For "Truth is a Matter of the Imagination", Thea Reifler and Phila Bergmann invited Lou Drago, Isabel Lewis, Ann Mbuti and Omsk Social Club for exchanges of thoughts departing from science fiction quotes. They sat down to talk about how the genre has influenced their ways of thinking, relating, creating art and programming institutions. Within the conversations, they discuss how it changed their perceptions of truth and fiction, dreamtime and world-time, structures and processes as well as change and collaboration. The podcast’s tone is tentative, probing, searching—it presents thoughts that are explored together and conversations that find neither certainty nor a conclusion. 

With quotes by: Judith Butler, Octavia E. Butler, N.K. Jemisin, Nnedi Okorafor and Ursula K. Le Guin, as well as text parts inspired by Marge Piercy

Voices (in order of appearance from the beginning of the podcast): Thea Reifler, Phila Bergmann, Omsk Social Club, Lou Drago, Ann Mbuti, Isabel Lewis
Editing and Sound: Kat Merten
Special thanks to: Lou Drago, Isabel Lewis, Ann Mbuti and Omsk Social Club

Thea Reifler (CH) und Phila Bergmann (DE) work as curators and artists in music theater, opera and performance. In the last years they developed and engaged in interdisciplinary projects inspired by queer-feminist concepts. Since 2020, they are the artistic directors of Shedhalle Zürich. With their concept PROTOZONES 2020-2025 they are establishing Shedhalle as an institution for process based art.

Reifler and Bergmann previously showed work at Museum Hamburger Bahnhof—Museum für Gegenwart—Berlin; 3HD-Festival, Berlin; Sophiensaele, Berlin; radialsystem, Berlin; Zürcher Theaterspektakel, Zürich; SpielArt-Festival, Munich; Nowy-Teatr, Warschau; HELLERAU – European Center for the Arts, Dresden; and Opera Darmstadt.

Thea Reifler and Phila Bergmann "Truth is a Matter of the Imagination"

Beth Collar’s "Scatter Cushion" is a "live" recording documenting a night-time pilgrimage to the fork in a road near the “Domine Quo Vadis?” church (also known as Santa Maria in Palmis) during the last curfew in Rome, where the artist lived after spending a few months on a residency. Parting the Roman Empire’s primary strategic road, the Via Appia Antica, and another, less legendary road the Via Ardeatina, the junction marks the spot where Jesus Christ appeared to Saint Peter as he made his way out of the city to escape persecution, prompting him to return and face his own martyrdom.

With a melancholic anticipation of absent bodies permeating her thoughts after a day-trip to the Etruscan site of the Necropolis Banditaccia, she counters the epic fabric of history and ideology-serving, gendered notions of the chronicler or bard with too-personal comment, fragmented memory, incidental noises, alcohol and urine. Collar layers a sense of bodily tangibility onto the ghostly absences of the eternal city.

Postproduction: Nadel Eins Studio Berlin

Beth Collar (*1984) is an artist based in Berlin. She thinks through sculpture and performance, making objects, drawings, and installations. Her work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions and performances, amongst others at stadium, Berlin (2020); Camden Arts Centre, London (2020); Regatta 2, Düsseldorf (2020); Kunstverein Kesselhaus, Bamberg (2020); Matt's Gallery at Dilston Grove, London (2019); 427, Riga (2019); Bärenzwinger, Berlin (2019); Waldo at Mathew Gallery, New York (2018); Primary, Nottingham (2018); Cell Project Space, London (2018); Standpoint, London (2017); ICA, London (2015) and Serpentine Galleries, London (2015).

Beth Collar "Scatter Cushion"

We were having one of our usual phone calls. Talking about life, dealing with the distance the pandemic had enforced upon us. Then there was a suicide that hit your family. Grief overwhelmed us both. I could not reach you. I wanted to cross the border from the UK to the EU, but death is not essential travel. I wanted to smuggle my body across the border. I was not allowed. Instead, I was forced to use my words. To write and read as you moved away into the silence of your family home. This is a call to you, wherever you are, that you are not alone in your grief right now.

