Conversations & Seminars
Seminar: Working Title

5.–6. oktober 2019

Past showings

11:00, Lille scene

11:00, Lille scene

What do we talk about when we talk about practice?

“Practice has often been opposed to theory, but the use of the term ‘practice’ in the world of art is often highly abstract and intellectualized. If art has become practice, what does this have to do with thinking, with making, with action, with transformation, with discipline, with repetition, with training, with habit and with performance? “ – Marcus Boon and Gabriel Levine

A seminar initiated by Runa Borch Skolseg, Nikhil Vettukattil, Alexandra Tveit and Marie Ursin in collaboration with Black Box teater. With invited guests:

Marcus Doverud & Else Tunemyr
Las Nietas de Nonó
Timothy George Kelly and Natasha Falkov
Elina Pirinen
Barbara Raes
Lisa Robertson
Adam Gallagher
B.I.T– Bureau of Translation

This is an invitation to an all-weekend seminar to take a closer look at the term artistic practice. We have invited participants and practitioners working across poetry, activism, visual and performing arts. There will be presentations, conversations and discussions. We will share a meal and and practice various ways of being and talking together.

We ask ourselves: Which tools and theories are we using? Which are still not developed? Is practice in art a means to understanding or a narrow path to professionalizing? Does it diminish the works we make or help to situate them? Is art embedded in a world of social practices or in a struggle against them?
Working Title has its starting point in a desire for collective thinking. And the belief that new relations, thoughts and landscapes arises from dialogue and listening to each other. Everyone is welcome!

*Program:
Saturday 5. October
11:00 – 11:30 Doors open, coffee and registration
11:30 – 12:00 Introduction
12:00 – 13:30 Lisa Robertson
13:30 – 14:30 Lunch
14:30 – 16:00 Las Nietas de Nonó
16:00 – 17:00 Elina Pirinen
18:00 Joint dinner with Else Tunemyr and Marcus Doverud. The dinner require separate ticket. Buy it here

Sunday 6. October
10:30 – Doors open, coffee and registration
11:00 – 11:30 Introduction
11:30 – 13:30 Barbara Raes
13:30 – 14:30 Lunch
14:30 – 15:30 Adam Gallagher
15:30 – 16:00 Timothy George Kelly and Natasha Falkov
16:00 – 17:00 Conversation and discussion

B.I.T – Bureau of Translation will be available at Black Box teater in the opening hours of the seminar. You can book your slot with them during the seminar.

* Obs. times may change during the seminar.

About the participants:

Lisa Robertson is a Canadian poet who works at the intersections of essay and verse, research and invention, the terrestrial and the utopian, the plastic arts and literature. Her most recent books of poetry, published in Toronto by Coach House, are 3 Summers, Cinema of the Present, and Lisa Robertson’s Magenta Soul Whip. Nilling, a book of prose essays appeared in 2012, and early next year a novel, The Baudelaire Fractal will be published. She lectures, performs and teaches across Europe, in Canada and in the USA, and lives in a small village in the Nouvelle Aquitaine region of France.

The sisters, Lydela and Michel are Las Nietas de Nonó. They were raised between the Manuel A. Pérez housing project in Río Piedras and the San Antón neighborhood in Carolina. Their artistic practices are framed within the socioeconomic and geographical context of the exclusion and displacement of black communities in Puerto Rico, racial and class discrimination, mass incarceration, drug trafficking, obstetric violence and poverty. In their creative process they evoke the family memory to expose the systematic oppressions that they have lived through for generations. Their practices also highlight circumstances and elements that are present in their neighborhood: the expansion of ancestral knowledge, the exchange of food grown in the neighborhood, the reuse of found materials and organic matters. As part of their research with organic elements Lydela and Michel Nonó are focusing in the symbiotic culture of bacteria and yeast (SCOOBY) for vegetable leather and iguanas hide. The work of Las Nietas de Nonó is fueled by the intersection of theater, performance, dance, activism, ecology, emancipatory education and local food. In the old plot of their paternal grandparents, Don Nonó (farmer) and Doña Manuela (curandera or healer), located in the San Antón neighborhood in Carolina, they manage Patio Taller. They also manage an art workshop and knowledge exchange to honor the practices that have come to life on the plot since the late 40s “: the exchange of fruit crops, healing by medicinal plants and the raising of farm animals. Las Nietas de Nonó have received the United States Artist Award (2018), The Art of Change from the Ford Foundation (2017), and the Global Arts Fund of the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice (2017). Their work has been shown in Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Cuba, the United States, Scotland, Germany and England. They multimedia performance Ilustraciones de la Mecánica (2016-2019) has been commissioned by the 79th Whitney Biennial (2019) and the 10th Berlin Biennial (2018).

