Убежище / Suoja / Shelter

The musical-dance-poetry environmental performance Safe Practice Space (2019) crosses metaphors of ecology and practices, makes room for critical inquiry, and creates safe spaces for gender, LGBT, queer and artistic variances. The format of the performance has an environmentally-inclusive design, in which bodily practices contact with gender-fluidity, a musical set is sensitive to interpenetration of ecosystems, poetry shakes its identity and calls for a non-toxic communication. Within a design where natural and socio-cultural overcome a binary, each body becomes a unique plant which frees its right to be different.

Voinea will present and discuss one of her long-term projects-collaborations, The Tranzit Garden under the auspices of tranzit.ro/Bucharest. Since 2014, The Tranzit Garden has hosted a series of workshops, debates, exhibitions, following the current preoccupations for ecology, deconstructing the anthropocentric filter and the myth of unlimited technological progress based on which the concept of the "natural" was built especially in the Western world, as well as the wider implications of its use for the purpose of gender, class and colonial domination.

The Autistic Turn (2019) is a multimedia reading and listening performance. In this project, she is engaged in building neurodiverse and feminist future scenarios where human and non-human agents meet each other in an uncanny valley at very high temperatures. As there is not much water left, water brings different communities together in a hammam-like setting. The project is a result of her research about affective computing, robots that show and recognise emotions, the idiosyncrasies of the autism spectrum, how they come together and the politics beside affects. These enable also connections with feminist movements, as well with older practices like shamanism and matriarchal structures that are not from western origin.

The performance Feelings are facts – magic, sex, politics (2018) is thought and choreographed as a ritual. It is a sensual howl of female witch. It is a tender call for resistance. It is a queer elegy. It is an attempt for healing, yet it is a turbulent response of embodied mercy.
"My witchcraft became the strategy of politics and art making. Magic to me is a way to shape reality. When losing the home, career as well as the community I turned back to the Mother Earth. I believe that witches were always working on subverting the power, confusing the reality, questioning the authority, yet earthquaking the rational mind and the order that patriarchy is trying to establish." (Vala's journal)

Plants Incoming! Making Room for Newcomers in the Cosmopolitical Arena (2019): the vilification of invasive species dates back to the early nineteenth century, when botanists first imposed the civic political distinction between natives and aliens onto the world of plants. During the Cold War, the demonization of resettled plants became a distinctive feature of Invasion Biology, while the fight against ideological dangers from abroad was sublimated into fears for the contamination of homegrown varieties. The contemporary era has seen a continued use of military metaphors for the control and eradication of botanical dangers, as the spurious distinction between native and non-native species is mobilised by populist ideologues as a tool of anti-globalism. However, climate disorder is transforming attitudes to vegetal migration as the adaptability of pioneering plants in rewilding post-industrial landscapes turns them from perceived threats into valued agents in the revitalisation of biological processes. This presentation reviews the intertwined natural and human histories of the global redistribution of plant species to challenge scientific, cultural and political prejudice against vegetal newcomers. It also considers the contribution of artists in developing a radical and affirmative understanding of more-than-human political realms, in which plant metaphors give way to the ecological solidarities and the multispecies convergences of a post-Anthropocentric cosmopolitics.

ToxiCity (2019) is a collective performance and on-going project that collects and maps air toxicity levels in different cities. For this purpose several speculative bodies, human-trash hybrids in a "DIY cyber-punk post-apocalyptic" armor, wander the city sensing the atmosphere around them and reacting to it by triggering oscillating sounds mediated by DIY electronics and open-source software. Through the projection of a body that enunciates the unseen constant air pollution that surround us on a daily basis, – and thus, making it a common ground for every being in the planet –, there is an attempt to criticize the techno-fixes our petrol fueled societies rely on today to extend our lives in this sick capitalist system by creating a scenario of confusion and noise that reflect the intensity of pollution. ToxiCity reflects on the human condition, on our collective effort and actions to remain alive, in an attempt to question our ways to cope with climate change and natural imbalance.

