Performance

Мистерия «О чем говорят муравьи?»

serj — Fri, 11 Dec 2020 18:37:25 +0000

Mysteria "What Ants Talk About" serj Fri, 12/11/2020 - 18:37

Performance

Installation

2017

Moscow

Дом. Перформанс.

serj — Fri, 11 Dec 2020 16:55:00 +0000

Understanding 'home'. Performance serj Fri, 12/11/2020 - 16:55

Работа выполнена во время резиденции на Кипре, организованной EKATE в рамках программы Perceiving Academy в 2019 году.

Тема — понятие 'дома'.

Перформер — Ashraf Gounerman

Following the success of our 2018 artists’ residency program, EKATE is very pleased to launch this year’s program, Perceiving Academy 648 km, on October 25, 2019. This year we set out for an alternative exploration of the coastline of Cyprus, with lectures and workshops, events and actions, performances, politics and discussions. The Academy is an animated and trans-disciplinary public art project, which takes the form of a higher-learning academy. It fosters a new type of education, one which teaches us ways to connect with our environment and topos, in an effort to understand the deeper transformations taking place in this era of energy crisis and of utter confusion of subject and object.

The coast of Cyprus is a constantly changing, vibrant and permeable 'cellular' boundary, which is gasping for breath. It serves mainly as a resource for industrial, military and tourist industry interests, but does not enjoy much cultural development, sustainability and sensitivity from our end. Our fossil post-modernity toxins of have no way out. Partly due to the global ecological crisis and irresponsible development policies, our coasts are already changing to something else, something slightly out of balance.

Our workshops will consist partly of interdisciplinary coastline research led by experts and partly of self-organized forms of learning, in public coastal areas, which will be our classroom and studio, with our headquarters in our Nicosia facilities.

Grace Schwindt (U.K, Germany), Senior Lecturer in Fine Art Goldsmith University, Dr. Kat Austen (Berlin), Cultural Fellow in Art and Science, University of Leeds, Bart (Bartaku) Vandeput (Finland, Bergium), Artist Researcher, Aalto University and Petri Berndtson Ph.D (Finland), Philosopher of Breath, will be our project hosts, lecturers and educators.

During the first week of the academy we will work with touch, landscape, body, memory, through refugees' stories (Grace Schwindt). Also we will use adapted scientific sensors to learn to listen to the chemical changes in the bodies of water that surround us, depending on land development and species migration (Dr. Kat Austen).

During the second part of the academy we will establish a daily dialogue protocol of waking meditation and felt sense connection (receiving/signaling), do group experiments with mediation with focus on self-gut and contact group explorations in connecting with the ineffable (of the) other and notions of Technic (Essence) & Magic (Existence) and Reality, following Federico Campagna´s attempt to establish a “Mediterranean Philosophy”(Bartaku).

We will also work with breath practices and theories of how place inhabits us within the respiratory atmosphere of air, based on pre-Socratic Greek ideas of aesthesis rooted firstly in the field of breath and not that of the senses. (Dr. Petri Berndson)

This experience is also partially open to the general public as a form of art that generates knowledge through perception and participation.

Perceiving Academy was created by Eric Ellingsen and Lynn Peemoeller, with its starting point in Institut für Raumexperimente (Berlin University of Arts).

This residency is kindly funded by the Cultural Services, Ministry of Education and Culture Cyprus.

https://www.facebook.com/events/524847741397073

Performance

2019

Nicosia

Perceiving Academy

serj — Sat, 26 Oct 2019 07:42:43 +0000

Perceiving Academy serj Sat, 10/26/2019 - 07:42

FOUNDER
Eric Ellingsen

CHOREOGRAPHERS & DIRECTORS
Eric Ellingsen, Lynn Peemoeller

CURATORIAL TEAM:
Katina Kosta, Katerina Neofytidou, Xenia
Tsiamanta

The participants of the PERCEINING ACADEMY, CYPRUS go ON RECORD:

Ilina Chervonnaya, Electra Christofi, Rebecca Efstathiou, Eric Ellingsen, Theodora Foutrou, Eshref Gunerman , Katina Kosta, Lia Lapithi, Georgia Michaelidous Saad, Evgeniya Kondakova-Theodorou, Kwnstandinos Michaelides, Katerina Neofytidou, Maria Papacharalambous, Milka Panayiotova, Lynn Peemoeller, Stylianou Stella, Xenia Tsiamanta, Serj Tubash

sound mastered by: Marcos Papageorgiou

11 of the participants of PERCEIVING ACADEMY, CYPRUS walk a 2.5km loop in Nicosia, Cyprus. The loop moves through two checkpoints in the UN occupied buffer zone, connecting both sides of the divided city.

How do we hear our cities today? How do we measure things on their own terms? How do we cultivate and sustain embodied knowledge within the synthetic spatial narratives of the spaces we have in common? PERCEIVING ACADEMY engages a kind of Urban Emotional Epidemiology, with a Discourse of Doing, while engaging public space, publics, different takes of democracy, geographic landscapes, politics, language and food. PERCEIVNG ACADEMY materializes as ephemeral place-makers, a kind of urban theater, a web-site, and a material object (lathed vinyl; photography monograph; book or recipes and procedural poems). A trust space emerges. And the participants of the PERCEIVING ACADMEY learn how to learn differently.

Every mark on the Urban Score corresponds to a sound, every sound to a measured urban system, like plantings, bollards, man-hole-covers, colors, etc. There is a perceptually rigorous, quantifiable spatial and sound correspondence between the distances in the city - the spacing out of the rotational marks in the drawn score - the rhythms in the sound recordings.

