Elma Riza & Mireia Aragonés Carol (Story of Shapes – Extended Blue)
6 Works on Architectural Conceptions of Time
Saturday, 16 April 6:00 pm – 12:30 am
Flutgraben e.V.
Am Flutgraben 3
3. OG
U1 Schlesisches Tor & S-bahn Treptower Park
Our day at the Flutgraben includes a diverse program of screenings and performances, each of which presents a radically different alternative to how artists can structure (or deconstruct) audiences’ experience of time and space.
The day begins with an immersive experiment by Grace Euna Kim, which challenges the constructs of performativity itself, inside of itself. After that, Elma Riza, Mireia Aragonés Carol, and Eric Wong’s space-responsive performance utilizes “instant composition” methods to create a truly ephemeral composition of art in action.
A screening of Peter Clough’s 2015 film, In My Room, follows the artist as he obsessively self-documents his relationship with a wooden scaffolding which has inexplicably appeared in his bedroom. After the screening, Spyridon Kouvaras recreates his May 2015 performance of Opus # 1 Temporality, a sculptural duet in motion, created in collaboration with 15 visual artists and co-produced by Owl Art Space Gallery in Athens.
The night concludes with multimedia performances by Stefan Demming and Suppiej & Zanato. Demming will employ his found video remixing techniques, while Suppiej & Zanato disassemble popular music.
Featuring:
6:00 pm
Waiting Room
Grace Euna Kim
Experimental, immersive performance.
7:15 pm
Story of Shapes – Extended Blue
Elma Riza, Mireia Aragonés Carol, Eric Wong
Improvisatory dance utilizing choreographic strategies of instant composition.
8:00 pm
In My Room
Peter Clough
Feature-length performance for video.
9:30 pm
Opus I# temporality
Spyridon Kouvaras, Giorgos Kouvaras, Vlassis Stathoulias
Choreographic installation in movement, created in collaboration with 15 visual artists and co-produced with Owl Art Space Gallery (Athens) as part of the visual, in progress project, Metrologos.
10:30 pm
Videoloopmachine
Stefan Demming
Multimedia performance utilizing found video.
11:30 pm
Save Me
Suppiej & Zanato
Conceptual DJ Performance.
Grace Euna Kim, Action in the Underground (2014) still document.
Grace Euna Kim – Waiting Room
Waiting Room is an immersive journey in which truth and fiction confront and coalesce. It is a floating narrative, living and evolving in real time, invited and meant to be broken. What is at stake in the theatre of everyday life, when the production of self supersedes that of being in itself. What does it mean to be present when social beings are embodied yet absent at the same time? Will you get lost, or will you be found?
Grace Euna Kim’s performance based interventions are a poetic mode of social research and experimentation, seeking to overturn symbolic borders between reality and fiction, spectator and performer. Careful not to allow new authoritarian structures to arise from this dissolution, the work invites new modes of being that liberate the participant, freeing them from the confines of ritual role play and movement patterns, and highlighting that which is already in them, a performer themselves. A symbolic mirror to the theatres of everyday life, the work is a reflection of what is at stake when the performing subject is produced by the same fictive landscape that s/he is also a producer of.
Grace Euna Kim’s work has been presented in various mediums and contexts, including White Box (New York), Hyères Festival (France), Galerie Madé (Paris) and Galerie Stuczna (Warsaw). She has been featured in Foam Magazine, Paper Magazine, Sleek Magazine and The Independent, among others. She is currently a PhD researcher in the European Graduate School’s department of Philosophy, Art and Social Thought, and is based between Berlin and New York.
Elma Riza & Mireia Aragonés Carol, Story of Shapes – Extended Blue (2015)
Elma Riza, Mireia Aragones and Eric Wong – Story of shapes – Extended blue
Story of Shapes began in January 2015 as a solo work, but recently expanded into a duo. This research is about imaginary and real space, a visual and acoustic composition in constant transformation. The performers and musician work with the idea of shapes as a starting point and deal with the different aspects and topics emerging from this visual element. The bodies become a still picture for a moment, part of the visual composition, along with the minimal soundscape and pulses, jumping back to movements and improvisation. It is a constant change between abstraction and a living story.
Elma Riza is a French visual artist, improviser and performer, working and living in Berlin since 2007. She graduated from the Kunsthochschule Berlin – KHB in 2012. Between 2007 and 2011 she worked mostly with video and photography. Then she started to study improvisation – instant composition with different choreographers and performers (Fanny de Chaillé, Jean-Jacques Sanchez, Eva Burghardt, Yuko Kaseki/Isak Immanuel, William Bilwa Costa, Sten Rudstrom, and Rosalind Crisp). In march 2014, she started Imprévu Berlin – Interdisciplinary Platform for Instant Composition.
