Flyer for the project. Image credit: Ursula Biemann, Acoustic Ocean, 2018. Video still
Digital Dramatizations: Ecologies from the Future
Fold II of Digital Ecologies: an international exhibition project in two folds
across two exhibition venues, the Center for Contemporary Art ‘Ancient Bath’ (6th September Str. 179) and the former tobacco warehouse SKLAD (Ekzarh Yosif Str. 16) in Plovdiv, Bulgaria.
With works on display and interventions by Donatella Bernardi, Ursula Biemann, Luchezar Boyadjiev, Johanna Bruckner, Sarah Burger, Delphine Chapuis Schmitz, Valko Chobanov, Voin de Voin & Marie Civikov, Jonas Etter, Anne-Laure Franchette, Monica Ursina Jäger, Stefanie Knobel, Marlene Maier, Boyan Manchev with Ani Vaseva and Leonid Yovchev (Metheor), Emil Mirazchiev, Uriel Orlow, Ursula Palla, Lourenço Penaguião Soares, Elodie Pong, Oliver Ressler, Tabita Rezaire, Dorothea Rust, Elza Sile, Kerstin Schroedinger, Pascal Schwaighofer, Venelin Shurelov, Sandro Steudler, Kamen Stoyanov, Milva Stutz, Katharina Swoboda, Una Szeemann / Bohdan Stehlik, Riikka Tauriainen, Lena Maria Thüring, Alexander Tuchaček, Borjana Ventzislavova, and Martina-Sofie Wildberger
with interventions and talks by the philosophers Boyan Manchev, Stanimir Panayotov, and Gerald Raunig
Curated by Dimitrina Sevova
Austrian participation co-curated by Katharina Swoboda
with organizational support from Emil Mirazchiev
04 May to 30 June 2019
Opening Hours
Tue-Sun 12:30h-18:30h
Mon - closed
Opening of the project Digital Ecologies:
Saturday 04 May 2019 (Ancient Bath, then SKLAD)
16:00h Doors open at the two venues
Ancient Bath
16:00h Dorothea Rust, performative intervention L’animoteur 9 — selfie or I am donkey and cacti
17:00h Welcome and introduction by Dimitrina Sevova, curator of the project, and Emil Mirazchiev, director of Art Today, organizer of the project, at Center for Contemporary Art ‘Ancient Bath’
SKLAD: the evening program continues
19:00h Boyan Manchev, public lecture The New Athanor, or Philosophy for the Future Nature, accompanied by a performance by Metheor (Ani Vaseva, Boyan Manchev and Leonid Yovchev), Theater of the Elements. A Diptych by Metheor
20:00 Short break
20:15 Gerald Raunig, talk One More Ecology, Futureless, but a Present Out of Joint
21:15 Discussion between Boyan Manchev, Gerald Raunig and the audience
21:45 Short break
22:00h Voin de Voin & Marie Civikov, performance Extinction Rebellion, 20′
The symposium, curated by Dimitrina Sevova, takes place in conjunction with the exhibition project Digital Ecologies and gives further insight and context on the works on display. It is a non-academical collection of events, performances, interventions, talks and discussions aimed at sharing knowledge and non-knowledge of eco-logic and aesthetic experience in togetherness with the audience.
