Errant Bodies publishes books, audio and video works with a focus on sound and spatial arts, contemporary political and pedagogical thought and research, performative and collaborative practices, and poetic writing.
Such areas of focus are developed through establishing specific series, including: audio issues (sonic and auditory research), critical ear (artistic monographs), surface tension (spatial and sited practices), doormats (on speculative political thought and current issues), errant editions (poetics), anthologies (edited volumes), impossible notes (on artistic research), and records (audio and video work).
Please join us for this extended program taking place in Madrid - April 19 & 20, 2024, in celebration of the launch of Party Studies, vol. 2.
Friday, April 19th / 17:00 Book presentation of the second volume of Party Studies - a series on party culture and experimental social life - with the editors Víctor Aguado, Ramón del Buey, Brandon LaBelle at the Reina Sofía Museum's bookstore
Followed by social get-together at the ESLA EKO / 20:00 Calle Ánade, 10 y calle Algorta. Metro Oporto-Urgel - Madrid After the liberation of an old company store, El Eko was born as an open, multidisciplinary and self managed space for all the neighbors in Carabanchel, in the south part of Madrid. A sociocultural, free and self managed space (E.S.L.A. = espacio sociocultural liberado autogestionado).
Saturday, April 20th / 19:00 - 22:00 Third Listening Party at La Nave, C/ Amor Hermoso 88, Usera, 28026 Madrid
In the context of planetary thinking, it is by way of situated practices that we may better attune to the polyphony of a shared world. This includes acknowledging the diverse forms which cultures, bodies and discourse may take – to decolonize dominant methodologies that objectify the earth. To work at supporting a “world of many worlds” is to upset the lines often separating subject and object, life and death, self and other. These are questions and concerns we want to gather around, to open a space for listening across worlds.
Please join us for this free-style gathering centered around the concept of Third Listening. Taking place at the studio of Raúl Marcos and Oihana Altube in the neighborhood of Usera, in Madrid, the gathering will be facilitated by artist and writer Brandon LaBelle, with the input of María Escobar, Fátima Cué Pérez, Catalina Mahecha, África Nieto, Paco Lidón, along with Oihana Altube and Raúl Marcos. The gathering will include exploring Third Listening as a proposition for reworking knowledge practices by way of the uncommoning configurations central to a “creaturely life” – where ecologies of relations support a reorientation of what counts as human.
The evening will include the screening of a new video work The Ghost Party. Developed collaboratively by Oihana Altube, Raúl Marcos, María Escobar, Fátima Cué Pérez, Brandon LaBelle, Paco Lidón, Catalina Mahecha, and África Nieto, the work was filmed in various sites in Madrid in 2022, and aims at capturing scenes of embodied transformation. Taking guidance from the figure of the ghost, the performers construct a ritualized dance of withdrawal, to inhabit a new planetary relation.
at Errant Bodies studio, Cotheniusstraße 6, 10407 Berlin
Berit Fischer will share with us her research and activities in micropolitical practices, from cultures of empathy to regaining ecological futures.
Berit Fischer (PhD) is a transdisciplinary cultural practitioner. She is a curator, scholar, artist, writer, and an editor with focus on experiential and socio-ecological knowledge formation, critical spatial and transformative emancipatory practices, that are often inspired by feminist- and radical pedagogies. In 2016 she founded the Radical Empathy Lab, an ongoing nomadic socio-ecological and research laboratory for experiential knowledge formation. She is the founder and curator of the (Re-)Gaining Ecological Futures festival at the Floating University, Berlin.
"… to expand beyond representation, to conquer an intimacy with the body as a vibratile surface that detects the waves even before they arise, to learn how to surf, establish zones of familiarity within the movement itself – that is 'sailing is necessary,' because if we don't, our destiny will probably be shipwreck…" - Suely Rolnik, Anthropophagic Subjectivity
Errant Bodies studio, Cotheniusstrasse 6, 10407 Berlin
de—COMPOSED documents the multi-faceted practice of Stefan Roigk, including acousmatic compositions, sound installations, musical graphics and text-sound compositions. Spanning the years 2005 to 2023, the book is beautifully designed by the artist, and includes 2 audio-CDs of related sound works.
STEFAN ROIGK (* 1974) studied fine art with a focus on sound art in Hannover under Professor Ulrich Eller. In his work, Roigk pursues the intermedial interweaving of sound collage, installation, musical graphics and text-sound composition. The resulting works approach sound as a field for artistic and aesthetic research, taking it as both their departure point and central medium. Roigk's artistic focus lies on the dynamic staging of context-related fragments of everyday existence, which he imbues, in the sense of visual music, with an extraordinarily developed, visually poetic formal language. In realizing these aims, Roigk uses compositional and deconstructivist techniques of collage and assemblage for the development of stage-like spatial compositions with an implicit underlying narrative sense, in which the diverse media blend together like the instruments of an orchestra. In his work, Roigk reflects on his own living and production conditions, while investigating the political potential of aurality and tracing the subjective construction of reality. Since 2010, he has worked regularly in co-operation with visual artist Daniela Fromberg on intermedial installations and compositions.
