Exercises in Becoming Water

postgraduate program, workshop

Marialena Marouda Exercises in Becoming Water

Score for a boat trip

no-boat

Introduction:

This is a score for a multiple day boat trip for two or more people. It should last a minimum of two days. It can take place on any body of water large enough to sail on for a number of days: a lake, a canal, a river, a sea or an ocean. The boat you use, its size and form, can differ accordingly. This score invites you to spend time on this body of water and to see how it affects/ can affect your body, your thoughts, and your work. It proposes some tasks that you can try while sailing. It also suggests different texts that you can read during the trip. Each task can take as long as you need it to take, from a few minutes to several days. Take your time.

1. Preparations

Start by making sure you know the basics regarding how to sail the boat or that you sail with someone who is a captain. Let them show you the knots that you will need to navigate and to dock the boat. Read the book of rules of conduct on water and inform yourself about the conditions of insurance. If there is a VHF on the boat, make sure you know the basics of how to communicate through it. Sign all the necessary papers and register, if necessary, with the marine authorities, before you start your trip.

2. Inhabiting your Boat

Get to know the boat you are on and its history. How old is it, by whom was it made? What material is it made out of? Who owns it? Is it a shared boat, or does it belong to an individual? How come you are on it then?

3. Inhabiting the Body of Water

Get to know the body water you are sailing on, its set of conditions and its history. Is it an ocean or a sea? Which one, how much salt does it have? Are there tides or currents? Or, otherwise, how is this body of water connected to the ocean? Is it natural or artificial? If natural, how did it come about, and what is its age? If its a river, in which direction is it flowing? If artificial, when was it made and for what reason?

How will you navigate through it?

4. Noting Elements/ Affects:

While you sail, try to take note of different elements/ particular that appear to you during the trip.

What elements of the specific body of water and its conditions are most intriguing for you? What things interest you, touch you, connect you to this specific water body affectively, physically? How do you experience those things? Can you name them and list them? How do they affect you, what are the ways in which they communicate themselves to you?

5. Doing work:

Option a.

Choose one affect that you noted before and demonstrate to each other how you experience it, how it affects you. You can use your body, voice, objects on the boat and anything else you need, as tools for this demonstration.

Option b.

Choose one affect that you noted before and try to present your work/research to each other through this element. How has this element affected your thoughts and work?

How is this element already present in your body or practice, or how has it affected it/ them?

6. Logbook/ Documentation:

A logbook is a book for narrating events that took place on the boat. There should be one logbook in your boat as well; you usually find it where all the maps for navigation are kept.

Document your trip and the affects that you have experienced and performed in the logbook of the boat you are sailing on. You can choose how you want to do this. What traces of your journey would you like to leave in the book, for others to read? You can use parts or all of your notes and research from the preparation process.

Some Reading to Accompany the Score:

McMenamin, Mark and Dianna: Hypersea (New York: Columbia UP, 1994)

Neimanis, Astreida: Bodies of Water:

https://www.bloomsburycollections.com/book/bodies-of-water-posthuman-feminist- phenomenology/

“Water: a Queer Archive of Feelings” in: Tidalectics; Imagining an oceanic worldview through art and Science (Cambridge: MIT UP, 2018)

Protevi, John: “Water” http://www.rhizomes.net/issue15/protevi.html#_edn8

information, postgraduate program

Workshops and Companions

The workshops of this block will be ‘gardens’ – and therefore for once of spacial nature. I propose to ask these gardens to be our teachers, to learn from them, to let them put us at work, to ask them to suggest a practice to us, to make them structure our time and our collective research attempts etc. The gardens are the ‘education’ framework and the ‘atelier.’

For this, we need interpreters and people who have tools, figures or behaviours to engage, read and work within the workshops. These interpreters – probably we will call them ‚companions’ – will build a network, a web of knowledge, together with us and amongst themselves. I would like to invite quite some of them to accompany us – sometimes alone sometimes in couples or groups.

For further details watch out for following posts.

postgraduate program, workshop

Kobe Mattihys Workshop 1 :: Zenne Garden

digging

Zenne Garden

This is an elaborate permaculture garden with many small experiments from water cleaning plants to interspecies labour. Kobe, who will also be one of the dedicated mentors – is working in this garden for 12 years together with a collective of various artists and activists. It is quite a sensitive ecosystem.

postgraduate program, workshop

Vincent P. Alexis Workshop 2 :: Westland / BUITEN/DEHORS

straying

terrain d'aventure

BXL WILD LIFE and BUITEN/DEHORS is a collective of research and experimentation which proposes to consider the urban as the natural environment of man. This year BUITEN / DEHORS decided to start on a piece of land located between Digue du Canal and rue des Goujons in Anderlecht, the establishment of what is called an adventure playground.
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performative publishing

Salad

Christina Stadlbauer

OLXE6310

Une salade, c’est pas comme une tomate

We went on an excursion to Fribourg in Switzerland. I took my little purse where I keep Swiss Francs from my last visit, but noticed that it contained only a few coins. In the train we were speculating how much we would have to pitch in for food and that we should eat rather rice and beans to keep the budget under control. Switzerland is expensive, for Europeans.

