knowledge and center nuanced conversations surrounding their histories of migration that are ordinarily left absent from datasets. In a series of studies, they layer together six woven panels combined with six music movements that encapsulate six themes – etymologies, water, time/displacement, flight, wonder, and memory – the six topics are generated through their research and illustrated with digitized and distorted layering of woven images and sound, as well as a co-creative manifesto. The fragmented sound and illegible visual documentation calls into question not only the absence and distortions that the artists found in previous datasets, but highlights how lived experience and memories (our truth values) undergo a process of fragmentation and distortion over time.


Stina Baudin (she/her) is an emerging Haitian-Canadian interdisciplinary artist. She has studied both at Concordia University in Montreal and The Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels. Using her own idiosyncratic visual language of pattern and relationships, Baudin’s large-scale, hand-woven fiber works create a counter-patriarchal, anti-capitalist and anticolonial way of narrating meaning from data. By collapsing the division between anecdotal and statistical data, her work removes the hierarchical distinctions between the scientific and the personal. They then start to operate as an entangled web of cohabiting knowledge centers - the scientific data indivisible from other knowledge forms that are affective and embodied. It’s important to note that her weavings are not merely data visualization. Instead they are an interpretative recontextualisation of the datascape as a way to speak beyond binaries, a way to fashion a subversive lexicon that is haptic and relational rather than representational. She has participated in national and international art residencies and exhibitions including Banff Center for the Arts Creativity (CA), and Pocoapoco in Mexico. In 2022, she completed an arts fellowship at Wildseed Center for Art & Activism, a project that hopes to build an enduring space that could cultivate the most transformative and radical ideas from Canada’s diverse Black communities and beyond.

www.stinabaudin.com // Instagram

Abigail Toll (she/her) is a British experimental music artist based in Berlin who makes ambient, psychoacoustic soundworlds. Her artistic research focuses on data aesthetics and harmonic chaos as a mode for critical thinking, often in collaboration with musicians, artists and writers. Matrices of Vision is the title of her debut release on Shelter Press which she composed during her Masters in Electroacoustic Composition at the KMH, Stockholm. It is based on a dataset which details the (in)accessibility to higher education in Sweden across seven decades and reveals the complexities around representation. In 2022, the piece premiered as an ensemble performance featuring Lucy Railton, Rebecca Lane and Evelyn Saylor, and took place at the Klosterruine in Berlin which was organized by KW Institute for Contemporary Art. Toll’s work and performances have also been shown at Kunsthalle Gent; Pawilon, Posnan; Volksbühne Berlin among others.

www.abigailtoll.com // Instagram

This exhibition is kindly supported by HOLON.

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ALLIES FOR THE UNCERTAIN FUTURES (SHAUNAK MAHBUBANI WITH BLUE P. FLEMING): AUTOPOIESIS: SONGS FOR RESUCITATION 

a peer-learning gathering

For those of us from communities who have faced the harsh effects of colonization and/or other forms of historical oppression, we know that our cultural archives suffer deep losses in the process. However, they do not become extinct, but, rather we propose, they can be seen as having being wounded. These wounded archives lose the ability to move, to circulate with their previous energy, and/or are impaled causing a loss of content and context allowing the stories of the oppressor to infiltrate and subjugate them. We believe that as healers do with corporeal wounds, artists, musicians, dancers, storytellers perform material and poetic acts of resuscitation to revive the vitality of the wounded archive.

Building on the work of Sylvia Wynter, we are creating an intimate space for acts of auto-narration through which we can take steps towards healing our wounded archives. The fourth in the process of such gatherings, this one will focus on the power of songs to rekindle personal and ancestral narratives. In this gentle process of sharing and listening, we will also have the conditions to learn specific and rooted cultural histories from each other, enabling a deeper understanding beyond abstract identities and statistics.  

     — Shaunak Mahbubani & Blue P. Fleming

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Who is this peer-learning gathering for?

We invite those from Black, Indigenous, Dalit, Roma, Trans, Disabled experiences, and those who have faced oppression in the region they grew up to share with, and learn from, each other. Session facilitators also come from these experiences.

What might happen at the gathering?

Very broadly without revealing the finer details: The group will be composed of 8-12 people. The first part of the gathering will be centred on each of us sharing our stories. In the second session we will have an embodied exercise to process these stories as a group. Lunch and dinner will be provided free of cost for the participants. Music and poetry performances will take place after dinner carrying forward the themes we discuss during the day, these will be open for all. The stage will also be open to any other participants who wish to perform.

Language: The gathering will be conducted in English.

Accessibility: The workshop space is accessible via steps. A sign language translator can be brought in if any participant needs one. Hosts are able to make the sessions more accessible for neurodivergent participants after discussing specific needs in advance.

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Shaunak Mahbubani (they/she) is a nomadic curator-writer currently based between Berlin and Mumbai. They primarily pursue projects under the exhibition series 'Allies for the Uncertain Futures’ focused on exploring possibilities of co-visioning futures grounded in the pursuit of non-duality. Other recent curatorial projects include Archipelagic Archivist (Tarq Mumbai, Aug 2023), Party Office at documenta fifteen (Kassel 2022, co-curated with Vidisha-Fadescha), A—ligning the Un—certain (Maxim Gorki Theatre, Berlin, 2022) and many other.

Blue Calypso is a poet who writes with images and voice. They film, photograph and write on topics of intimacy, marginality, neurodivergence. Unapologetically and raw, their work lights corners we have taken the habit to ignore.

Abul Kalam Azad is a poet, digging for roses in a world that severs the roots.

Enana is the Sumerian goddess of love, war, sex and fertility. Much like their name, Enana is a multi-dimensional artist. Enana is a trans non-binary Rapper, singer-songwriter, performer and activist whose artistic engine has always been fueled by their quest for freedom and social justice. In the last years they have been nurturing a unique sound that represents their intertwined existence, being born in Damascus & based in Berlin since 2015.