Thursday, September 21, 2023 / 18:00-22:00, with reading by the artists of their new book b for the birds (at 21:00)
Location: Errant Sound, Rungestrasse 20, 10179 Berlin
Coinciding with the publication of their new book “b for the birds” (Errand Bodies Press), Silvia Maglioni & Graeme Thomson present LIKE LICHENS LISTEN (Variation V). Inspired by the symbiotic interactions of lichens and the extraordinary solidarity of the vegetal world that fosters collaboration between organisms of completely different natures, LIKE LICHENS LISTEN recreates an immersive space where we can dwell in an awareness of deep time. Images of the Garajonay Forest (La Gomera), an ancient living organism that contains an enormous variety of endangered plants – last vestiges of the vegetation that covered most of Europe millions of years ago – are visited by visual and sonic shadows that gradually reveal the names of extinct bird species, entangled with poetic text fragments. This magical ecosystem, with its shifting electroacoustic soundscape, invites us to re-enchant the world and listen to the play of inter-species alliances.
Graeme Thomson & Silvia Maglioni are filmmakers, artists and researchers whose work explores the porous borders between fiction and documentary, the visible and the invisible, the audible and what has been silenced. Focusing on the reactivation of lost, forgotten or silenced archives and histories, their practice includes the creation of films, mixed-media installations, soundworks, film-performances, radio shows, vernacular technologies and books. In dialogue with literature, philosophy, music and science, their work is research-based, process-oriented and trans-disciplinary, proposing new forms of collective vision and engagement with contemporary thought and politics.
Dayang Yraola is a curator and sound art researcher based in Manila. She is co-curator of The Listening Biennial, 2023, as well as Associate Professor at the Department of Theory, College of Fine Arts, and an adjunct at the Department of Musicology, College of Music, University of the Philippines.
For her talk at Errant Bodies, Dayang will share and reflect upon her curatorial strategy for The Listening Biennial and its program across Southeast Asia. The curatorial core of designing the program in Asia is anchored on two catchwords that artists in the region have been using generously before the pandemic—community and connection. We consider ourselves (a) community (a barangay, a kampung, a muban, a 村, or a village), where the connections we made as practitioners serves as umbilical cord beyond the geopolitical borders. We are therefore kins, more than colleagues; we share common goals, more than projects or resources. While this ecology of practice remains in the “post-pandemic” current, with the introduction of Listening Biennial, it became curious to shift the connection from practice to attention (to listening), which implies an expansion beyond the familiar.
In the course of examining, an old favourite platform presented itself useful—tambayan (rumhängen, abhängen). Tambayan is a Filipino term which literally translates to hanging out. It is an informal gathering that maybe purposeful, but also allows "anything can happen". And this became the preferred attitude in approaching all activities that were included in the Listening Biennial Inter-Asia Program.
The Listening Biennial will be taking place at Errant Bodies, opening July 8th. The Listening Biennial is an international biennial focusing on listening as a practice and issue, bringing together commissioned audio works by a group of 30 artists from around the world. The works will be presented through an informal listening lounge, inviting audiences to spend time listening together.
July 8 – July 30 / Saturday & Sunday 13:00 – 18:00
Exhibition of audio works by Participating artists:
Nicolás Kisic Aguirre (Peru); Rouzbeh Akhbari (Iran); Ayọ̀ Akínwándé (Nigeria/UK);Yara Asmar (Lebanon); Aya Atoui (Lebanon); Teresa Barrozo (Philippines); Ariel Bustamante (Chile); Alejandra Canelas (Bolivia); Lucia Herbas Cordero (Bolivia); Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui (Bolivia); Tara Fatehi & Pouya Ehsaei (Iran/UK); Ibelisse Guardia Ferragutti (Bolivia/Brazil); Victor Mazón Gardoqui (Spain); Jimena Croceri & Sara Hamdy (Argentina/Egypt); Abdellah M. Hassak (Morocco); Hasan Hujairi (Bahrain); Igor Jesus (Portugal); Jason Kahn (US/Switzerland); Dirar Kalash (Palestine); Arendse Krabbe (Denmark); Landra (Sara Rodrigues with Rodrigo B. Camacho) (Portugal); Yolanda Mamani Mamani (Bolivia); mamoru (Japan); Sary Moussa (Lebanon); Arnont Nongyao (Thailand); Ayumi Paul (Germany); Planetary Listening (Germany); Bernardo Rozzo (Bolivia); Griselda Sánchez (Mexico); Alexandre St-Onge (Canada); The Observatory (Singapore); Zorka Wollny (Poland)
Sharing stories on sound, music and listening – a series of conversations
July 16, 17:00 conversation with musician Alejandra Cárdenas
@ Errant Bodies studio, Cotheniusstrasse 6, 10407 Berlin
Alejandra Cárdenas (aka Ale Hop) is a Peruvian-born artist. She began her career in the 2000s in Lima’s underground music scene. Her body of work includes diverse formats such as live shows, albums, multimedia artworks and research. Whether alone, maneuvering an intricate repertoire of electric guitar techniques, or collaborating with other artists, her live performances have an immersive and transcendental character. Last year she launched two collaborative practices: Agua Dulce, with percussionist Laura Robles, radically mutating Afro-Peruvian rhythms (recently picked as global album of the month by The Guardian), and with the sound artist Tatiana Heuman, experimenting with self-built South American clay instruments and storytelling. She also co-grounded the festival Radical Sounds Latin America (of which she was co-curator from 2019 to 2021) and, nowadays, initiated the editorial platform Contingent Sounds, aiming at facilitating critical discourses and artistic research. She has shown her work in spaces such as UNSOUND (2022), Sonic Acts (2022), CTM Festival (2022), Taiwan C-LAB (2022), REWIRE (2021), Haus der Kulturen der Welt (2021), New York’s Museum of Arts and Design (2021), Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (2020), Somerset House Studios (2019), Heroines of Sound (2019), among others.