"Lamentation No.1: A Smuggler's Guide to Loss" are the recorded fragments from the diary I keep, starting on the days of a phone call with a friend and the suicide of his father. From this point on I meditated on what it meant to think about to address those who can no longer respond. Whilst wondering how to carry the weight of loss for another, smuggling words in our bodies, and what it means to become smugglers of the bond, opening our homes to objects and bodies to grieve for those that are no longer here. In these times of distance words and objects are our greatest travellers. 

Joshua Leon is an artist, writer and Ph.D. candidate at the Royal College of Art in London researching lament and Jewishness. He works from peripheral positions, moving and thinking through personal and private gestures to access a combination of subjectivity, heritage and a re-staging of voices by blending writing, poetic performance, objects and exhibition making. Within this Leon investigates the conditions that produce precarity and its performativity. Leon’s work is constantly collecting and reordering itself to produce an inventory of life treating conditions and sites as fluid and continuous by unfolding mechanisms for producing meaning.

Joshua Leon "Lamentation No.1: A Smuggler's Guide to Loss"

In "Memory Talk", artist-performer Nour Mobarak continues her ongoing exploration of memory, psychic spaces and the spatialization of language. Based largely on field-recordings from Hollywood Boulevard and other places in Los Angeles where she asked strangers to share their earliest memories, her sound textures delve deep into the invisible architecture of both the individual mind and US therapy culture, often capturing moments of trauma, transgression, and intense feelings. As memory is itself fragmentary and shifting over time, her formal investigation aptly makes use of techniques such as microsampling, panning, silence, and pitch-shifting, which create sound textures of a pulsing, disorienting and hallucinatory spatiality.

The sound sources all come from specific places—the voices of the interviewed on Hollywood Boulevard, a lengthy conversation with a friend, poems written and read by Mobarak herself, music snippets, and podcast-inspired guitar interludes by Dakota Higgins—which are cut up into micro-samples and projected into a stereo piece moving between right and left channel. The voices here become compositional material whose different intonations and syntax carry as much content as do the accounts themselves. The arrangement of voices of others and her own as well as the more incidental sounds in "Memory Talk" capture the sonic quality of the human voice as it becomes dissociated from the story, and the musical immediacy of it.

Meanwhile, as Mobarak keeps asking the people on Hollywood Boulevard – what did it look like? Do you have an image? – visuals are missing and images are instead transported by voice.

Recommended to listen with headphones.

Postproduction: Juliette Amoroso and Nadel Eins Studio Berlin

Nour Mobarak (b. 1985, Cairo, EG) lives and works in Los Angeles. Her works and performances have been presented, amongst others, at Miguel Abreu Gallery, New York (2021, 2019), KIM Contemporary Art Centre, Riga (2021), Hakuna Matata Sculpture Garden, Los Angeles (2020), Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (2020), Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2019), LAXART, Los Angeles (2019), Cubitt Gallery, London (2019), Rodeo Gallery, London (2017), and Stadslimeit, Antwerp (2016). Her music has been released by Recital (Los Angeles), Cafe Oto’s TakuRoku (London) and Ultra Eczema (Antwerp), and is included in the Whitney Museum Library’s Special Collections. Her poetry and other writing has appeared in Triple Canopy, F.R. David, The Claudius App, and the Salzburg Review, among others.

Nour Mobarak "Memory Talk"

A science-fantasy novel set in Manchester, UK in 2080, Orion J. Facey’s "The Virosexuals" portraits a subculture that shares a desire to escape the broad algorithmization of our lives, bodies, and minds. Experimenting with virosexuality—the sexual attraction to transmitting and receiving STI’s—, the group around the main character Amygdala negotiates their bodies and desires while being faced with a virus sweeping the scene and the dangers and vulnerabilities of going off-grid.
 
