Testing Ground

Who’s Afraid of Fear? 

Over the course of the fall, literary and art historical non-fiction writer, para-curator and cyclical agent, Sidsel Nelund, will conduct an open research investigation into fear in the art world. The paradox of fear being integral to the creative process and also its growing hindrance is sparking this investigation: What fears affect art professionals? Where do the fears come from, how do fear shape art practitioners, their practice and the collective endeavors they are part of?

In a critical era of polycrisis, fear is a physical and mental force that transforms the art profession. Fear is futuristic and a tool of envisioning what might come next: fear of rejection, fear of economy, fear of public life, fear of being redundant, fear of visibility, fear of colleagues, fear of success, fear of failure, fear of having a voice, fear of structures, fear of systemic injustices, fear of harassment, fear of shaming, fear of critique.

Yet, the fear-based approach inhibits creative processes when given too much space. Some level of safety – inner as outer – is needed. So how can these fears be faced? And how can they find a place to be release?

Taking inspiration from the black African-American embodiment tradition and South American hospicing modernity practices, Sidsel Nelund will, over a series of sharing sessions, weave together a hybrid method that is at once theoretical, communal, and emotional. Rooted in a cyclical creativity approach she has developed over the past decade, these sessions will explore fear with curiosity, and connection. Nelund hopes to inspire a practice of courageous togetherness, because fear both bind people together and disperses, so what if we gather to normalize fear and find ways to move beyond?

Let’s face the fears together, discern what is real, what is ours to face or not, and let isolation and loneliness transform.

The Who’s Afraid of Fear? investigation is part of the book project How to Survive the Art World: An Ecosystemic Approach to Art, which is a book as talisman for strengthening the inner creative process and its meeting with the outer world.

Soil Readings
– a study in collective methods of organizing

Throughout the fall, artists Bodil Krogh Andersen and Martin Christoffer Lund will participate in a Testing Ground program, where they will explore how to work with different learning and co-creation formats to form the basis of a future interdisciplinary summer school.

Based on their extensive focus on the Nordhavnen land-reclamation project and the migrating ecologies that simultaneously shape the area into recreational environments and bear witness to heavy industry, they want to create spaces that facilitate collective investigations of the intertwined contexts in which we inhabit.

The aim is to find entry points for co-creation, not only across people with different experiences, but also the stories they find in materials and species around them, to encourage cohesion and edification in future sustainable ecosystems.

During their Testing Ground process, they will establish dialogue and knowledge-sharing with other communities in similar contexts to learn from their organization and methods. Based on these meetings, they will organize public events aimed at approaching the matter from different perspectives to help create a shared and interconnected space for knowledge.

Within a contemporary state of increasing polarization, environmental catastrophe, and for many either political fatigue or revolt, in what way does listening offer a meaningful artistic and critical practice; a pause from speaking up, taking space, defining, and describing? How does listening offer a space and practice for reflection and care?

On the last evening of each Testing Ground week, Bureau for Listening invited inside for a Listening Event. The specific program for each event was planned during the upleading week, and therefore unknown until arrival and participation in the event.

Each Listening Event is conceptualized as a gathering and sharing moment, centered around the listening theme/practice of the week, and as a chance to share findings, practices, knowledge, questions and wondering – a chance to celebrate and promote listening.

EVENTS:

AHC : Art & Research : Testing Ground : Bureau for Listening : listening as artistic practice : 26.01.24

AHC : Art & Research : Testing Ground : Bureau for Listening : slow listening : 01.03.24

AHC : Art & Research : Testing Ground : Bureau for Listening : listening body : 21.03.24

AHC : Art & Research : Testing Ground : Bureau for Listening : spatial listening : 18.04.24

Testing Ground explores the intersection between knowledge production and art practice, studio and exhibition. It is an opportunity for artists to open up their processes and reflect on their way of thinking together with an audience or peers in a space of opportunity, which they themselves determine. For this Testing Ground, the curator Jacob Fabricius invited the author/playwright Ida Marie Hede to write a theatre work. The hope is one day to stage the performance in the heart of a total installation as part of Fabricius’s exhibition series iwillmedievalfutureyou.