Public Symposium in conjunction with the project Digital Ecologies:
Sunday 05 May 2019 at the former tobacco warehouse SKLAD (evening program at Ancient Bath)
SKLAD: Morning Session
10:30 Doors open, coffee
11:00 Introduction by Dimitrina Sevova, curator of the project
11:15 Artistic interventions by Milva Stutz, My Dear Lover, Elodie Pong, Paradise Paradox, and Borjana Ventzislavova, Magic Resistance
12:45 Short break
13:00 Discussion between the artists and the audience
13:30 Lunch break
In relation to Pascal Schwaighofer's performance-lecture, you are encouraged to join (even ahead of time) &Absence&Abstinence on Viber
SKLAD: Afternoon Session
15:30 Pascal Schwaighofer, performance-lecture &Absence&Abstinence
16:00 Venelin Shurelov, Presentation on Body Hacking
17:00 Luchezar Boyadjiev, talk The Anthropocene as a Prolonged-Release Anthropogenesis
17:45 Discussion between the artists and the audience
18:15 Short break
18:30 Kerstin Schroedinger, performance Matters of Practices/Actions/Doings, 25′, followed by screening of 16mm film by the artist, Fugue, 2015, 8′
19:15 Short Break
19:30 Uriel Orlow, lecture-performance Grey, Green, Gold, 25′, followed by discussion with the artist
20:15 Dinner break
Ancient Bath: Evening Program
21:30 Stefanie Knobel, performance A manifestation for the quasi-public
Public Symposium in conjunction with the project Digital Ecologies:
Monday 06 May 2019 at the former tobacco warehouse SKLAD
10:30 Doors open, coffee
11:00 Artistic interventions by Lourenço Soares, Jonas Etter, Elza Sile
12:30 Discussion between the artists and the audience
13:00 Donatella Bernardi, performance A suit made out of a galactic towel, performed by Elma, followed by discussion with the audience
14:00 Lunch break
15:30 Oliver Ressler, talk Gathering around the Wreckage
16:30 Short break
16:45 Stanimir Panayotov, talk Disembodiment: The Future of Nature
17:30 Discussion with Oliver Ressler, Stanimir Panayotov and the audience
18:00 Short break
18:15 Alexander Tuchaček, performance-lecture paradise now – Echos from the Future
19:00 Dorothea Rust, performative urban intervention L’animoteur 8 — selfie or I am donkey, continued, starting at SKLAD, and the artist will lose herself in the public space of Plovdiv
Uriel Orlow, Imbizo Ka Mafavuke (Mafavuke’s Tribunal), 2017. Video still
Overview over the two folds
Digital Ecologies 2018-2019, Plovdiv, Bulgaria: an international exhibition project in two folds
Digital Ecologies is composed of two folds of an international group exhibition project and takes place across two venues, the Center for Contemporary Art ‘Ancient Bath’ and the former tobacco warehouse SKLAD in Plovdiv, Bulgaria. The first fold, an exhibition project under the title, Operaismo Naturale: Ecology of the Event, takes place from 27 July to 5 September 2018, with talks, interventions and performances on 28 and 29 July and on 5 September; and the second, Digital Dramatizations: Ecologies from the Future, an expanded exhibition project building on the first exhibition and its context, from 4 May to 30 June 2019, with an accompanying symposium on 5/6 May 2019.
The exhibition project spans two folds, one critical, the other speculative, back and forth, leaving a continuity of time between them to become a discontinuity of our collective living multiplicities in-between the two, to cast a bridge, an elastic spinal column between them with its own sensible temporality. The time between the two folds of Digital Ecologies matters. It is the time to negotiate between the two and consider the work that has to be done in everyday life. As the title of the first fold, Operaismo Naturale, suggests, it is time for urgent actions, i.e., the work and no work of inventions that are independent from productivity. Operaismo Naturale forges a body of collective and personal artistic research to activate compositional changes between human labor and natural habitats and their biodiversity.
[excerpt from the curatorial input; read the complete text here]
Johanna Bruckner, Holofuel / Terra X, 2018. Video still
Curatorial Input
Fold II; Digital Ecologies. Digital Dramatizations: Ecologies from the Future
Hamm: Nature has
forgotten us.
Clov: There’s no more nature.
Hamm: No more nature! You exaggerate.
Clov: In the vicinity.