July 23, 17:00 conversation with artist Ayumi Paul
@ Errant Bodies studio, Cotheniusstrasse 6, 10407 Berlin
Ayumi Paul is an artist and composer who works with sound, performance, ritual, paper, textile, film and installation. The interdependency of all phenomena is essential to her practice, which is dedicated to listening and engaging the non-linearity of time. She trained as a classical violinist at Hochschule für Musik Hanns Eisler in Berlin and Indiana University and performed at many of the world’s major concert halls for more than 15 years, while continuously developing her multi-disciplinary approach to exploring sound and consciousness. Paul’s work is today mostly presented within visual and performative art contexts, including Kunsthalle Osnabrück (2016 and 2020), National Gallery Singapore (2018 and 2021), SFMOMA (2021), Villa Massimo (2021), Auditorium Parco della Musica (2022), Gropius Bau Berlin (2022).
On Friday, 14 April at 7pm, artist, writer and publisher Brandon LaBelle will present the publishing house Errant Bodies Press at Zabriskie. He will talk about the publishing practice and about more recent publications. The presentation is in English. Admission will be free.
* Since 1995, Errant Bodies Press has been at the forefront of developing and supporting the diverse attitudes toward sound and spatial arts, auditory culture, community and commoning initiatives, poetic and experimental writing, contemporary political and pedagogical thought and research, performative and collaborative practices.
* Such areas of focus are developed through establishing specific series, including: audio issues (sonic and auditory research), critical ear (artistic monographs), surface tension (spatial and sited practices), doormats (on speculative political thought and current issues), errant editions (poetics), anthologies (edited volumes), impossible notes (on artistic research), and records (audio and video work).
* Errant Bodies also supports situated research and collaborative projects with a view towards fostering communal engagement and imaginaries. This includes the ongoing project Dirty Ear Forum. Activities are directed and facilitated by Octavio Camargo, Luis Guerra, Brandon LaBelle, Riccardo Benassi, Lily Errant, and fliegende Teilchen. Errant Bodies is associated with Errant Sound project space in Berlin.
Errant Bodies studio Cotheniusstrasse 6 10407 Berlin
Bárbara Lázara / Sharing and discussing her artistic practice and approach
The latent realm underneath words. In this talk I will unfold some aspects of my vocal work and research dedicated to track and amplify subjugated languages, archives of the body and stolen memories.
Bárbara Lázara is an artist, vocalist, and researcher devoted to making space for technologies that have been betrayed and abandoned by Western thought. She researches with her voice and senses knowledge embedded in ancestral memory. Describing her body as an archaeological ruin and the Spanish language as a Catholic church built on its top, she asks her buried remains how they want to speak. Sound emerges and reflects back in different ways, depending on the space she finds herself in. Her interest in echolocation began when she was working in Berlin and a friend invited her to perform in an abandoned hospital. She was struck with the way the space talked back at her, as each material had a different response to the same sound. This experience amplified interests of vulnerability in performance, and she slowly stripped her work away from gadgets. Eventually, it ended up being her voice, sometimes performing along with others, and finding ways to create effects found in sound editing devices only with the architecture. Bárbara Lázara is DAAD sound and music fellow 2022/23.
Budhaditya Chattopadhyay / Presenting his recent publication, Sound Practices in the Global South: Co-listening to Resounding Plurilogues (London: Palgrave Macmillan)
This book develops a comprehensive understanding of the unique sound worlds of key regions in the Global Souths, through an auto-ethnographic method of self-reflective conversations with prominent sound practitioners from South Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America. The conversations navigate various trajectories of sound practices, illuminating intricate sonic processes of listening, thinking through sounds, ideating, exposing, and performing with sound. This collection of conversations constitutes the main body of the book, including critical and scholarly commentaries on aural cultures, sound theory and production. The book builds a ground-up approach to nurturing knowledge about aural cultures and sonic aesthetics, moving beyond the Eurocentric focus of contemporary sound studies. Instead of understanding sound practices through consumption and entertainment, they are explored as complex cultural and aesthetic systems, working directly with the practitioners themselves, who largely contribute to the development of the sonic methodologies. Refocusing on the working methods of practitioners, the book reveals a tension between the West’s predominant colonial-extractive-consumptive cultures, and the collective desires of practitioners to resist colonial models of listening by expressing themselves in terms of their arts and craft, and their critical faculties.
