Flycatchers, tit mouses and bruises. Discussion forum for the issues of Trace the Tweet

Thursday, June 14, 2012, 17:00 h
Školská 28
Communication space at ul. Školská 28, Praha–1
in courtyard – through passage

Presentations to the exhibition include lectures of Jiří Zemánek, Claudia Mongini, Vít Zavadil and Radan Haluzík.

Claudia MonginiRed threat continued: reflections on the interstice.

This talk intends to reflect upon the exhibition “trace the tweet”, by focusing onto questions about the “making of” interdisciplinary works of art: what is the relevance of the spaces in-between epistemologies, and how do artists deal with them?

By departing from the works presented in the show, I intend to propose a constructivist approach in order to deal with issues of epistemological transformation. My point of view leads towards the presentation of an approach that is neither purely “functional”, – i.e. which operates in terms of a one to one translation of specific aspects of a discipline – , nor completely metaphoric, that is in terms of a purely intuitive knowledge translation.

Borrowing a concept developed by the philosopher Alfred North Withehead, I intend propose the point of view that foreign ways of producing knowledge might act as a “lure” towards the development of new conditions of creation. I introduce hereby the concept of interstitial aesthetics, and discuss it in terms of composition between different formations of knowledge, of practices and of personal and collective experience. The role of theory would then not to be that of explication or conceptualization of art, but an approach towards artistic experience in terms of mutual processes of experimentation.

Claudia Mongini is an independent researcher and artist based in Vienna.She studied physics at the University of Turin, wrote her PHD about chaos theory applied to neuroscience, and subsequently engaged in philosophy and fine arts in Vienna. Since 2001 she has been dealing with the crossover between arts and science, both within her artistic practice and in her theoretical research and writing.Currently she is working on a project exploring connections between new theories of information processing and contemporary aesthetic sensibility in terms of political questions of precarious sensitivity, labour and general intellect.

Jana Doležalová and Štěpán Plátek:
Agrosquatting project.

Radan Haluzík finished his studies at the Faculty of Science, Charles University. Later he studied social anthropology at the Institute of Humanities, Charles University (IZV UK) and at Stanford University in USA. His pre-doctorate studies under the direction of prof. Ernest Gellner were completed at the Centre for the Study of Nationalism at Central European University. He received his Ph.D. in England at University College London.He lectured at FAMU, New York University in Prague, CERGE-EI (UPCES), Faculty of Humanities, Faculty of Social Sciences and Faculty of Science at Charles University. Radan lectures on current nationalism, the relation between politics and aesthetics, film and society, and further also about the social life of things, anthropology of socialism and postsocialism, the relationship of man to nature and wilderness a savages. In his field work he focuses on current ethnic conflicts. As a social anthropologist and war reporter was active in war zones in Bosna, Kosovo, Croatia, Chechnya, Georgia, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Armenia, Nagorno-Karabakh and also in Afghanistan, Peruvian Amazonia, Mexican Chiapas and Kurdistan. He is interested in the motivation of individual soldiers and entire national movements and why they entered these conflicts, primarily the relationship between nationalist aesthetics and art and political programs leading to war.

Jiří Zemánek
will present work of David Abram and David Rothenberg in the framework of a communication models of language in the western and native concepts.

Zemánek is art historian, ethnographer, curator and journalist. His interests include the overlaps between artistic creation, ecology and spirituality, issues of paradigm shift and the emergence of a new integral culture. He is translator and editor in the fields of deep ecology, geomancy, integral culture and neo-cosmology. He is an associate of the Prostor arts review.

Vít Zavadil
is poet and biologist, he collected huge assembly of field recordings focused on birds and frogs.

Lizbeth Rymland
will present the project Visionary Homeschooler’s Almanac designed for groups of artist, teachers and artist parents. Liz graduated in 1981 from Sarah Lawrence College, where she studied cultural anthropology, metaphysics, shamanic theatre and poetry, then studied anthropology and film history in Paris at Barnard College. Coming back to the United States, she lived in a farming community in the Berkshires where she studied permaculture land design and biodynamic farming. A pilgrim and student of folk psychiatry, Rymland has pilgrimaged in India, Indonesia, South America, and the American Southwest, studying and collaborating with folk psychiatrists. She also trained as a residential counselor to disturbed children at St. George Homes, a Jungian Treatment Center in Oakland, California. Because of her interest in alchemy, in 1991 she co-founded Bioremediation Services in New Mexico, an enterprise dedicated to popularizing constructed wetlands for cleaning polluted lands and waters, did public relations work for Seeds of Change, a company dedicated to gene-pool conservation, and served as public educator on bioregional and watershed issues, working closely with the Huichol leader Jaime Pérez at the inception of the Agua Dulce Self-Help Project in El Paso, Texas. This work involved the design of a training for county officials in sustainable-habitat land and shelter design. With Kenny Ausubel she coordinated the 2nd and 3rd Seeds of Change Conferences which led to the creation of the annual Bioneers conference in San Rafael California. She is the founder of the Future Wilderness Project, in which a Mongolian-style Yurt was built from local materials and served as a meeting place for focus groups of teenagers and established mentors on subjects diverse as The Future of Perception and the Future of Sustainable Habitat. At the Center for Contemporary Arts in Santa Fe, NM she curated exhibits requiring conceptual design and collaboration with four teams of artists and SW communities (Helen and Newton Harrison, Mel Chin, Wittenborn and Biegert, Mazeaud and Ikeda) who work as social catalysts on water and river issues. As an educational consultant, she has designed life-long learning environments for ranch owners and environmental programs for a philanthropic organization informing sustainable resource designers and strategists on arid-lands exchanges in the American Southwest and the Middle East.