So, in the course of four evenings, Ida Marie Hede will interpret Fabricius’s exhibition concept on the basis of conversations with a number of invited guests – artists, researchers and architects – to pinpoint the form and material for the as yet unwritten performance. As the cryptic title iwillmedievalfutureyou implies, it  involves disbanding the concept of time, casting a spotlight on the primitive, absurd, dreamlike and dystopian aspects both of our present and of our potential future. Together with the guests, Hede will speculate on this dissolution of time in a world entangled with bodies, matter, labour, capital, desire, indignation, anxiety and self-optimisation. It is a world that, while expediting everything, also strives to find healing crevices and awkward communities. Questions that might propel the conversations forward (or back) include: Can we use metabolism as a prism, through which to understand our society? How many eras are there in a chicken nugget? Why is power so hard to spot? Does technology save us from death, or does death merely become more insistent? Who is at work here? Will it ever be too late to hold a mourning ritual for the long-forgotten? Can we build new cemeteries for the bodies of the future? Each event will begin with Hede trying out a short dramatic sketch by inviting her guests to read it out loud with her. After this nerve-wracking abdominal exercise, the conversation will move more freely.

EVENTS:

AHC : Art & Research : Testing Ground : The As Yet Unrealised Performance I : 28.03.23

AHC : Art & Research : Testing Ground : The As Yet Unrealised Performance II : 18.04.23

AHC : Art & Research : Testing Ground : The As Yet Unrealised Performance III : 16.05.23

AHC : Art & Research : Testing Ground : The As Yet Unrealised Performance IV : 13.06.23

As part of his Testing Grounds residency, Juan Pablo García Sossa / jpgs explores the rendering of a multiplicity of realities through Magical Hackerism and Spelling Masala Protocols. Interested in pluriversing technologies towards a techno diversity and pluriversal understandings of the planet, jpgs looks at Magical Hackerism and various forms of tropical hacking (Brazilian Jeitinho and Gambiarra, Indian Jugaad, and Latin American Rebusque and Hechiza, among many others) as a way of hacking reality. In order to re·wire the rootcode of what we think makes us human and reduce the verticalities embedded in the modern binaries we live, jpgs focuses on generative protocols that respond to endemic situated knowledges from the tropics. Masala is commonly understood as a combination of spices that can be eaten or drunk. There’s no single way of doing masala but rather millions of ways, yet we can still refer to it. During Testing Ground jpgs formed a research netting performed within Futura Trōpica Netroots exploring notions of technologies and nets from a Tropikós perspective and crafting generative masala protocols that enable the rendering of a multiplicity of worlds and their translations into digital experiments.

Futura Trōpica Netroots is an InterTropical Network of Grass-Root LANscapes for the lateral exchange of other forms of endemic knowledges, resources and technologies, from a Tropikós perspective. This P2P- semipublic network uses the IPFS protocol to connect practitioners and networks of affection that understand life as an artistic practice in Bogotá Colombia, Kinshasa DR Congo, and Bengaluru India. Within the network we perform a series of experiments that shape and reshape our organizational and governance patterns and ways of netting.

EVENTS:

AHC : Art & Research : Testing Ground :  Spelling Masala Protocols : A Protocol Design Workshop : 10.05.23 – 11.05.23

AHC : Art & Research : Testing Ground : Talk : Magical Hackerism : On Creolizing Protocols, Tekologies and Permacomputing : 11.05.23

What is the act of writing? What is ‘knowledge’? What is implicit in, and what may be introduced into the field of artistic research? WORKSHOP FOR AESTHETICS’ Talking in Praxis, presented by Jonas Georg Christensen, will seek to investigate such questions.

Starting out in August 2022 – and from then on, five times every last Tuesday of the month from 6.30 to 8.30 pm – the conversations will be presented as audio and text montages in the cinema space. Straight after each screening, we will follow up on the presentations – together with the audience as a third conversational partner.

All séances will be at Vester Vov Vov, Absalonsgade 5, 1658 Copenhagen.

The séances involve exchanges between practising artists, theoreticians, and researchers. The basis for the conversations comprises both personal and general questions about notions of practice. In other words, these are some of the questions that Jonas Georg Christensen asks himself in relation to understanding the character of artistic practice, and the implicit possibilities involved in giving an account of one’s experience of having a creative and theoretical practice.

While trying out the conversation as a format, together with five colleagues whose work also is exploratory, these questions will be raised. In the conversations, each of us will attempt to articulate our notion of what takes place in the studio space or on site, and at the work desk. Thereby, by putting things to the test, we seek to ask and formulate questions through dialogues in praxis. Questions about knowledge.

WORKSHOP FOR AESTHETICS’ Dialogues in Praxis has been given its current format by Jonas Georg Christensen in collaboration with AHC as part of the Testing Ground Programme.