Budhaditya Chattopadhyay is an Indian-born media artist, researcher, and writer, with a PhD in artistic research and sound studies from Leiden University, The Netherlands. Chattopadhyay is a professor at Critical Media Lab, Academy of Art and Design, University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland.
As a result of our Dirty Ear Forum convened in February 2022, a radio piece collaboratively composed between Kat Austen, Miguel Buenrostro, Kate Donovan, Florence Freitag, Brandon LaBelle, and Michelle-Marie Letelier. Broadcast on Kunstradio, Sunday, December 18, 2022.
We are not solid, we are agglomerates of wave functions. Wavelings. Planetariat. Waves across time & space, places & things. Being-in-Touch with many other forces, movements, cycles.
Oscillations that pass across and then back, MTH rhythms. Rhythms across bodies, time. Time as wave-like rather than linear.
That is pastpresentfuture tumbling upon itself.
What does it mean to perceive as a Planetariat? Oscillation as a way to shift between scales and the rhythms we encounter, the atmospheres we create, the conversations that hold us. To be pulled along, down, down, and then up, to breathe as a Waveling. Waving, weaving, being-woven.
The threading of Edges & Centers, Margins & Peripheries – what happens or emerges in these exchanges, tides, winds?
And what washes up? Like driftwood. Across sands & situations. To oscillate within another time-frame, a geological wave of change, composting back into the ground. We all make ripples.
Things That Matter: Conversation between & with Yang Yeung and Salomé Voegelin
Saturday, July 16, 2022 / 15:00 - 18:00
Errant Bodies studio Cotheniusstrasse 6 10407 Berlin
How are you today? How was dawn? Has the weather affected you the same way? When was the last time you saw a rainbow?
What has been on your mind lately? What is a book you have tried many times to finish, but have failed? What is your favorite recipe? What is one discovery about yourself you made recently? What small joy have you recently experienced? How have you shared this with others?
Are your dreams in color? Can we tell each other one - be it broken or whole? When are you the most playful? Do you believe in magic?
If an artist were to visit you in your neighborhood, how would you spend time together? What would you like to smuggle into forbidden territory? What makes you feel safe? What is freedom like?
Yang Yeung is a writer on art and an independent curator based in Hong Kong. She founded the non-profit soundpocket in 2008 and is currently its Artistic Director. Her recent publications include “caring is a quality: on being touched by Alecia Neo’s Care Index” (for Dance Nucleus, Singapore) and an exhibition essay on Francis Alÿs’ solo Wet feet __ dry feet: borders and games (for Taikwun Contemporary, Hong Kong). She devotes herself to following how artists think, move, make and unmake sense of the world. She continues to work towards juxtaposing contemporary art with ideas from the ancient and modern classics she teaches at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Salomé Voegelin is an artist and writer who works with sound’s relational capacity to develop different and plural knowledge possibilities. She writes essays and text-scores for performance and publication. Books include Listening to Noise and Silence (2010), The Political Possibility of Sound (2018) and Sonic Possible Worlds (2014/ 2021). Her forthcoming book Uncurating Sound: Knowledge with Voice and Hands (2022) foregrounds the perfidy of norms and considers the violence of contemporary art.Voegelin’s practice works through participatory, collective and communal approaches and pursues sonic pedagogies that trouble the lines of knowledge from an uncertain and plural listening. She is a Professor of Sound at the London College of Communication, University of the Arts London.
Errant Bodies studio Cotheniusstrasse 6 10407 Berlin
Thursday, May 19, 2022 / 19:30
Jordan Lacey’s new book Urban Roar: a psychophysical approach to the design of affective environments brings together environmental philosophy, psychoanalysis, ambience theory and field recording practices, to present an ambitious vision for the future human habitat. In this launch, Lacey will foreground the influence of indigenous scholarship on his thinking. He argues for the importance of artistic practices that engage with the ‘spirt(s) of the land’ as means to connect society with those more-than-human forces existing beneath the threshold of human sensibility. He considers such practices to be critical endeavours in the age of the Anthropocene, which saturates the planet with images of the self. The presentation includes sounds and images from recent gallery-based and publicly situated artworks.
Jordan Lacey is a senior research fellow and practicing sound artist based in the School of Design at RMIT University. His research focusses on the role sound installations play in the design of public spaces in urban environments. He is author of Sonic Rupture: a practice-led approach to urban soundscape design (Bloomsbury 2016) and Urban Roar: a psychophysical approach to the design of affective environments (Bloomsbury 2022). His website, jordan-lacey.com documents multiple artworks and publications.