Samuel Beckett, Endgame (1955) [1]
In Beckett’s play Endgame, Clov periodically announces the extinction of various things listed by Hamm: there are no more bicycle wheels, pap, nature, sugarplums, tide, navigators, rugs, painkillers, coffins… At least, none remain in the vicinity. It is a haunted play and endgame, haunted by shades and echoes from the future and from the past, by the objects of which he wishes to create hallucination. Digital Dramatizations – Ecologies from the Future revolves around a mystery of objects to withdraw and the distinct obscurity of Beckett’s ecological thought. We wait for something that never arrives. It may have arrived in the no-where, but not in the now-here. And yet as we are waiting, there is an openness to the wonder in our wait that may lead to another encounter – an encounter with the Other, with something strange. We wait for things to become magically different without actually trusting the use of magic, and without realizing that we are ourselves responsible for any change we desire to happen. It is a strange stranger [2] yet to come, an aesthetic (dis)orientation of perceptions towards the future that Digital Dramatizations pursues. It awaits and speculates about the unknowable, a yearning for change and yet in our despair, the obscure object of anxiety and depression. The future is the time of the fall, when the dark becomes deeper and deeper and “the sorrow of the stranger might give us a different angle on happiness not because it teaches us what it is like or must be like to be a stranger, but because it might estrange us from the very happiness of the familiar.” [3]
Digital Dramatizations – Ecologies from the Future approaches ecology through an interspecies performance in a collaboration with non-human agents at the intersections of theater, theatricality, (un)acting and contemporary art. It concerns how ecological thought and its method of dramatization(s) can open up the potentialities of ecologies from the future, of life after life, of nature after nature, of the future after the future. It dis-plays new speculative realities caused by artistic experiment and sensibilization, which is a dramatization of data in the gap between what things are and how they are represented as data. Digital Dramatizations strives to find objects, not the raw sense of data, and dis-play them because the world of things calls for art. Ecological awareness is futurality and aesthetics from the future. And the object of art is the unknowable yet to come: “Art is (from) the future.” [4]
Ecology is neither a paradise nor an alternative to current reality. It is neither utopia nor dystopia, an anagrammatic movement like Erewhon, an anagram of utopia or inverted utopia, [5] like Sci-Fi projects are a refraction of uniform time and the present upon many futures. Ecological sensibility relates to symbioses, to things that co-exist in uneasy ways, says Morton. It calls up, in the potentialities opened up by these futures by rendering life strange, dis-embodied and incorporeal companions whose physicality takes place in humor.
[excerpt from the curatorial input; read the complete text here]
Text: Dimitrina Sevova
Notes
[1] Cf. archived page at <https://web.archive.org/web/20180224132141/http://www.samuel-beckett.net:80/endgame.html> (accessed 2019-03-10).
[2] Timothy Morton, “Thinking Ecology: The Mesh, The Strange Stranger, and the Beautiful Soul,” Collapse, Issue 6 (2010), pp. 265-293.
[3] Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness, (New York: Duke University Press, 2016), p. 17.
[4] Timothy Morton, “Tim Answers an Email,” Ecology Without Nature (blog), 13 September 2017 <http://ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com/2017/09/tim-answers-email.html> (accessed 2019-03-10).
[5] Samuel Butler, Erewhon: or, Over the Range (London: A. C. Fifield, 1910/1872) <http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1906/1906-h/1906-h.htm> (accessed 2016-02-27).
Oliver Ressler, The economy is wounded – let it die!, 2016. One of a series of photographs
A project of Art Тoday Аssociation, Plovdiv in collaboration with Corner College, Zurich.
The project is part of the program of Plovdiv 2019 - European Capital of Culture.
Donatella Bernardi, A suit made out of a galactic towel
It is supported by the Municipal Foundation Plovdiv 2019, Pro Helvetia, National Cultural Fund Bulgaria, the Federal Chancellery of Austria (Bundeskanzleramt), and organized by the Art Today Association.