Recently, Riza has developed a series of solo installations/performance, recherche which make the connection between her work in Instant composition and in Visual Arts, opening her research to collaboration with other artists, dancers and performers. Whether in her photographic, video or performative work, her starting point is always the space. The space as a point of departure for visual research, with omnipresent consciousness of the location of the body in space. In addition, the research creates a sensitive experience triggered by the moment and everything that is included in this situation. The moment, which can be experienced in a active or a contemplative manner: fleeting or suspended moments near from infinity.
Mireia Aragones is researching about the meaning and conditions of presence since more than10 years. Her path has brought her through Contemporary Dance, BMC, Contact Improvisation, Instant Composition, Pilates, Alexander Technique, Meditation and Buddhism; finding big inspiration in teachers like Julien Hamilton, Kirstie Simson, Martin Keogh or Martha Eddy. She learns, dance, teaches in Berlin since 2008, and until 2011 performs in collaboration with other dancers, musicians and visual artists. Since 2011 her research on presenceperformance-statewhatisthisallabout is mostly been developed in the multidisciplinary performative projects The Meeting Point Berlin (until 2014), regular study groups like Imprevu Collective (since 2014) and in her classes and Workshops.
Eric Wong was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, grew up in Hong Kong, and is a guitarist and computer musician, with a background in rock and electronic music, but with a current focus on free improvisation and sound manipulation. Now based out of Berlin, he has performed in Germany, Hong Kong, China, USA, China, and Poland. Besides solo works, other projects he is also involved include rock duo Meta Fog with Sascia Pellegrini patchworking pop culture montage, musical collective Stoic Strangers with Wilson Tsang plus other Hong Kong based musicians, and improvisational guitar/piano duo Se Noh Te with Eunice Martins.
Peter Clough, In My Room (2015) video still.
Peter Clough – In My Room
In My Room is a 70-minute film beginning under the sheets of the artist’s bed, then following him on an obsessively self-documented journey through his bedroom, which has been inexplicably occupied by a large wooden scaffold. Shot with fifteen cameras placed both on the artist’s body and around the room, the abundance of digital perspectives invites the viewer to enter the dissociative space of lucid dreams and the performative space of queer identity.
Peter Clough was born in Boston in 1984 and raised in Northfield, Minnesota. He received a BA in Studio Art from Grinnell College in 2006 and an MFA in Studio Art from the Steinhardt School of Culture and Education at New York University in 2009. Clough has presented work in New York at the Center for Performance Research, Dixon Place Theater, Microscope Gallery, Southfirst Gallery, the SPRING/BREAK Art Fair, and MoMA PS1, as well as Open Lot in Nashville, The Custer Observatory in Southold, Weird Shift in Portland, Peres Projects in Berlin, Konkuk University and The House of Collections in Seoul, The Monty Video Space in Antwerp, Off/off Cinema in Ghent and Kunstnernes Hus in Oslo. Clough’s work has been featured in the New York Times and Time Out magazine. Clough lives and works in Brooklyn.
Spyridon Kouvaras, Opus I# temporality (2015, Owl Art Space Gallery). Video by Vlassis Stathoulias.
Opus I# temporality is a choreographic installation in movement, which approaches the scenic space like an exhibition hall. Using time as an abstract canvas, the piece examines the tragic, poetic, and political body in space, focusing on the interdependent relationship between perception, time, and subjectivity. This organic collaboration between body, music, and the work of 15 visual artists was co-produced with Owl Art Space Gallery in Athens.
Performed by Spyridon Kouvaras
Music by Giorgos Kouvaras
Video by Vlassis Stathoulias
Production by Synthesis 748/Spyros Kouvaras
Curated by Alexandra Nasioula and Sofia Kyriakou
Featuring work by visual artists A.Nasioula, I.Poulos, A.Ziogas, V.Stathoulias, S.Kyriakou, G.Brehier, B.Colignon, V.Kavouridis, A.Pafiliari, L.Tentoma, A.Skourtis, K.Triantafyllou, I.Maipa, K. Grammenos, and G.Damopoulou
Opus I# temporality is a choreographic performance for the visual, in progress project, Metrologos.
Synthesis 748 Company was established in May 2008 in Paris, France, by dancer and choreographer Spyros Kouvaras. Powered by the National Dance Center of France and the French Ministry of Culture, the company has an international course over the years. Spyros Kouvaras’ works have been exhibited and performed in theaters, galleries, museums and festivals in various countries including France, Germany, Greece, Sweden, Switzerland, Belgium, Italy, Argentina and Colombia. The Company has received warm reviews and has been referenced in international contemporary art publications. Since 2015, Synthesis 748 is also based in Athens, Greece.
“My work examines conceptual and philosophical issues concerning human nature, through the exploration of the tragic and political body on stage. I practice a research that focuses on the relation between body, sound and image and I am interested in the natural sculptures of the bodies, the prolonged duration and the aesthetic precision.
It is about a study of abstraction where its strength consists on the intensity between human subject and visual object, between time and space, movement and sound. An important area of creation is the approach of art and philosophy as well as art and science.