Errant Bodies studio Cotheniusstrasse 6 10407 Berlin
Wednesday, May 4, 2022 / 19:30
The research-creation project Soundwalking from the research-practice of sono[soro]ridades, aims to develop the conceptual framework of the term Sono-(soro)rity, as a feminist collective practice approaching aural expressions and social coalitions. Under this subject, the presentation will introduce a small survey of activist and artistic projects by collectives embodying sound practices in Latin America, especially enacted through walks in the public sphere. Her talk will be followed by a night soundwalk featuring her latest project Sono-sono[walks], an audio Augmented Reality audiowalk that brings together the audio recordings of female-identifying, two-spirit, non-binary individuals about their experience of walking in urban space at night in Colombia, Mexico, Canada, Singapore, and Turkey.
Amanda Gutiérrez (b. 1978, Mexico City) explores the experience of political listening and cultural identity by bringing into focus sound and walking practices. Trained and graduated initially as a stage designer from The National School of Theater, Gutiérrez uses a range of media such as sound and performance art to investigate how conditions of everyday life set the stage for our experiences and collective identities. Approaching these questions from aural perspectives continues to be of special interest to Gutiérrez, who completed her MFA in Media and Performance Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is currently elaborating on the academic dimension of her work as a Ph.D. studentin Arts and Humanities at Concordia University. Gutiérrez has held numerous art residencies at FACT, Liverpool in the UK, ZKM in Germany, TAV in Taiwan, Bolit Art Center in Spain, and her work has been exhibited internationally in venues such as The Liverpool Biennale in 2012, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Harvestworks, SBC Gallery, amongst other. Gutiérrez is currently one member of the Board of Directors of the World Listening Project.
From a tissue of voice and word to a dance of memory and inner melody, dreaming is posed as an-other body, within and without, shaped by all that touches and impinges, and that is situated always below the line of what we know and speak.
Aine E. Nakamura, my skin listens to voice I will present an art of voice and body, which will fluidly move between stories. Language(s) does not seem to fulfill our need to communicate, imagine, embrace, or being embraced, because it all started from spirit and the unspeakable communal. Nevertheless, I will borrow words. Melodies will come to me too, through which I will tell, so that stories will not be lost. I trust my body that it listens and waits, for my voice to be one with it and for ‘song’ to guide my body. I wish to seek, through my inner, what needs to be communicated or what desperately or quietly needs to live in bodies. Inner is my focus as it does not seem to escape from the past or the present, for our care in the future, and for dreams seeded to be carried forward. At least, this is my wish.
My voice is of and with my body. I pursue sensibility and spirituality as my aesthetics through a focus on the nuanced possibilities of my voice. This is my way of showing resilience against violence.
Singer, composer, and performer Aine E. Nakamura creates transborder art through voice and body. She resides in Berlin, Germany as an awardee of the Fulbright fellowship. She will present her performance project Circle hasu We plant seeds in the spring of mountains at Stückemarkt at Berliner Festspiele’s 2022 Theatertreffen, and her new site-specific work Under an Unnamed Flower at the 50th International Theatre Festival at the Venice Biennale. She has presented her work at Gallatin Galleries NY (2021), A Concert of Electronic Music in honor of Mario Davidovsky (2019), Dias de Música Electroacústica (2019), New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival (2018), October New Music Festival in Finland performed with Mikro Ensemblen (2018), and Abrons Arts Center with ICE (2019). Her other appearances include The Two directed by Dmitry Krymov (New York Theater Workshop 2019). www.evaaine.com @ainenaka
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Annette le Fort, j’aime ma caméra parce que j’aime vivre Closing my eyes, breathing in, breathing out, humming. The camera is an extension of my body, moved by my heartbeat, looking through my closed eyes. Video, 2006. (trembling, Part 1)
Annette le Fort is a poetic researcher in the field of language, with a focus on the act of writing, script as a trace of memory, voice and synaesthesia. She explores this mainly through video works, sound projects, photographs and different forms of performative diaries. She is the editor of the series »Parole«, which deals with the materiality of language (Salon Verlag Cologne). Her diary projects are published as an art book series by Revolver Publishing Berlin, including »Sevilla Diary« (2015), »Mothers Diaries« (2016), »Memory Maps« (2019). Her sound projects include »Phonetic Skin. A Library of Voices« (2017) and »Synästhetische Bilder« (2020) with Eilith le Fort, published by Errant Bodies Press, Berlin.
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Brandon LaBelle, Dreamtime X – without Author, artist Brandon LaBelle will give a performative reading of his new book. Comprised of 100 short poetic entries, Dreamtime X is a personal meditation on the negative and the missing. Developed as a diary kept between March 2020 and March 2021, the author searches for forms of affiliation, friendship, solidarity under the conditions of lockdown, giving way to a destituent poetics, a voice that speaks by way of absence, aligning itself with emptiness, the unseen, creatures, vibration, and that finds possibility in the withdrawal of visibilization.The voice always already constituted by silence.
