Towards a Shimmer on the Horizon #3
A post-capitalist summer series at ZK/U. In the evening, outdoors, with a shared meal and two performances.
ZK/U BerlinSiemensstr. 27, 10551, Berlin, Germany
Promona Sengupta - Time travelogues: The battle of Sylt, listening session from the shiplogs of the spaceship Beben
C1 Collective: Just a day inside the machine, like no other. Audio installation
Eliza Chojnacka - Pigeon on the swan: The feast made to shamelessly greet you in home-sick dreams hidden in transparent cabbage leaves, then cooled by ice swan fantasies, grounding within brave visions and spooky whispers. In collabo with Izabela Koch
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?
Time Travelogues: The Battle of Sylt
Promona Sengupta
Captain Pro and Cosmic Oceanographer Sumo of the deep space exploration vehicle Beben accept a top secret mission on Planet Earth, commissioned by the ungovernable Seagull Mafia of the North Sea. When the two cosmonauts arrive in the bougie North German spa town of Sylt, the antediluvian marshes cough up hair-raising histories of land and sea, birds and people, all in the backdrop of an impending battle between the lily-livered German ruling class and its dogs, the police, and the 9 euro ticket-buying, loudly holidaying north sea punk antifa. Pro meticulously logs the mission, sharing information on how the "Holiday" is a colonial practice, the possibilities of "decolonial travel and leisure", time travelling tips and tricks to traverse through the border regime, and of course, the on board playlist.
Join Captain Pro on her shore leave on Earth, in a listening session from the shiplogs of the Spaceship Beben, a FLINTAQ+ intergalactic interspecies deep space exploration vehicle surfing the timespace continuum in search of an unalienated, joyful femme life -- ex-capital, ex-patariarch, ex-hetero and so on. On its planetfalls on Terran, the Beben regularly recruits cosmonauts to join the onboard research facilities for collaborative experiments on space travel, time travel, and other queer feminist ex-capitalist ways of surviving the universe. This session is hosted by Beben crew member Kita Commandanta Andrea.
Promona Sengupta is an artist, academic, activist and curator based in Berlin. She is a doctoral associate at the International Research Center: Interweaving Performance Cultures at the Freie Universität Berlin. Her creative practice engages with decolonial speculative imagination as a means for radical politics. She co-created and co-flies the FLINTAQ+ Spaceship Beben, as its serving Captain and chef. She co-curates Radio Kal, as a part of the transoceanic longform artistic project kal, and was the resident artist at District Berlin in 2020. She has shared her multidisciplinary creative practices at the Maxim Gorki Theater, District Berlin, English Theater Berlin and other spaces. She co-founded the Berlin-Delhi based progressive cultural politics pop up Mo'Halla. In her activist work, she fights for dignity alongside her comrades in queer feminist antifascist and BIPOC community spaces. She is committed to centering rest and repair in the activist spaces she inhabits, which is a project in progress.
https://www.instagram.com/promo_sapien/
Just a day inside the machine, like no other
C1 Collective
"Let's reveal ourselves to each other
And not hesitate,
To thank every curse
That brings us back to the authentic source
of all recurring mistakes.
Let’s justify the future
through a scream that calls on freedom; the self-earned freedom
through anger, through resistance, and through love.
This is how we fulfill the promise"
C1 collective presents the audio installation: “Just a day inside the machine, Like no other”. Fragments and shattered thoughts from the life in the shadow of the capitalist machine, through words and sounds a long daydream builds up and makes us question small aspects of our daily lives. The different aspects and experiences that the individuals might have and how to mirror it through daily life, acts, and routines, what threatens us as societies and as social creatures, the fear of a radical change, and the way to get there without a mass loss on a humanitarian level.
C1 Collective - self-organized group of Syrian diasporas redefining its identity through electronic music and arts.
https://www.instagram.com/c1ollective/
https://soundcloud.com/c1ollective
Pigeon on the Swan
Eliza Chojnacka
The Feast made to shamelessly greet you in home-sick dreams hidden in transparent cabbage leaves, then cooled by ice swan fantasies. Grounding within brave visions and spooky whispers to attract fussy appetite of earthy signs. *twist of Gołąbki and Peach Melba
in collabo with Izabela Koch
Eliza Chojnacka is an artist-researcher based in Berlin and a graduate of Social Design at the University of Fine Arts in Vienna. Her practice grew on the moist ground of Krzak Collective, a non-profit collectively run garden and cultural space in Warsaw. She uses this experience now working at Floating University. In her work, she uses uncertain, ephemeral practices such as walking, fermenting, cooking and gathering as a way of unfolding stories. Centering her interests around poetic, cultural and social ties to care and maintenance, she often takes the position of a host. Currently her focus lies in more-than-human communication and collective practices of resilience. She collaborated with and showed her work at 26th Biennial of Design, Ljubljana; Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw; DOCK20, Lustenau; ZK/U, Berlin; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin. Recently she has undertaken an art residency together with some Krzak members at D21 Kunstraum in Leipzig.