What does it take to belong?
Focus: Belonging, Collectivity, Movement
The 2019/20 SODA lecture and workshop seminar looks at the notion and experience of Belonging from the perspective of bodies. It explores how belonging is constructed, rehearsed, performatively brought about and authenticated by body- and movement-based, sensorial and affective means and strategies: how can artistic practice and aesthetic experience be understood as a site of recuperation for homogenizing and static identity politics? But also, when do we become complicit in collectivizing and stereotyping bodies in our dances, choreographies, performances and writings?
Practice-based session
Jee-Ae Lim: Sharing Belongings
How is dance going somewhere by itself, detached from a body? How is a certain cultural dance rooted into a brand new culture? Where does the dance belong? Who owns it? Who is privileged to access the dance? Does the dance even require an ethnic and national identity, ideology and genetic root? In this session, traditional Korean dance is offered as an open source which can be touched and danced by people from different places in order to create a space of re-orientating the well preserved dance heritage and rethink the sense of collectivity, solidarity and acceptance.
Jee-Ae Lim is a dancer and choreographer currently living and working in Berlin. She is particularly interested in exploring the various possible meanings of traditional dance through her choreographic practice. Tradition to her eyes is less about worshipping the phantoms and glories of the past but closer to a space of creation where questions as material of experiment arise.
Workshop
Janez Janša: BE-LONGING
Whenever we touch the question of belonging we end up in a kind of slippery area. Is belonging about identity, is it about commitment, is it about beliefs, ideology, ownership? Is it about territory or territorialization? Do we like to belong? Do we feel protected? Do we consider themselves something more when we belong? Do we belong without even knowing? Could we get rid of belonging? These and related questions will be addressed in a format of collective interview, where Janša and participants would open range of questions related to belonging in artistic work and wider social and political context.
Janez Janša is artist, writer, performer and director of interdisciplinary performances as well as conceptual and visual artworks. His work contains strong critical and political dimension and it is focused on the relation between art and social and political context.
Curated by Prof. Dr. Sandra Noeth & the MA SODA students Michalis Angelidis, Michaela Bangemann, Michela Filzi, Armin Hokmi, Min-Suck Kim, Yusuke Taninaka and Xenia Vlachou-Kogchylaki.
Free Admission, in English (with live German translation available).
The lecture and workshop seminar consists of four days, each day addressing specific aspects of what it takes to belong. Please note that registration is required and possible for full days only. Email: soda_support[at]hzt-berlin.de; specific skills or previous knowledge are not necessary; please wear comfortable clothes for practical work.
Saturday, January 18 - 10.30 am – 6pm
Belonging, Collectivity, Movement
10.30 – 11.15 Introductory lecture by Prof. Dr. Sandra Noeth, Armin Hokmi, Henna-Elise Selkälä & the team of the MA SODA
11.15 – 12.30 Sharing Belongings, practice-based session on collectivity by Jee-Ae Lim
12.30 – 13.30 Lunch
13.30 – 16.00 BE-LONGING, workshop by Janez Janša
16.00 – 16.30 Break
16.30 – 18.00 Digesting, with Michela Filzi & Min-Suck Kim
Further dates and Note on the SODA lecture and workshop seminar What does it take to belong?
18.01.2020, 10:30-18:00, Studio 11
19.01.2020, 11:00-17:00, Studio 11
8.02.2020, 10:30-18:00, Studio 11
9.02.2020, 11:00-17:00, Studio 11
The notion of belonging continues to forcefully permeate cultural and socio-political debates today. The question of what it is that binds and holds us together opens up a field of complicity, affinity and kinship. At the same time, it carries the risk of relativism and essentialism when tied up too closely with identity politics which work towards collectivizing, compartmentalizing and stereotyping as well as conflating differences and specificities; also instilling notions of crisis, fear and exclusion of what seems to be ‘foreign’ or ‘strange.’ Belonging as experience is multi-facetted, unfixed and unfinished, it always suggests something but left behind, always yet to come: it evokes home, a physical structure or a geopolitical location and carries as well, an affective and emotional layer. It refers to a set of familiar routines, habits, to shared gestures, features or recognizable aesthetics; to values, rules and rights, ideas and visions. It designates a network of relations, a feeling of safety, trust and entitlement. Belonging significantly, upholds the possibility of non-belonging. Along numerous axes of power and differences and acknowledging that experience, imagination and representation are at the core of arts and politics alike, they combine co-constitutive elements and aspects in a dynamic process. Significantly, this makes clear that belonging is not just given or defined by overarching frameworks. The 2019/20 SODA lecture and workshop seminar takes on that assumption from the perspective of bodies. It looks at how belonging is constructed, rehearsed, performatively brought about and authenticated by body- and movement-based, sensorial and affective means and strategies: how can artistic practice and aesthetic experience be understood as a site of recuperation for homogenizing and static identity politics? But also, when do we become complicit in collectivizing and stereotyping bodies in our dances, choreographies, performances and writings?
Event location:
Uferstudios |
Uferstr. 23 |
13357Berlin
© Nada Zgank