SODA Lectures with artists and theorists
Winter Semester 2024/25: HZT / FU Berlin Lecture Series "Body Concepts"
How to think (with) bodies? How to grasp the embodied knowledge that informs and at the same time undermines our theorising? In eight encounters between transdisciplinary thinkers and artists, the international lecture series Body Concepts asks which bodies - and which realities of life - we pay attention to in our thinking, and which are confronted with systemic exclusions or framings.
Archive SODA Lecture Series
How do class and classism manifest themselves in bodies? How do experiences of exclusion, isolation, assimilation or shame translate into somatic experiences or bodily positions and gestures? What do 'social advancement' and 'belonging' taste and smell like? The lecture series takes an intersectional looked at the comeback of the concept of class today with a focus on educational and work realities in the field of body-based performing arts: Areas in which social inequality and privilege are often reproduced, not dismantled. In dialogue with experts from art, science and education, it explores how class positions determine relationships among students, teachers and in a larger social context, how social privileges translate into understandings of knowledge and the body, into speaker positions and structures, and what role performative and artistic (counter-) strategies play in this.
The lecture series was jointly curated and organised by Prof. Dr. Sandra Noeth (MA SODA/HZT Berlin) and Prof. Dan Belasco Rogers (UdK Studium Generale).
Lectures
20. October
Gurur Ertem "Promises and Pitfalls of ‘Political’ Curating in Live Arts"
27. October
Prof. Dr. Ana Vujanović: The question of possession: from the bodies of the proletariat to the bodies of the precariat"
03. November
Venuri Perera 'If I may be candid'
10. November
Francis Seeck "Classismus. The ignored discrimination"
24. November
Tanja Abou "Class(ism), Body and Practices of Beauty"
01. December
Kerstin Honeit "Voices at Work, Bodies on Strike. Struggles and Strategies of an artistic search for Aesthetics of Class and Poverty beyond representation"
08. December
Edwin Nasr "Would Curators Unionize?" (cancelled)
SODA Lecture Series 2020/21: Breathe.
Breathing is an unavoidable, vital act. Yet, it cannot be taken for granted as the experience of the pandemic, profound changes in our environment, but also structural, racist discrimination make clear. In the physical act of breathing that often stays unnoticed, we are symbolically and materially radically thrown back on our own bodies - and connected to the bodies of others at the same time. In conversation with artists, theorists and experts from different fields of practice, the lecture series explores different acts of suffocation and release. It questions how the protection of bodies is unequally and ambivalently distributed and how resistance can find expression in the figure and the act of breathing, as well: an insistence on presence, a demand for existential, political, symbolic and ethical recognition.
With: Basel Abbas & Ruanne Abou-Rahme; Hope Ginsburg; Miriam Jakob & Jana Unmüßig; Maikon K; Bojana Kunst; Francesca Raimondi; Vanessa Eileen Thompson.
Curated by Prof. Dr. Sandra Noeth (HZT Berlin – MA SODA).
Programm
2020
- Maikon K. (artist) Zarabatana: air to concrete
- Prof. Dr. Bojana Kunst (Philosophin, Institut für Angewandte Theaterwissenschaft Gießen): Some questions on the ‘international’ art education: on studying, breathing and reciprocity
- Prof. Dr. Francesca Raimondi (Philosophin, Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt a.M.): Freedom to Breathe
- Prof. Hope Ginsburg (Künstlerin, Virginia Commonwealth School of the Arts): Meditations on Amphibiousness
- Miriam Jakob & Jana Unmüssig (Choreographinnen, Performerinnen): Breathing With
2021
- Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme (Künstler*in): Breathing where you are not supposed to. Mittwoch, Feb., 17, 18 Uhr,
- Dr. Vanessa Eileen Thompson (Sozialwissenschaftlerin, Europa-University Viadrina Frankfurt Oder): Blackness, Conditions of Unbreathing and the Possibility of Abolition
WS 2019/20: What does it take to belong? Sandra Noeth & Guests
The SODA lecture seminar gathers each semester artists and theorists from various disciplines and fields of practice. Bodies, and the aesthetic, socio-political and ethical questions that they open up, are at the core of the public discourse and workshop program that is dedicated to the idea of ‘belonging’ in the 2019/20 winter term: a complex and open idea that addresses material, geopolitical and affective aspects; reminds of familiar routines, gestures and habits, shared norms, values and rights; and formulates questions concerning experiences of safety and trust and the right to societal and political participation. What does it take to belong? Starting from artistic and theoretical inputs and practices of the invited guests, the public series explores how ‘belonging’ is constructed, negotiated, rehearsed and challenged by performative, body- and movement-based and sensorial strategies. How can artistic practice and aesthetic create always-specific experiences and reflections of belonging that go beyond essentialist and normative identity politics?
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.
Corporeal Matters: a lecture series on the diagnostic capacities of bodies
Bodies – and their artistic articulations - are key to understanding the complex surroundings that we live in today: they unfold their diagnostic capacities by reconstructing and reflecting, de-normalizing and re-appropriating, testing, imagining and speculating on what conditions our living-together in manifold and multi-layered ways. Small-scale, in the everyday, or at a global level, bodies, here, appear simultaneously as witnesses, documents, and agents as they move across physical and symbolic territories drawn by vectors of power such as nationhood, sovereignty, and normalcy. However, they are not approached as transparent windows that provide unmediated access to reality or as the last resort of authenticity and immediacy. Rather, they us to rethink corporeality today and underscore the intertwinement between aesthetics, politics, and ethics.In five public events, the SODA lecture series 2019 gathers artists from different fields of engagement: dance and choreography, theatre, visual arts and film. They introduce their artistic practices as specific ways of responding to, of intervening and participating in the worlds that we live in by sensorial, performative, choreographic and symbolic strategies.
Dates
24.4.2019 Marwa Arsanios: What comes after research?
08.5.2019 Perel: You Make Me Sick
29.5.2019 Ian Kaler: Transparencies
19.6.2019 Mischa Leinkauf: Challenge Your Boundaries – A Lecture on handling Impossible Tasks
10.7.2019 Çağlar Yiiğitoğulları: Wunderland
On Decision-Making. A lecture and seminar series
Composing is about decision-making: about strategies and rules, about making-sense and letting go of it again; about raising one’s voice, about the promise of being-together. In artistic processes, it unfolds between determined matters and hidden protocols and questions the elements and conditions that we ground our actions in.
Next to relying on what seems available and desirable, possible and established, decision-making opens up to what is not yet given, not probable and still unknown. It opens up a process that does not primarily - or not necessarily - aim at fixation, affirmation or rigid form but measures out the relation between bodies, in ever changing formations.
The lecture and seminar series gathers an international and trans-disciplinary group of artists - choreographers, sound and visual artists, filmmakers, and writers - to address the politics and poetics of decision-making. Grounded in their respective artistic and body-centred practices, they explore technical, affective, corporeal and discursive, ethical, political and social elements that drive their compositional choices in both, individual and collaborative work.
Dates
24.10.2018 I Dr. Didem Pekün: United Nothing: The ‘inarticulacy’ of Images in Representing Atrocities
07.11.2018 I Dr. Tom Tlalim: Noise-Control-Noise: The politics of composition
21.11.2018 I Dr. Natasha A. Kelly: Milli’s Awakening. Black Women, Art and Resistance
16.01.2019 I Ivana Müller: Body, Text, Collective - Choreographing the Imaginary 06.02.2019 I Paz Rojo: Dancing its do
Curated by Prof. Dr. Sandra Noeth (MA SODA)
HZT I Studio 11 I Uferstudios I Uferstraße 23 I 13587 Berlin