Brandon LaBelle is an artist, writer and editor of Errant Bodies Press. His work focuses on questions of community, resulting in a range of collaborative, pedagogical and para-institutional initiatives, including: The Pirate Academy (2021-22), The Listening Biennial (2021-), Communities in Movement (2019-), The Living School (with South London Gallery, 2014-16), Oficina de Autonomia (2017), The Imaginary Republic (2014-19). His publications include: Acoustic Justice (2021), The Other Citizen (2020), Sonic Agency (2018), Lexicon of the Mouth (2014), Diary of an Imaginary Egyptian (2012), Acoustic Territories (2010, 2019), and Background Noise (2006, 2015).
Please join us for the launch of The Future Is Inherited: Fragments of a Chile in Revolt with an informal, online conversation with the author Rodrigo Karmy Bolton
Saturday, April 2, 2022 / 16:00 – 18:00 Errant Bodies studio Cotheniusstrasse 6, 10407 Berlin
We’re pleased to launch The Future Is Inherited, and to celebrate the ongoing revolutionary developments taking place in Chile.
This collection of articles and essays was written alongside the events of the ongoing Chilean popular rebellion. Parallel to what emerged with force on October 18, 2019, these are fragments that carry with them the sign of danger and the potential for cohesion, both because of the flammable matter they deal with and because of the urgency they create. In Rodrigo Karmy Bolton’s writing, the incandescence of the people, the Averroist analysis of a necessary Constituent Assembly, and the bankruptcy of the transitional episteme of the state, are brought forward with a feverish rigor. The revolt, like his writing, continues to remind us that in the most decisive tremor, in the adjustment with our historicity and, with the words of Salvador Allende, the future is inherited.
RODRIGO KARMY BOLTON is professor and researcher at the Center for Arabic Studies in the Faculty of Philosophy and Humanities, University of Chile. In his work, contemporary thought is intertwined with medieval Greek-Arab thought, focusing on the question of imagination. This includes research on the theological roots of modernity, the comparative research of Christianity and Islam, and medieval Arabic philosophy. He holds a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Chile with a thesis entitled “Politics of In(Ex)-carnation: Elements of a Genealogy of Biopolitics.” He is the author of Barbarian Writings: Essays on Imperial Reason and the Contemporary Arab World (LOM, Santiago de Chile, 2016) and Intifada: A topology of popular imagination (Metales Pesados, Santiago de Chile, 2020), among others.
Book presentation and discussion with author Manuela Zechner – On care, commons and municipalism
Friday, March 18, 2022 / 19:30 Errant Bodies studio Cotheniusstrasse 6, 10407 Berlin
The publication Commoning Care & Collective Power (published by transversal texts) traces the twin genealogies of childcare commons and the micropolitics of municipalism in Barcelona. It shows how grassroots movements engaged new institutional experiments after Spain’s 15M movement, marked by struggles for social reproduction and a new feminist politics, leading towards commons municipalisms. Interested in both struggles for and to care, this book looks across subjective and collective processes. Interdependence and autonomy, care and micropolitics, building power and commons, neighbourhood and city: those are some of the terms brought into resonant tension. Midwives, mothers, carers and councillors prefigure schools and cities of care, as this book turns to explore how institutions are themselves sites of struggles to care. This book’s interweaving of concepts and experiences traces a powerful cycle of collective learning, yielding new articulations between the commons and the public, and channeling new feminist forces.
Manuela Zechner is a researcher and facilitator working across the social movements, academia and the arts. She currently works on&with struggles across ecology and care, within the MovE research project based at Jena University, as co-producer of the Earthcare Fieldcast, and as part of the Common Ecologies School that is launching in spring 2022. She just published 'Commoning Care & Collective Power' with transversal texts and runs the Future Archive project since 2005.
February 7 - 11, 2022 / Errant Bodies studio, Berlin
Kat Austen Miguel Buenrostro Kate Donovan Florence Freitag Brandon LaBelle Michelle-Marie Letelier
For this edition of the Dirty Ear Forum, questions of the more-than-human are brought forward. This includes reflecting upon experiences of planetary entanglement, and how we might reimagine human community making from an ecological perspective. Through such reflection, issues around extractivism, the rights of nature, wild law, acoustic ecology and ecofeminism can be considered, allowing for a broad base of knowledge sharing. Central to the Forum is a focus on sound and listening, and in what ways sonic practices and auditory thinking can contribute to ecological and planetary practices. What does it mean to listen beyond the human? Is it possible to reorient understandings of voice to extend toward other life forms? Can sonic materiality open pathways of co-existence, and even trans-species collaboration so as to nurture biodiverse worlding? What potentialities as well as pitfalls do we encounter within models of human and more-than-human connectedness? We’ll follow these questions and concerns through the sharing of practices and knowledges, as well as open discussions so as to foster meeting points and synergies. This will lead to mapping key perspectives as well as potential future directions, so as to deepen processes and methods of planetary engagement.