The experience at the Unlearning Centre, however, was totally unexpected. We had just arrived, when a car came, with crates of food – freegan. Martin Schick had organized a delivery for us and we found ourselves with more than we could handle. All for free and all (almost) expired.

We tried to fit everything into the two large fridges at the NeighborHub, but did not manage.

Meat, sausages, vegetables, herbs, juices, ice tea, yoghurt and loads of green salad. That first day we got 2 crates of salad – maybe 20 heads of lettuce. Great! Fresh food!

We ate a lot of salad. We ate salad at lunch and for dinner, snacked on it in between. But the salad did not end. Some days later, the car delivered another load to us. There was again salad, new salad. This time, some heads of lettuce, but also some that was already washed and torn into pieces, wrapped in plastic. And some salad hearts, wrapped in plastic film. We were still trying to deal with the 2 crates from the first day. Nicolas made salad soup. We had it warm and iced, with salad on the side. At every meal, there was a salad bowl that could never be finished. One evening, we were high on salad. We could not talk about anything else anymore, could not stop laughing. Mathilde composed a song about salad. “Une salade, c’est pas comme une tomate”.

There was also more meat than we could eat, there were bags and bags of herbs that slowly started to rot in the fridge, there were litres of bottled liquid whole egg and many packkages of rice pudding, different flavours. There was an opening of a new atelier – a big space with machinery – and it was rented for free There was a dinner perfomance at the Belluard festival and the wine bottles kept on being opened and poured into glasses at no extra cost. Generosity came upon us from all sides. It was amazing.

All our lives, we have been hearing about scarcity. At home, we learned how to shut the doors to keep the heat in, we used second hand clothes and we were instructed how to not waste food. At school, we learned the scarcity of natural resources. We all know about the scarcity of money on our bank accounts. But what happened there in Switzerland in June 2019, was abundance. Suddenly, we were confronted with abundance and we had to deal with it. We had to unlearn how we are used to handle scarcity. And this allowed me to observe many interesting things.

I became obsessed. It went automatically. I could not allow myself to throw food away and invented dishes that consumed lots of parsley. I also ate more than I needed, just because I could not see the food being trashed. My attempt was not successful. Lots of stuff that had gotten a second life – saved from the trash of the supermarket could not be saved by us and went on the compost pile.

The Fribourg trip and unlearning for me meant to look into abundance as a concept and the salad became my fulcrum.

postgraduate program, workshop

Marialena Marouda, Christina Stadlbauer and Nicolas Geleazzi Writing into becoming water

an instant conversation

IMG_20190615_145950

M.M.: A brief introduction into my practice: I see performance as a practice of inhabiting a specific ecosystem. Currently, I am focusing on the oceanic ecosystem, one that can only in part be inhabited by human beings. ...
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performative publishing, postgraduate program

Mathilde Maillard / I gave a hamac and it came back to me

20190614_100129

I like to think that objects decide the place where they want to be or with who they want to be.
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postgraduate program

Nicolas Galeazzi Block 2019/II Troubled Gardens

29 April-28 July 2019

ecologies of artistic research

battlefish

The earth faces troubles of kind humanity never experienced before: climatic changes induced by humankind are dramatically destructive and - meanwhile unavoidable. This perspective fundamentally shifts our understanding of nature - and therefore it poses big questions to the arts as a source of cultural knowledge. The aim of this block is to challenge our individual research aims as living creatures and companions in and as ecosystems. Hyper related, affecting, and never singular, our researches are - however - made by their surrounding as much as their make it.
Read more..

information, postgraduate program

Three Days a Week

29 April-28 July 2019

ö.

One day of relating to the environmental ecology by 'gardening'; one day of engaging giving seeds to the social ecology; and one day of diving into the mental ecology by composting the urgent knowledge.
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performative publishing, postgraduate program

Maurice Meewisse Documentation Fourth Block – troubled garden

1 May-31 July 2019

Curated by Nicolas Y Galeazzi

japan web1

Open Call