EXHIBITION: PROJECTIONS // CHAPTER II: SPECULATING // SUPERPOSITIONS THREE

CURATORS: Katia Anguelova & Lucrezia Cippitelli

OPENING: 26 /07, 19.00 – 21.00

Video projections in public space
Zbyněk Baladrán (Czech Republic) | Riccardo Arena (Italy) | Emre Hüner (Turkey) 

..they come to need each other in diverse, passionate, corporeal, meaningful ways.

Donna Haraway

For the second chapter or Living Together, we focused on practices of togetherness based on loose time spent with others and collective thinking as a methodology which leads to produce (or better co-produce) thoughts, which become imaginaries, which become inventive ways to observe life and improvise other possible lives, together.

Speculating is a practice which in the last decade became popular among students and scholars of humanities and arts, and spread thorough the cultural world, globally, thanks to the efforts of science philosopher and scholar Donna Haraway, who elaborated and connected a cloud of cultural practices, theoretical approaches and material ways of coexisting in her book Staying with the trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016). 

With Donna Haraway we have learned that ecological and geopolitical emergencies of our present are the consequence of how humans conceive themselves as separated entities from nature, coexisting according to a functional and extractivist approach: humans in the highest position, non-humans as depletable resources. Within this system, cultures are goods to be produced and consumed as amusement. Through her words we started to foresee the possibility of de-naturalizing the way we are called to live, learning from a network of writers, scientists, animals, ethnographers, philosophers, artists, activists.

“Becoming with”, “SF” (as science fiction, speculative fabulation, string figures, science fact), “Trouble”, “Response-ability” are few of Haraway’s words which depict possible ways out from the constraints of our present condition. They are based on practices of being together, imagining together, inventing together, speculating together. They are not mental diversions from reality: rather they are mental processes which lead to ways of reinvent ourselves in relation with many others and space we inhabit. It is a narration of possibilities which emerge from spending time together, connecting on an intuitive level, sharing words, inventing new words, explaining how they could become realities: wordling.

Speculation is therefore a practice of togetherness which leads and demands us to be present, be together, observe elements which surround us and imagine – through them – outer worlds. It is not a passive practice: on the contrary it is an activation, where cultural forms are engaged not as good to be consumed, but rather as elements that we can actively bridge and learn from, because they can lead us to unexpected spaces and states of mind.

Arena’s complex installation Hyphae is part of a broader ecosystem of research and formalization that began in 2017 with field researches in Iran, Armenia, and Ethiopia, crystallized into a metaphysical poem divided into the 21 chapter’s book LuDD! – Topography of Light (2019-2021). A wide spectrum of different media and expressive languages dialogue one with the other: the video introduces part of this iconographic materials, edited and animated so to loose any linear connotation of narration. In The Commodity dialogue, Baladrán explores the commodified nature of artworks, questioning its meaning and relationship with economy in a film which becomes a metalinguistic exploration on the commodified character of images, lost in an indistinguishable flood of data. With [ELEKTROİZOLASYON], Hüner operates on the borderline between fiction, performance documentation and documentary: sequences where actors perform multiple characters of a script, improvise or interact with real life situations and people, moving across locations such as factories, shipyards, junkyards, mannequin shops, electronics and car repair shops, the ruins surrounding the city of Istanbul and the landscapes where industrial contamination, vegetation and geological formations are interwoven.

Living Together is a program of artistic research and artistic production curated by Katja Anguelova and Lucrezia Cipitelli in the context of the SUPERPOSITIONS THREE exhibition series initiated by the Institute of Contemporary Art in Sofia (ICA-Sofia).

Further information: https://ica-sofia.org/en/ica-gallery/exhibitions/item/560:superpositions-three-living-together-projections-chapter-speculating