The discussion Cosmic Ecology: reimagined futures, rediscovered pasts (2019) is instigated by the returning space race and the impact it has had on the environmental, political, economic, and social climate in historical perspective and contemporary context. Curator Maria Veits and artists Andrea Stanivslav (US) and Axel Straschnoy (FI) will discuss alternative, non-official and silenced narratives connected to the topic of the space and will explore various artistic formats of presenting counternarratives about the cosmos from female, ethnic, racial and ecological perspectives. Andréa Stanislav focuses on underrepresented female legacy in the official historical narrative about the space in the USSR and the USA and pays tribute to female cosmonauts whose names get much less mentioning that those of their male colleagues. Axel Straschnoy's work revolves around the Finnish Space program that dates back to the Сold War but was never realized fully after the ambition of the Finnish Astronautic society to participate in the global space exploration started to shrink in 1990s. Maria Veits will speak about the projects by artists whose works imagine alternative scenarios of the futures or explore potentiality of the past through the prism of cosmos (Yevgeniy Fiks, Larissa Sansour, Anawana Haloba and Halil Altindere). Addressing the events of the past, the discussion reflects upon the contemporary political processes including migration and new strategies of exile, feminist movements and postcolonial discourse of reclaiming the past and the future.

Underground river_extended (2018-2019): the underground river is the voice of hidden, forgotten, scared, uncertain, excluded, searching for direction, the voice of unexpressed, voice of women of Łódź telling the story of 19 rivers flowing underground, telling the stories of their own emotions, dreams and fears. The high-speed growth of the city in the XIXth century was connected with rivers and forests – perfect conditions for the textile industry. Both were devastated. It was also strongly correlated with the fate of women working in the textile industry, who didn't have many perspectives after the collapse of the business – 80' 90' of the XX century. The performance is about going underground to hide, wait and survive. It's about transformation and searching for a way to go back to the surface. HEXY uses voices of women recorded during workshops in the Centre for Victims of Domestic Violence in Łódź and with elderly women, sounds of streams, video material from places where the rivers are – on the surface or underground, for sure or just possibly. The artists want to make a connection between soft resistance and the energy of water – a symbol of women's power in many cultures. The performance consists of video, sound and action.

The Festival Lunch offers attendees the chance to socialize and meet each other away from the hard-hitting presentations, lively discussions, and multi-media art presentations. The festival lunch session allows for more informal conversations and exchanges while being in tune with this year's theme of environmental awareness and ecological resilience.
Rather than another format for presentation, the lunch inspires dialogue and conversation through the act of sharing a vegetarian/ vegan meal. The lunch will be facilitated by the festival curator.

Space plays an exceptional role in musical perception, and the bunker provides unique conditions for psychoacoustic experiments. Rabota will turn the space of the bunker into the body of a giant stringed electroacoustic instrument named Samotryas built in analogy to the Pythagorean monochord with the only difference that the audience will be inside of the instrument. The playing on it requires special performative treatment, focused on the interaction between the amplified string and the acoustic environment. The Samotryas and its sound from will constitute a singular art object, which takes place through the use of a special practice. Being at the same time a musical instrument, an abstract model, and an art object, Samotryas becomes a meeting point of performative and objective art. Rabota uses strings as a tool for working with space and time, focusing on spatial aspects of sound, proportions of overtones, and proportionality as a universal mediator.

WOLFFFLOW is a reflection on the concept of vitalistic materialism, which reveals active, living, vibrating, pulsating, evaporating, fluid matter. It is a trip through different landscapes of the present, in which one should strive to be attentive to everything, to sounds, emotions, found objects, things and affects, in order to trace the actions of an almost elusive materiality, crossing both human and inhuman bodies and making itself known through a special kind of thing-force. To produce this work the following were used: noises, devices, captured voices, errors, films, interferences, magnets, strings, broken audio fragments, found objects, feedbacks, loops, plants, and metasonix tube.