Edited by Taylor Le Melle for their collaboratively run independent publisher PSS [with Daniella Valz Gen, Ima-Abasi Okon and Rehana Zaman], an excerpt of the book is here translated into a screenplay, accompanying its release. The characters meet during a watershed, cathartic moment of the novel. Voiced by PSS along with artists Jesse Darling, G, Christopher Kirubi, Natasha Lall, and the author Orion J. Facey. Soundtrack by KINDNESS.
 
The following is an excerpt from a conversation commissioned and published by Banner Repeater between Taylor Le Melle (T) and Orion J. Facey (O):
 
T: One of the minor characters, Stylbe, is, as I understand it, two people with one soul. They is also queer. The way you wrote this character, and constructed the queer social scene that they is a part of, was grammatically so nimble and delicate in terms of use of pronouns, noun-verb agreement, plural, singular. What was your strategy for that? What did you pull from? Were there any examples that you followed or did you have to make a lot of decisions on your own about how you would essentially morph English to fit their worlds?
 
O: Whilst I was writing the book, some of the other characters in the novel went through various edits, including changes to the pronouns that they use. Whilst I was changing the pronouns of characters one by one, it would often create these cases where there was grammatical non-agreement with genders (She picked up her cup and then he drank from it). A similar thing would happen when I changed the agent of an action from a group to an individual. I found these syntactic glitches interesting and wondered if they could be exploited to represent a queer identity that fluctuated on a quantum scale, and I decided that Stylbe (who already existed in the novel by this point) would be a good characters to use for this experiment.
 
 
PSS is a publisher of printed material.
 
Orion J. Facey is a writer of science-fantasy and a textile artist.
 
Taylor Le Melle writes, organises and produces objects.
 
Banner Repeater is an Artist-led contemporary art space: a reading room, and experimental project space, founded by Ami Clarke in 2010.
 
Special thanks to Ami Clarke at Banner Repeater.

Taylor Le Melle "Orion J. Facey’s The Virosexuals"

"It’s 10pm. Do You know where your children are?" narrates the struggles of teenagers dealing with their queerness within varying family dynamics and socio-political realities. The intertwined stories of the two protagonists touch upon memories, expectations and values shared between parents and their offspring with a diasporic background, unveiling the confluence of primary feelings of love, hate, desire and regret. Nicholas Grafia and Mikołaj Sobczak combine these anachronistic, personal fragments with other texts such as news items, statistics and research outcomes relating to BIPoC and LGBTQI+ individuals. The artists not only seek to negotiate individual positions in relation to religion, Slavic and Philippine folk traditions, scientific data and lived experiences, but also make the complexity of intergenerational, reciprocal understanding palpable.

The podcast "It’s 10pm. Do You know where your children are?" is a reworked version of an earlier staged performance. Since 2014 Nicholas Grafia and Mikołaj Sobczak often collaborate for performances and video installations, with which they reveal stories of marginalized people, and challenge notions of heteronormativity, patriarchism and eurocentrism. Their collaborative works have among others been shown and/or performed at the Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw (PL); Museum Ludwig, Cologne (DE); Shedhalle, Zürich (CH); Dortmunder Kunstverein (DE). 

Nicholas Grafia (born in 1990, Philippines) holds a MFA from the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (DE). He has previously studied at the Kunstakademie Münster (DE) and the School of Arts and Cultures in Newcastle (UK) as well as British, American and Postcolonial Studies at the University of Münster (DE). 

Mikołaj Sobczak (born in 1989, Poland) graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts Warsaw (PL) in the Studio of Spatial Activities, followed by a scholarship at Universität der Künste Berlin (DE), and studied at the Kunstakademie Münster (DE). From September 2021, he will start a two-year residency at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam (NL). 

Postproduction: Nagel Eins Studio Berlin

Nicholas Grafia and Mikołaj Sobczak "It’s 10PM. Do You know where your children are?"

"The Podcast City" follows a script which could also be a template for one of Phung-Tien Phan’s films, in which the artist explores contemporary lifestyles, the performativity of daily life and our different roles between labor and leisure time. As her own roles move fluidly between author of the script, artist, and actor, her practice is situated in a close network of relationships and the social and material conditions of her own creative labor, while addressing questions of creativity, social privileges, and neoliberal logics of consumption and self-marketing.