The choreographic research consists on a mechanistic approach of movement using at the same time the body as a canvas, as an abstract surface, so that the movement can be in the image and the movement can vibrates the image. The kinetic vocabulary of the company focuses on the development of a personal choreographic language which deviates from the recognizable forms of contemporary dance and usually takes a hybrid form.
My performances do not tell a story. The scenic installations that always make up the starting point of the global composition are characterized by the creation of timeless spaces, by the creation of situations and fields which are interpreted more by the unconscious and less by logic. The company’s works, often like choreographic installations in movement, approaches the scenic space like an exhibition room, the performance itself like an exposed object and propose to the audience the role of the visitor. I could say that my pieces are more likely performances that dance than dance performances.”
-Spyros Kouvaras
Stefan Demming, footage from Einzug ins Paradies (DDR 1984-87)
Stefan Demming – Videoloopmachine (VM)
Stefan Demming is a visual artist focusing on the video, installation and public intervention. In his live performance sessions, the artist takes short sequences of found video footage and manipulates them live to reveal unexpectedly rhythmic and melodic compositions. Under repeated viewing, otherwise unremarkable moments take on unexpected meaning, actors become virtual singing sculptures, and inexplicable narratives begin to emerge.
His research and related projects develop into performative spaces. Their dramaturgy is often made of light and audiovisual events. As spaces of experience, they provide the opportunity for discoveries through uncertainty and sensitizing, following a logic of the poetical. Among his projects were “The smallest show on earth 2”, travelling show on circus as place of work and of amusement as well as “Plantation”, a series of inflatable vegetables and flowers that grow and decline in public space.
His latest project “Dropping in on farmers” (together with Daniela Schlüter) is an approach to question landscape, the work of farmers and agribusiness in a rural area with an industrialized agriculture. Shows were held in-situ on farms and featured an exhibition, public talks, video installations and collaborations with farmers such as printmaking with tractor driven rollers.
Stefan is the recipient of the German Videoinstallation award, the Bremen young artists’ prize for fine arts, the OLBmedia art award at the European Media Art Festival Osnabrück as well as grants from CBK Rotterdam and the DAAD. He graduated in History and Fine Art in Bremen where he did another studies in audiovisual composition within fine art and received his MFA in 2006 as a “Meisterschüler” of Jean François Guiton. Stefan Demming lives and works in Berlin and in the Münsterland, Germany.
Suppiej & Zanato – Save Me
This conceptual DJ performance by Suppiej & Zanato will take the audience from libidinal pleasure to acute tragicomedy. Music, as a gorgeous jingle, will shape and characterize the shared time, will lead and distract, will move consciences at the rhythm that has shaken thousands of iconic asses. In this performance and site-specific installation, the Mehrzweckhalle in the Flutgraben will become a place for salvation, with the DJ as monk and ritual-alchemist, merging pop and dance with apocalyptic, mystic vibes. There is something wrong with this party, but it’s not unpleasant.
Mia D. Suppiej is a sociologist. While studying in Paris at EHESS she carried a research thesis on the End of the World, extensively investigating the “behavior” of imaginary beliefs, religion, charismatic power, community and, particularly, its crucial processes of constitution and narration.
Edoardo T. Zanato is an artist. While studying in Venice and Bremen he developed his artistic researches in connection to anarchy, nihilism, and hip hop writing. His interventions, mainly site-specific installations, have always – less or more shrewd – a philosophical, political and absurd nuance.
Suppiej & Zanato’s artistic research develops through themes of Apocalypse, Survival and Salvation, questioning the placement and the echoes of imaginaries and definitions such as image, icon, device, party, gorgeous-ity, glow, pattern, charismatic power, faith, ecstasy, representation, narration, potentiality, and resistance. Their practice takes the form of videos, installations, performances, and drawings. Their research aims to recognize – in both the contemporary and historic scenarios – those certain images which are a sort of image du temps. Then manipulate them, translate them, activate them, de-activate them, in order to present an image staged that acts as a unit of time-space, a sort of mystic portal to enter; where to contemplate an absurd, paradoxical, tragicomic, and enigmatic vision.
Flutgraben e.V. is a non-profit, self organizing art-association in an approximately 3800 square meters big building managing about 50 artist studios accommodating more than 80 artists from all over the world, in all disciplines.
The non-profit art-association was founded in 1997 as “Kunstfabrik am Flutgraben” which later became “Flutgraben e.V.”, in 2008. It is set in what has formerly been a repair workshop for the East Berlin public transport system. At KIB – Kraftfahrzeugsinstandsetzungsbetrieb – where trams, trucks and buses were repaired. The building was a part of the Berlin wall in the separated city.
Information about previous activities of the art-association am Flutgraben 3 is archived at http://archiv.flutgraben.org and www.kunstfabrik.org.
Space/Time Berlin 