Dirty Ear Forum is an experimental forum for sonic research. Occurring in different locations and settings, it is based on the coming together of a selected group of practitioners to share and exchange research on sound and listening, and to collectively work through a range of sonic concepts. At the center of the Forum is a desire to bring together individual viewpoints and practices into a shared activity, embracing sound as a conceptual and material platform that may provide creative opportunities for collaborative and pluralistic expressions.
We're pleased to share the release of our latest publication by author and choreographer Sara Gebran. Quantum Society is a performative publication aiming to immerse readers in a world of social intimacy. As in her previous work Another Hole, author and choreographer Sara Gebran adopts a speculative-writing style so as to avoid categorization. A writing that appropriates everything that goes on in front of her, from films, news, daily pandemic or post pandemic stressed jokes, philosophy, to books on art, or by artists, sex and desires, performances, YouTube, Instagram, and soap operas. Quantum Society figures a delirious and hallucinatory theoretical poetics that prompts access to a new world without representation Sara calls: NOTHING, BIG EMPTY, BIG NOTHING, where everything we know will not appear as separated in the future. Comprised of 550 micro-chapters, Quantum Society journeys through an overabundance of critical topics, personal reflections, political rants, song lyrics, lists, capturing contemporary global life as one of loneliness as well as critical hope and courage to demand an ecstasy of intimacy. Sara uses the page as a stage for choreographic and dancing practices, and as a public space where readers meet (in quantic time) to experience shared imaginaries. Readers are treated as a collective audience, equally addressed as co-thinkers, co-writers, and performers. The instructions of emotions by colors, emotions by spacing, and how to sing this book on the frst pages gives the reader agency to put together their own matrix of feelings and imaginaries. The uncanny intimacy she develops is a tool and a concept she calls Social Intimacy, a part of her investigation on how to achieve, together, a more open, inclusive and solidary society, a QUANTUM SOCIETY, which she unfolds slowly throughout the book.
Published in collaboration with MaMa Multimedia Institute, Zagreb. Available from les presses du réel.
We're glad to be participating in this second in a series of twelve annual events taking place on December 12 from 12 noon to midnight (EST) organized by Christof Migone. Each year the event will move through each word of the 12-word phrase ‘you and I are water earth fire air of life and death’ and activate the word of the year in myriad ways. This year the word is ‘and’, consequently the focus is on repetitions, conjunctions, and duos. Last year it started with ‘you’, this year we connect you to anything and everything, you are together-with. Or, we get stuck in the very act that ‘and’ opens up, into the enormity that the so-what-next that ‘and’ implies. ‘And’ is all possibilities in a nutshell. For more information see: https://youandiarewaterearthfireairoflifeanddeath.com/
Weaving together image theory with environmental theory, counter-anthropology, feminist materialism and ecofeminism, the publication COMMON IMAGE explores Western and non-Western thought, past and present, poetic and mythic in search for a common image: a sensus communis, an ethico-aesthetics implicating the mineral, the vegetal, and the animal.
Western humanism has established a reifying and predatory relation to the world. While its collateral visual regime, the perspectival image, is still saturating our screens, this relation has reached a dead end. Rather than desperately turning towards transhumanism and geoengineering, we need to readjust our position within community Earth. Facing this predicament, COMMON IMAGE develops the notion of the common image understood as a multisensory perception across species; and a common ethics, a comportment that transcends species-bound ways of living. Highlighting the notion of the common as opposed to the immune, Hoelzl and Marie ultimately advocate otherness as a common ground for a larger than human communism.
Ingrid Hoelzl will discuss the book’s central notion of the common image asking how it may institute a larger than human community-in-the-making and unmaking, and reflect on the sound-image (Chapter 4) as an immersive condition of oceanic resonance.
Day 1: December 3, 19:30 – 21:30 / Public book launch & conversation with Ingrid Hoelzl on COMMON IMAGE: Towards a Larger than Human Communism (transcript verlag) by Ingrid Hoelzl and Remi Marie
Day 2: December 4, 14:00 – 17:00 / Closed workshop & group discussion: Ingrid will introduce her research project General Humanity and open a discussion on practices of Resonance
Errant Bodies studio, Cotheniusstrasse 6, 10407 Berlin
Ingrid Hoelzl is an independent scholar specializing in digital and environmental image theory, and the artistic director of the General Humanity collective bringing together theory, poetry, and performance. She holds a PhD from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and a diploma in Fine Arts/Visual Culture Studies from the Universität der Künste Berlin. She is the author of Der autoporträtistische Pakt (2008, Fink) and (with Remi Marie) of SOFTIMAGE (2015). Ingrid has worked as a researcher and educator at universities and art academies worldwide, most recently as a Marie-Curie Fellow at the Collegium Helveticum, ETH Zurich. Her research on the soft- and postimage, the image as transaction and the Martian image has been published widely in journals and anthologies, including Multitudes (2019), Parallax (2020), the Posthuman Glossary (2018) and The Palgrave Handbook of Image Studies (2021).