Voices: Maximilian Schmötzer, Simon Mielke, Phung-Tien Phan

Postproduction: Nadel Eins Studio Berlin

Phung-Tien Phan (*1983, GER) lives and works in Essen. Her works have been presented, amongst others, at Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof (2020); at Galerie Drei, Cologne (2019); Campoli Presti, London (2019); Stadtgalerie, Bern (2019); Glasgow Project Room, Glasgow (2018); 8. Salon, Hamburg (2018); Shanaynay , Paris (2017); Belle Air, Essen (2017); Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn (2016); or Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (2015).

Phung-Tien Phan "The Podcast City"

Root Canal "I'll Never be a Star I've Always Been the Moon"

"Mutiny on the Bivalvia" is a radio play about power and relationships. In an interview, a seafarer and previously successful artist delineates her motives for wanting to become a member of the female crew on board of the „Bivalvia“ and her daily life as a seafarer. The interviewer has but one question on her mind: What has lead the all-women crew to shipwreck and mutiny?
 
Text and direction: Nadja Abt
Seafarer: Mareike Wenzel
Interviewer: Nadja Abt
Music: Alabaster DePlume
Sound: Nadja Abt & Franz Schütte
 
Nadja Abt is an artist and writer, living between Berlin and Lisbon. Abt studied Literature and Art History at Freie Universität Berlin as well as Fine Arts at Universität der Künste Berlin and the Universidad Torcuato di Tella in Buenos Aires. In her performances, videos and paintings, she constructs feminist narratives that reference the world of literature and film. She is part of the artist collective Michelle Volta. Recent exhibitions and performances include KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Pivô, São Paulo; Casa Triângulo, São Paulo. She has upcoming shows at Bärenzwinger, Berlin (April 2021) and Galeria Diferença, Lisbon (October 2021).

Nadja Abt "Mutiny On The Bivalvia - Interview with a Seafarer"

In "The Acquisition of Language & The Language of Acquisition", artist-poet Luzie Meyer traces the property of language to both confine and liberate, and the verbal means of expression available to us in times of digital media and algorithms. With the faculty of being able to express oneself through these forms (templates) comes the problem of false equivalence or commensurability: Unlike the spider that mechanically reproduces the same pattern again and again, The Acquisition of Language & The Language of Acquisition explores the gaps and interstices in which such tools and formats might possibly be used for different and poetic ends.

The long poem reads as a succession of “exercises” (chapters) and addresses the intricate entanglement between the individual and the universal, or the authentic and the socially constructed. Blending sound (among which are zither pieces of her friend Magda Barthofer, or composition techniques borrowed from musique concrète) with writing techniques such as cut-up, Meyer investigates the psychology of language forms and formats. As the narrator of the poem finds themself looking for a different and individualized alphabet, the use of an all-too-familiar language of therapy and self-enhancement reveals it as yet again firmly merging with the logic of neoliberal value and exchange.

The spoken word is accompanied and interrupted by musical interludes. The musique concrète compositions are created with a drum rack of original percussion sounds recorded at home, as well as with a ready-made set of sounds from Ableton. Additionally, the piece includes sounds of a lapharp (zither), played by Magdalena Barthofer, which were recorded with Ableton with an effects pedal.

Postproduction: Nadel Eins Studio Berlin

Luzie Meyer "The Acquisition of Language & The Language of Acquisition"

Pogo Bar Podcasts are a series of long poems, sound scapes, essays, speculative interviews, and potential histories, commissioned by KW Institute for Contemporary Art. For the time being, the collective space of the physical Pogo bar is moved to the digital realm, with two new podcasts to be released on a monthly basis. The podcast series is curated by Kathrin Bentele and Léon Kruijswijk, Assistant Curators at KW Institute for Contemporary Art.

Phung-Tien Phan "The Podcast City"

KW Pogo Bar Podcasts

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