Media partners
Kamen Stoyanov, Formation of Shadows, Part I: Tbilisi, 2018. Video still
Fold II. Digital Ecologies: Digital Dramatizations – Ecologies from the Future
Donatella Bernardi, A suit made out of a galactic towel
A suit made out of a galactic towel
2019. Installation and performance at the symposium. Performed by Elma
Ursula Biemann, Acoustic Ocean, 2018. Video still
Acoustic Ocean
2018. Video installation with audio, 18′
Ursula Biemann, Deep Weather, 2013. Video still
Deep Weather
2013. Video essay, 9′
Luchezar Boyadjiev, Anthropocene. Cover Version, 2019. One of nine digital prints after Jan Brueghel the Younger
Anthropocene. Cover Version
2019. A set of 9 digital prints; digitally and hand-manipulated photographs after Jan Brueghel the Younger
Luchezar Boyadjiev, The Anthropocene as a Prolonged-Release Anthropogenesis, 2019. Image from the working process
The Anthropocene as a Prolonged-Release Anthropogenesis
2019. Talk at the symposium
Johanna Bruckner, Molecular Ghosts of Love, 2019. Video still
Molecular Ghosts of Love
2019. Film production for vertical cinema, 9:16
Johanna Bruckner, Holofuel / Terra X, 2018. Video still
Holofuel / Terra X
2019. Single-channel video installation
Sarah Burger, Landscapes, 2019. Digital print
Landscapes
2019. Six digital prints on fabric, each 145 × 97 cm, installed with aluminum bars and steel wire
Sarah Burger, Touches, 2018. Digital collage
Touches
2018. Seven digital collages printed on photo paper, each 21.9 × 30 cm, framed
Sarah Burger, Wasser, Blätter, Fels, 2018. Scanned composition printed on silk
Wasser, Blätter, Fels and Füsse, Ranken
2018. Two scanned compositions printed on silk, 178.75 × 130 cm each
Delphine Chapuis Schmitz, WAITING2BGHOSTS-AGAIN, 2017. View of the installation at Swiss Art Awards, Basel. Photo: Office fédéral de la culture, Guadalupe Ruiz, 2017
WAITING2BGHOSTS-AGAIN
2017. HD video with sound, four screens, room, carpet
Valko Chobanov, Wingspan of a heart, 2019
Wingspan of a heart
2017. Installation
Voin de Voin and Marie Civikov, Portal 2: Physical Property, 2019
Portal 2: Physical Property
2019. Installation
Extinction Rebellion
2019. Performance by Voin de Voin and Marie Civikov
Jonas Etter, Sepia (II.2, III, IV, V, IX), 2015. Inkjet prints
Sepia (II.2, III, IV, V, IX)
2015. Inkjet prints
Jonas Etter, Untitled, 2019. Installation view
Untitled
2019. Installation
Anne-Laure Franchette, ζιζάνια, New Philadelphia & Little Manchester, 2018, Yellow Brick, Athens
to tell you the truth
2019. Weaving, plastic, electric wire, industrial thread
Monica Ursina Jäger, Shifting Topographies: Forest Tales and Emerald Fictions, 2019
Shifting Topographies: Forest Tales and Emerald Fictions
2019. 3 channel HD, colour, sound, 16:9, 20′
Monica Ursina Jäger, Topographies, 2014
Topographies
2014. Installation
Stefanie Knobel, Interfacing the non-, 2019. Installation view at OnCurating Project Space, Zurich, September-October 2018. Photo: Miwa Negoro
Interfacing the non-
2018. Installation, laser on cotton, silicone, hand movements on flatscreen monitors
Stefanie Knobel, A manifestation for the quasi-public, 2018-. Solo performance at Aargauer Kunsthaus, 2019. Photo courtesy of the artist
A manifestation for the quasi-public
2018. Solo performance in the program of the symposium
Marlene Maier, Unreal Engines, 2019. Video still
Unreal Engines
2019. Single-channel video installation, 20′