The loop is divided into 11 sections. Each participant maps at least 4 systems found along their section of the loop (doors, colors, cats, trees...) Each system is assigned a graphical notation. Each notation receives a sound, A kind of 'Concrete Poetry' evolves, an Urban Score. The spacing and relation of the city becomes the rhythm in the recordings.

Those sounds and sound maps are taken into a sound engineers recording studio and recorded as layers. The layers are superimposed on each other. The image (the cover art) can be read and heard here. The image was used in a public performance/walk that took place at the end of the Perceiving Academy.

This is the A SIDE of the record; the B SIDE is comprised of interviews and ethnographic conversations around food, bread, flour and place.

Media

FOUNDER
Eric Ellingsen

CHOREOGRAPHERS & DIRECTORS
Eric Ellingsen, Lynn Peemoeller

CURATORIAL TEAM:
Katina Kosta, Katerina Neofytidou, Xenia
Tsiamanta

The participants of the PERCEINING ACADEMY, CYPRUS go ON RECORD:

sound mastered by: Marcos Papageorgiou

Performance

2018

Nicosia

Attraction co-construction

serj — Mon, 21 Oct 2019 17:59:36 +0000

Attraction co-construction serj Mon, 10/21/2019 - 17:59

The proposed project is a study of the structure of an attraction, which, on the one hand, is an obvious ingredient of any tourist destination, and having own division into a number of mandatory elements, on the other.

An attraction is not just a monument of history or art, but the object of mass consumption, a sort of construct, the commodity created by mass culture to meet the demands of a new type of consumer.

By its structure, according to Dean McСannell, a famous classic in a field of tourism analysis, any attraction has a life cycle consisting of several stages of sacralization, and contains the following components:

[tourist / sight / marker] = attraction

Many different forms that markers may take are guidebooks, informational tablets, slide shows, travelogues, souvenirs, etc. It is necessary to note that among the most important Stages of Sight Sacralization are: the naming phase (takes place when the sight is marked off from similar objects as worthy of preservation), as well as the stage of "mechanical reproduction" - the creation of brochures, photographs, etc.

Due to this, the project, based on the theoretical basis, sets a practical task to create a number of new attractions within the framework of the festival.

[1] Using the offered location boundaries, artists and project participants entered into communication with residents of houses, employees of establishments located on a given site. As the result, potential attractions (stories, mentioned historical events or buildings) were selected, which corresponds to the first stage of their sacralization.

[2] The artists prepare edited descriptions of new attractions (in the form of scripts, maps, postcards, brochures, etc.) and directed the upcoming tour during the festival, the audience of which are the guests of the festival.

[3] Right after the festival, the project will was fully documented and published on the websites of artists and friendly media, thus completing the stage of sacralization of the found sights and marking them visible to the tourist mass consumer.

1 Cyprus Amber

‘Cyprus Amber’ is a neuroleptic stone that captures highly mobile bodies with a particular range of chemical composition. Mutated under the influence of frequent travel mobile bodies are no longer resistant to manipulation by Amber.

Whether it bewitches individuals in the tourist agencies, souvenir stores, penetrates into consumer goods or disperses itself in the air and water the stone always finds its way inside recipient bodies and begins to construct their desires and aspirations.

Touristic places and bodies are becoming containers not only for information (experience, memories, etc.) but mainly for the new intellectual substance called ‘Cyprus Amber’ which is an offspring of the generation of excess.

2 Traces on a surface

There is a visual remarkable trace on the building wall which is visible from one of the streets of the festival. We asked a few people on the street if they knew the history of the trace, and it seemed the sign had appeared by itself a couple of years ago. No one could remember the exact day it happened. One of the women confidently correlated the shape of the trace with the sign of a nearby pharmacy. Is it man-made? Is it a coincidence it appeared here?

3 Phantom’s plates

Signs on the houses is a lost culture in Soviet Russia, where all ordinary citizens had to be of the same rank.

Only very high-ranking people had the right to be mentioned. There are many plates on buildings’ surfaces in modern Moscow where you can see a precise information who and when lived there before.

In Larnaca, we stayed at a house where the entrance has plates which are covered with marks of time and changes. How relevant is the information indicated on them? Whom of these mentioned people still live or work in this place? For whom the sign has become a commemorative plaque?

4 A building renovation/new construction

It was surprising to come across information about the potential development project. If not this, nothing says that just in a couple of years on this site can grow a skyscraper that will completely change the historical and visual landscape of the city.

A foreign investor who is building commercial real estate all over the world, paid his attention to the modest street of the city of Larnaca. The building promises to be one of the tallest in the world. The number of floors is record for buildings of this type. It seems that in an attempt to divide the space into the maximum number of cells, the question of human conditions remains beyond. Do any of the locals know about the potential changes?

Do they wonder how this will change their lives? How important is it to preserve the existing landscape of the city and does anyone care?

5 Genius loci

The city is filled with spaces that are closed. Their windows are covered with dust, preventing to look inside. The whole surface is covered with traces of time, events and emotions, intertwining with each other and telling us their story. Sometimes it feels like we can read it. What is it about? Who are the authors? What are they talking to each other about?

6 Wedding photo agency

A shop window with wedding photos has become a real find. We spent a long time looking at people, details. Who are they, how did they meet? What is their fate? Each of the captured in the photo becomes the hero of an untold story. Only one thing is for sure, most of the couples who have become clients of this photo Agency are happy married. Such statistics make the company so popular that the queue for recording is years. What is the secret of this fact? Whether it is an external and inexplicable factor or just a coincidence?

7 Mysterious spot

There is a spot on the street I can't explain for myself. An unexpected discovery. The objects are chained to a pillar. A plastic stool, broom and scoop, empty metal box. Complete set for a story. Only once I saw something like this, on the cold night coast, illuminated by the dim light of ultraviolet lights. How can you explain such a coincidence?

Performance

2018

Larnaca