Elina Pirinen is Helsinki based choreographer, dancer, singer-songwriter-musician, curator, artistic director and pedagogue. She works closely and passionately with feminist, psychodynamic, intimate and emancipatory language, music and visual forms.
She has been collaborating regularly with Zodiak – Center for New Dance, Kiasma Theater of Kiasma Museum of contemporary art, performance art venue Mad House and toured widely with her works ‘Personal Symphonic Moment’, ‘meadow,meadow,meadow’, ‘Concerto under Waterlilies’, ‘Brume de Mer’ and ‘La Beaute du Coeur’ .Pirinen is responsible for the dance art education in the Degree Programme in Acting in Swedish in Theatre Academy of University of the Arts Helsinki. She also works with domestic animals in need and makes romantique and wild electro-doom-pop-baroque music with her orchestra Al2Be3.

Marcus Doverud is working as a dancer, choreographer and teacher based in Stockholm. His work moves between different stages of bodily, spatial and sonic utterances. He aspires to describe and create contractions in culture that open up for ways of understanding, experiencing and being together. Marcus graduated from the Stockholm Academy of Dramatic Arts and studied aesthetic philosophy at the Institution for Culture and Communication at Södertörn University College. In October 2018 the piece ‘The Skin Ego’ premiered, Doverud’s first work made for several dancers. During 2019 the piece ‘Samples Songs and Prayers’ will be performed as well as the initiation of the coming work ‘Thinking with Music’. He has published the book Viformation together with visual artist Liv Strand. Marcus graduated from the Stockholm Academy of Dramatic Arts and studied aesthetic philosophy at the Institution for Culture and Communication at Södertörn University College.

Else Tunemyr is working in different collaborations sometimes as a dancer and sometimes as a choreographer, dramaturg and cook. Also known as ‘The Dramaturg Chef’, she started cooking for her friend’s rehearsals to include the affection and affiliations created from eating together as a crucial part of a working process.

Barbara Raes was artistic director of arts centre Vooruit (Ghent) and BUDA (Kortrijk) for 15 years. In 2014 she radically stopped working in the arts field with the text “Radiantly burning out and stacking stones”. She followed a course in funeral celebrancy and created her own workspace for unacknowledged loss, Beyond The Spoken. In co-creation with artists she devises unique, bespoke rituals, to commemorate and give meaning to transitional moments in life. From 2015 onwards Barbara was researcher at KASK, School of Arts and curated different programs related to the topic of loss, pain and grief in Brussels, Berlin, Ghent and Amsterdam.

Adam Gallagher is an artist and writer from and based in London who works mainly through performance and publishing. He works against the performative artist ego; disassembling its reliance upon the myopic context, history and industry of art to produce new meaning. He self-publishes a series of pamphlets called ‘E.A.R.F’. The series transposes original fictionalised biographies that aim to dramatise instances in which disparate subjectivities appear, relate, contradict, and attempt to coexist, to form a picture of the fallout, failures and flatulence of global capitalism. Recently he has been working in collaboration with Curtly Thomas on his music and performance act, clubcouture and with him and Ruth Angel Edwards on The Unwelcome Collection, a collaborative performance spectacle. Recent exhibitions and performances include: ‘The Unwelcome Collection: We the Upsetters: Executive Plunge’, Peak Gallery, (2019), ‘What can Robert do next? Where is Roberto going?’, Piper Keys, (2018), ‘Divine Cargo’, South London Gallery, (2018), ‘CC, Klein presents’, with clubcouture, Somerset House, ‘The Unwelcome Collection: An Incendiary Costume Drama’, Auto Italia South East, (2018), ‘Words fail me’, Auto Italia South East. (2018) and ’Polly Anything’, Lima Zulu (2017). Commissioned writing include The Happy Hypocrite issue 11: Silver Bandage, ‘Tuna Temperature’, The Tube #3: Loosing, ‘Special Category Status’ and ‘Trust’ for The Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis (2018), ‘Extra Judicial Killing’ and ‘What did I do to deserve this?’, Montez Press, Interjection Calendar (2017).

Natasha Falkov is a union organiser, writer and filmmaker from New Zealand. Recently relocated to Berlin, Natasha works as an organiser for United Voices of the World, a London based grassroots union that are currently unionising precarious workers.

Timothy George Kelly is a filmmaker, artist and facilitator from Melbourne currently based between London and Berlin. In 2017 his second feature-length documentary Brexitannia was released, it played over sixty festivals and was broadcast on European television. He is engaged in activism in London and runs regular reading groups and workshops in Berlin.

B.I.T
The BIT Translation Bureau has been active since 2017 under the rolling stewardship of R. Skolseg, J. Scott, J. Reed, A. Napier, S. Mollicchi, O.K. Fairweather, and J. Cox.
The Translation Bureau will be open from ten thirty to one thirty, and from two thirty to six on each day. If you have any business for the Bureau, we would love to see you. If you don’t have any business for the Bureau, we would love to see you also.

5.-6. October. 11.00-17.00. Lille Scene + Foajé
Price for both days is 200 NOK. Coffee, snacks and lunch is included. Price for separate dinner event 100 NOK The seminar will be in English. This event is produced in collaboration with Black Box teater and funded with support from OCA, Grenland Friteater, Deichmanske Bibliotek, Norsk Kulturråd, Nordisk Kulturfond, FFUK and Oslo Kommune.