Writer and sound artist Nina Dragičević will be holding a talk and related workshop at Errant Bodies studio on October 1 & 2, 2021. She will focus on the sound of power, addressing how bureaucracy performs as a mechanism for the construction, and continuous perseverance of, domination. In what ways does bureaucracy function as an explicit representation and affirmation of power and its ideology? Through her talk and workshop she will consider how bureaucracy is present in everyday life through abstract omnipresence (power itself) + material artifacts (such as forms and clerks), a silent yet screaming force directed at a subordinate population. Following David Graeber’s golden rule of liberalism – the more government claims to be reducing bureaucratic procedures, the more bureaucratic procedures it produces – bureaucracy is seemingly applied universally, yet it primarily coordinates inequality. And this – the domination-drive of bureaucracy and its drive for the formalization of inequality – constructs its specific sonority as well as its specific sonic policies. We shall listen to them and try to articulate the sound of bureaucracy as a mechanism of power through a critical and radical feminist perspective.
The event is developed in the context of The Listening Academy, a research academy on questions of sonic culture, listening, and social and civic resistances and practices.
Day 1: Public presentation / October 1, 19:30 – 21:30
Day 2: Closed workshop & group discussion: In pursuit of listening to world-systems / October 2, 13:30 – 16:30
Nina Dragičević is a writer and a sound artist, with a PhD in Sociology. Her doctoral thesis, The Sonority of Bureaucracy in Everyday Life, is to be published as a book in 2021. She is the author of five other books, among them Slavne neznane: zvočne umetnice v konstrukciji družbe (Famous Unknowns: Women and Lesbian sonic artists in the construction of society) and Med njima je glasba: glasba v konstrukciji lezbične scene (The Music Between Them: Music in the construction of lesbian communities). She is also the author of two albums – Parallellax (Kamizdat Records) and Ma’am, there is no such thing in reality (Kamizdat Records) – and has exhibited several sound installations and radio dramas. In 2017 she founded the Topographies of Sound Festival in Ljubljana.
Dragičević is the 2020 recipient of the Župančič Award for outstanding artistic achievements. In 2019, her book Ljubav reče greva (Love says go) was shortlisted for the Jenko Award, Veronika Award, and Kritiško sito Award, as well as included in the critics’ choice for 10 Books from Slovenia. In 2018, she won The Knight of Poetry competition (both the Jury Award and the People’s Choice award). The same year she was presented the Outstanding Achievement Award of the University of Ljubljana. In 2018, she was shortlisted for the European award Palma Ars Acustica.
We're pleased to share the launch of the first volume in a series dedicated to Party Studies. The series is being developed in the context of a collaboration with an organization in Madrid, focusing on the ways in which parties may act as scenes of anarchic worlding.
Party Studies, vol. 1 / Home gatherings, flat events, festive pedagogy and refiguring the hangover / ISBN: 978-0-9978744-9-5 / Edited: Víctor Aguado, Ramón del Buey, Brandon LaBelle / Published: Errant Bodies Press, Berlin / AMEE, Madrid
From social get-together to scenes of delirium, the publication aims to unpack the party as a complex, vertiginous construct that provides a dynamic view onto questions of community. If the party functions as an intensification of togetherness, what lessons might it provide in negotiating a given social order? In particular, volume 1 considers the house party, and in what ways domestic space is reworked in support of an extension of the family unit. Including a series of interviews with those active in flat events in Budapest during the communist regime and today, essays on hospitality, the politics of rest, and erotic knowledge, and documentation on Sala 603, an informal house-theater in Curitiba. The publication is the first in a series developed in parallel to a set of party-workshops held in different locations in Madrid, each of which performatively investigates states of partying, posing the party as a scene of creative study.
Contributions by Miguel Ballarín and Víctor Aguado, Octavio Camargo, István Javór, András Kovács, Brandon LaBelle, Julia Morandeira, and Lucia Udvardyova.
Book launch – Towards a Micropolitical and Holistic Post-Representational Practice, A Case Study by Berit Fischer November 21, 2023
Book launch of de—COMPOSED with Berlin-based artist Stefan Roigk November 4, 2023
Presentation at Zabriskie Buchladen, Berlin April 14, 2023
An evening on voice, listening and language with Bárbara Lázara and Budhaditya Chattopadhyay / January 25 January 4, 2023
Social Music #4 December 20, 2022
Things That Matter: Conversation between & with Yang Yeung and Salomé Voegelin / July 16th July 6, 2022
Urban Roar with Jordan Lacey / May 19th May 9, 2022
Soundwalking from the research-practice of sono[soro]ridade with Amanda Gutiérrez
An evening of listening, dreaming, voicing / with Aine E. Nakamura, Annette le Fort and Brandon LaBelle, April 30th April 23, 2022
Book launch with Rodrigo Karmy Bolton / April 2nd March 23, 2022
POSTPONED: Event / Commoning Care & Collective Power, March 18th February 22, 2022
Quantum Society: release February 2, 2022
COMMON IMAGE: Book presentation / Workshop with Ingrid Hoelzl November 20, 2021
Talk / Workshop with Nina Dragičević September 20, 2021
Party Studies, vol. 1: release September 16, 2021