EVENTS:

AHC : Art & Research : Testing Ground : WORKSHOP FOR AESTHETICS’ – DIALOGUES IN PRAXIS #1 : 30.08.22

AHC : Art & Research : Testing Ground : WORKSHOP FOR AESTHETICS’ – DIALOGUES IN PRAXIS #2 : 27.09.22

AHC : Art & Research : Testing Ground : WORKSHOP FOR AESTHETICS’ – DIALOGUES IN PRAXIS #3 : 25.10.22

AHC : Art & Research : Testing Ground : WORKSHOP FOR AESTHETICS’ – DIALOGUES IN PRAXIS #4 : 29.11.22

AHC : Art & Research : Testing Ground : WORKSHOP FOR AESTHETICS’ – DIALOGUES IN PRAXIS #5 : 24.01.23

DOCUMENTATION:

AHC : Media : Testing Ground : Workshop for Aesthetics’ – Dialouges in Praxis : Audio

The Algorithmic Theatre is a work collective and artistic research project, operating at the cross-section of stage arts, visual arts, and programming. It investigates how algorithms affect our bodies, identities, and societies, and directs a critical and investigative gaze at algorithmic control, surveillance, and the digitization of our lives.

The Algorithmic Theatre has existed as an ongoing investigative project since 2020 and is currently working on the development of an algorithmic format for the stage arts, leading up to a performance-installation at Den Frie Centre for Contemporary Art in 2023. In parallel a discursive events program is under development.

The core members are writer and visual artist Kristian Byskov, dramatist and director Kristian Husted, curator and program developer Tina Ryoon Andersen, and dramaturg Pernille Kragh. The Algorithmic Theatre collaborates with AHC, TOASTER and IDA, and is supported by The Danish Arts Foundation and The Bikuben Foundation.

THE ALGORITHMIC THEATER AND TESTING GROUND

In March 2022 Kristian Husted and Kristian Byskov were artists in residence at AHC’s Testing Ground Research Residency. During the one-month residency Husted and Byskov developed the concept for The Memory Machine Game, an algorithmic format that can be used as an artistic tool. Professors and students from the departments of Law (KU), Computer Science (KU) and Digital Design (ITU) was co-developing the format throughout a workshop at AHC. Further, a research journal will be developed as part of the residency.

EVENTS:

AHC : Art & Research : Testing Ground : Free Lunch Series : The Algorithmic Theater : 26.04.22

In this series, the artists Eva La Cour, Mia Edelgart and Joen Vedel set out to use live editing as a method of articulating issues of representation, historicity, temporality and technological agency in training and the ‘nurturing’ of affective sensitivity and attention. Live editing is a form of cinematic practice in which the sequence of images is not arranged in a pre-established narrative and temporal structure, but instead is performed in front of an audience in new combinations of live recordings and existing material. Live editing thereby paves the way for new groupings that hover between thinking and image, archive and social process. In this context, as a performative and situated cinematic expression, the film’s technological conditions and visual expression encounter bodies, time and space.

AHC : Art & Research : Testing Ground : Prekær filmpraktik #1 : 13.04.21 (In Danish only)

AHC : Art & Research : Testing Ground : Prekær filmpraktik #2 : 20.04.21 (In Danish only)

AHC : Art & Research : Testing Ground : Prekær filmpraktik #3 : 14.09.21 (In Danish only)

AHC : Art & Research : Testing Ground : Prekær filmpraktik #4 : 21.09.21 (In Danish only)

DOCUMENTATION:

AHC : Art & Research : Testing Ground : Prekær filmpraktik : video & text

New Connections: Queering the Radio Voice, was a series of five live radio shows (later turned into a podcast series) which examined the relationship between body and voice, especially our normative perceptions of which voices – anatomical as well as synthetic – are connected to which bodies.

Kristoffer Raasted perceives his practice-based research project as artistic thinking rather than ‘artistic research’ – a less result-oriented and more process-based approach to basic research. Intersectional feminism and sustainability are also key topics in the project.

EVENTS:

AHC : Art & Research : Testing Ground : Kristoffer Raasted : New Connections Queering the Radio Voice I : 25.02.21

AHC : Art & Research : Testing Ground : Kristoffer Raasted : New Connections Queering the Radio Voice II : 04.03.21

AHC : Art & Research : Testing Ground : Kristoffer Raasted : New Connections Queering the Radio Voice III : 18.03.21

AHC : Art & Research : Testing Ground : Kristoffer Raasted : New Connections Queering the Radio Voice IV : 25.03.21

AHC : Art & Research : Testing Ground : Kristoffer Raasted : New Connections Queering the Radio Voice V : 16.04.21

The podcast is available here.