Boyan Manchev with Ani Vaseva and Leonid Yovchev (Metheor)
Cover of Thomas Norton's Tractatus Chymicus
The New Athanor, or Philosophy for the Future Nature
2019. Lecture at the symposium by Boyan Manchev
accompanied by
Metheor, Roadtrip to Hell, 2017. Photo: Svoboda Tzekova
Theater of the Elements. A Diptych by Metheor
1. Hades: Mineralogy
2. Eros: Demonology
2019. Performance by Metheor (Ani Vaseva, Boyan Manchev and Leonid Yovchev)
Uriel Orlow, Imbizo Ka Mafavuke (Mafavuke’s Tribunal), 2017. Video still
Imbizo Ka Mafavuke (Mafavuke’s Tribunal)
2017. HD video, black and white / colour, stereo, 16:9, 28′
Uriel Orlow, Grey, Green, Gold, 2015-2017
Grey, Green, Gold
2015-2019. Lecture-performance at the symposium, 25′
Ursula Palla, talking to the moon, 2018. Installation view
talking to the moon
2018. Video installation, sound, 9′, looped
Mamoru Oshii, Ghost in the Shell, 1995. Film still
Disembodiment: The Future of Nature
2019. Talk at the symposium
Elodie Pong, Something in the Air (Just do it?) , 2019. One of a series of kinetic objects
Something in the Air (Just do it?)
Something in the Air (Just did it)
Something in the Air (Just doing it)
2019. Series of kinetic objects
Paradise Paradox
2019. Presentation at the symposium
One More Ecology, Futureless, but a Present Out of Joint
2019. Talk at the symposium
Oliver Ressler, The economy is wounded – let it die!, 2016. One of a series of photographs
The economy is wounded – let it die!
2016. Print on PVC, hung on the façade of the Ancient Bath
Oliver Ressler, Stranded, 2018. Digital print
Stranded
2015. Two digital prints on self-adhesive folio, from the series of photographs Stranded
Oliver Ressler in collaboration with Zanny Begg, Anubumin, 2017. Video still
Anubumin
2017. A film by Zanny Begg & Oliver Ressler, 18′
Oliver Ressler, The Visible and the Invisible, 2014. Video still
The Visible and the Invisible
2014. A film by Oliver Ressler, 20′
Oliver Ressler, Failed Investments, 2015. Digital print, 60 × 120 cm
Gathering around the Wreckage
2019. Artist talk, contribution to the symposium (05/06 May 2019)
Tabita Rezaire, Deep Down Tidal, 2017. Installation view, shown on a curved wall of LED panels, Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa. Photo courtesy of the artist
Deep Down Tidal
2017. HD video, aspect ratio 16:4.5, 18′44″, edition of 3
Dorothea Rust, L’animoteur 5 + 6 — selfie or I am donkey, 2018. Performance / Intervention at the Center for Contemporary Art Ancient Bath, in the public-space in Plovdiv, Bulgaria and at SKLAD, in the context of Digital Ecologies 2018-2019: an international exhibition project in two folds – Fold I, 2018. Operaismo Naturale: Ecology of the Event. Selfie: Dorothea Rust
L’animoteur 8 — selfie or I am donkey, continued
2019. Performative intervention
L’animoteur 9 — selfie or I am donkey and cacti
2019. Performative intervention
Dorothea Rust, eyjafjallajökull, exercise no. 9, 2018/2019. Photo: Dorothea Rust & Arnold Häni
eyjafjallajökull
2018/2019. Video performance work
Elza Sile, Domestic Sets, 2019. Photo: Elza Sile
Domestic Sets
2019. Installation, 1.8 m × 2.5 m × 5 m, tape, plaster, cardboard, metal, paint, transparent film
Kerstin Schroedinger, Matters of Practices/Actions/Doings, 2016. Performance
Matters of Practices/Actions/Doings
2016. Performance, 25′. Performative installation