Collective Subversive Meditation All That is Solid Melts into Air (2019): popular methods and tactics of self-help such as occidental yoga or wellness, either appropriated or created by neoliberalism, oftentimes are tailored to distract individuals from the real cause of their distress and let them repeatedly focus on temporary solutions. Whilst this temporal relief may be helpful in certain occasions, generally this tendency may lead towards the de-politicization and further alienation of individuals. Combining the lecture and physical practice, collective subversive meditation All that has melted into air, inhale (2019) questions the position of our bodies within the territory of struggle, and views the air we breathe as an invisible witness and a result of a quite visible problem of extractive capitalism. Within this subversive meditation, participants would attempt to shift attention back towards the production of collectivity, critically reflect upon their own exhaustion and the exhaustion of resources, and take a sideway in thinking about the corporeal, their bodies, and their functions.

The Clothes Repair-a-thon (2016 – ongoing) is a repeating performance of which the purpose is to engage communities about responsible consumption. By bringing their own clothes for repairing, mending or up-cycling, the audience participates in the action by engaging in meaningful conversations about ecology, mending, clothes and the purpose of things in general. Because of this, the act of mending is transformed into a community art practice that brings out personal stories, emotions and hopefully changed mindsets. It is not at first glance obvious how repairing can be acknowledged as an art form itself, as it used to be a widespread if not mundane and necessary household practice, so common to be nearly invisible. But as the Earth's natural resources are depleting, the practice of repairing is here proposed as a new type of luxury, an added value which is brought on by the repairers themselves. We are giving new value to the torn clothing through devoting our time, patience, and experience to the mending. It is as simple as stitching back a button, replacing a lining, hemming a pair of pants or patching a hole, to embed the clothing item with memories, meanings and symbols of a newfound community.

Inventing conceptual tools for decolonization: assemblages and epistemology (2019): the lecture reflects upon conceptual tools used by philosophers pursuing different types of decolonization thinking and then deconstructs analytically those types of thinking to extract epistemological foundations making them intelligibly possible. Decolonization discourse is based on presupposition of the inadequacy of the nature/culture distinction which allows different types of inequality and discrimination narratives to flourish. However, obscuring that distinction using terms like Manuel DeLanda's "assemblage" does not reject it since it is based on the metaphysical idea of univocity of being, which is not legitimate for building powerful realist perspective on decolonization. Instead, I propose using the object/concept distinction which allows for an epistemologically correct thinking of decolonization but does not presuppose totalizing like nature/culture dichotomy does. The idea is to confront such a problem in an epistemological way, by transcendentally delimiting the possible knowledge and extracting relevant ontological presuppositions from it. Those might be used in political discourse, but the way of discovering those should be empirical and not metaphysical, i.e. instead of postulating some ontological principle we should proceed by making hypotheses concerning the phenomena studied and check them empirically.

"Welcome to our garden! Peep, listen, sniff! Stare, inhale, absorb! Enjoy! Inside this greenhouse women and flowers spray the vital forces of nature. Do not get off the tracks, supervise children at all times! In our collection of flora and fauna, the woman is presented as a sexual object side by side to other objects of wildlife. Beauty, fertility, forbidden fruit." The Garden is a selection of exotic plants, searching for power in the vulnerability. It is a research of affect and hybridity ironically built around the concept of objectification. Through monotonous hips-shaking performers generate energy and charge the space and objects, mutate and allow other forms of life to express themselves. In search of images, nobody has ever seen before and the creatures that have never existed, the ironic garden of pleasure transforms into the pure experience of where body ends and starts. In The Garden, cultural ideas about female sexuality are brushed away. The stereotypical image turns into a reserved landscape, not yet discovered. How should the palm tree mutate to escape from the greenhouse?

Librāh will perform music from her latest EP "gl♽bal c♽mm♽ns", documenting the enjoyment of nature while staying inside looking at a screen. Her sound contrasts calmness with silliness and notions of impending doom. This show of "funbient" will unfold a soft and feminine* way of exhibiting music by demystifying and demasculinizing the ambient world to make it more accessible to women*, beginners, and people who just want to make music and friends.