Kerstin Schroedinger, Fugue, 2015. Film still
Fugue
2015. Film, 16mm, sound, b/w, 8′
Pascal Schwaighofer, &Abstinence&Absence, 2019. Lecture-performance on Viber in the symposium
&Abstinence&Absence
2019. Lecture-performance on Viber at the symposium
Venelin Shurelov (SubHuman Theatre), Up and Down (Горе-долу), 2018. Installation view
Up and Down (Горе-долу)
2018. Kinetic installations
Venelin Shurelov, Man Ex Machina, 2011. Cyber-lecture. Photo: Andreas .muk. Haider
Presentation on Body Hacking
2019. Presentation at the symposium, 60′
Sandro Steudler, K20-B (Animation), 2007. Video still
K20-B (Animation)
2007. Video, looped, 3′06″
Lourenço Soares, Landscape Paradise: A Dialogue, 2018. Installation view
Landscape Paradise: A Dialogue
2018. Video, no sound, 7′ 34″
Lourenço Soares, IMAGES (Love Story Or Weather Forecast), 2019. One of a series of slides
IMAGES (Love Story Or Weather Forecast)
2019. Slideshow, sound
Lourenço Soares, Natural Death, 2018. Video still
Natural Death
2018. Video, no sound, 8′ 40″
Lourenço Soares, Dinosaur Wallpaper (with four illustrations based on Zdenek Burian), 2019. Detail
Of Gardens and Dinosaur Wallpaper (with four illustrations based on Zdenek Burian)
2019. Text on paper, wallpaper
Kamen Stoyanov, Formation of Shadows, Part I: Tbilisi, 2018. Video still
Kamen Stoyanov, Formation of Shadows, Part II Gori, 2019. Video still
Kamen Stoyanov, Formation of Shadows, Part III Zemo Nikozi, 2019. Video still
Formation of Shadows, Part I: Tbilisi
2018. Short film, 18′
Formation of Shadows, Part II Gori
2018. Short film, 15′ 30″
Formation of Shadows, Part III Zemo Nikozi
2018. Short film, 25′
Milva Stutz, My Dear Lover, 2019
My Dear Lover
2018. Wall installation
Encyclopedia Britannica, Ant
The Ants (after Caryl Churchill)
2019. Audio work
Una Szeemann, One silent drape, 2019. Detail
Una Szeemann, One silent drape
2019. Molleton fabric, stage props, size variable
Bohdan Stehlik, Some Stains Decay, Others Do Not, 2019
Bohdan Stehlik, Some Stains Decay, Others Do Not
2019. Installation, print on tarpaulin
Riikka Tauriainen, Hydrocommons: Watery Bodies and Fluid Exchange, 2019. Installation view
Hydrocommons: Watery Bodies and Fluid Exchange
2019. Installation
Lena Maria Thüring, Future Me, 2016. Video still
Future Me
2016. HD Video, single channel, 16:9, color, sound, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, Albanian, Macedonian, English titles, 11′ 49″
SAYHERNAME
2017. Song, 6′ 05″
Alexander Tuchaček, paradise now 2.0, 2015. Video installation with footage from paradise now - The Living Theatre, DVD by Marty Topp, 1968 - 2007
paradise now – Echos from the Future
2019. Site specific installation and live performance at the Symposium
Borjana Ventzislavova, And the sky clears up (specter-whisk), 2019. Inkjet on cotton paper, mounted on MDF, framed, 40 × 60 cm
And the sky clears up (specter-whisk)
2019. One of a series of inkjet prints on cotton paper, mounted on MDF, framed, 40 × 60 cm
Borjana Ventzislavova, And the sky clears up (MAGIC RESISTANCE), 2018. Video still
And the sky clears up (MAGIC RESISTANCE)
2018. 4K or HD, color, stereo, 23′
Martina-Sofie Wildberger, CONVERSATION PIECE: BOB AND ALICE, 2017/2018. Performance, 15′, with Martin Chramosta, view of the audience with T-shirts, Fondazione Giuliani, Rome, Italy
Conversation Piece: Bob and Alice
2017-2019. Installation, wallpaper, stack of T-shirts