In its new collective publication, Schlossghost #1, Akademie Schloss Solitude examines the ways in which politics meet artistic and aesthetic practices in contemporary societies. For this the Solitude-fellows who had residencies in 2014, 2015 and early 2016 were invited to reflect on following questions: »Would you say that your practice is political? If so, how would you describe its political dimension?« Schlossghost #1 takes over the role of the traditional yearbooks by the Akademie. Every second year since 1990 they were summarizing all the facets of the work done in Solitude and maintained as a final truth Stéphane Mallarmé’s affirmation that »the ultimate state of the world is a book«. This new publication has lost its materiality and exists only as a virtual yearbook, or one could say as the ghost of a book. WWW.SCHLOSS-GHOST.COM
Is this artistic practice of mine political, you asked? It’s even less than self-governance. But that is precisely the active part of it. It is a governance of disintegration of self and self-referential abilities. It is just the act of trying to re-member something of past and future, re-member the body, re-member own part. It does seem urgent to me, and don‘t get me wrong, not for a pleasure of being able to reflect, reflection seems completely redundant. It seems
Questions: Q: Would you say that your (artistic) practice is political? A: Yes, it is. For me, the unspoken personal is political. I write to give voice to subjects our society likes to brush under the carpet – give voice to the marginalized. My intention is to find ways to restore human dignity through language. Q: If so, how would you describe its political dimension? A: I believe writing is a space where it is possible to honestly dissect the self
The question of how political art and literature can be was never as crucial as it is at the current moment. Especially if you come from a place that is a stage for a brutal war, an endless conflict. It’s almost the same question you hear at every event you are invited to: how was your writing affected by what’s happening in your country? And what role does literature take as an act of resistance? Those questions are so much
She is a pure lament. Like Job, she curses the day when she was born and the night when she was conceived. Like Job, she has no skin. She is pure flesh broken into so many little pieces that she exists only as an irritated surface. Like Job, she opens her mouth for the first time, but there is no intelligible voice coming from within her body. She shakes and trembles in spasm. Her voice cannot find a stable corpse from within
Gia’ … Ma il problema è che voi parlate di »altri« universi come se, in fondo, quello »vero« fosse pur sempre il nostro … E invece, molto probabilmente, questo strano, assurdo mondo è … un sogno di nessuno! [But the problem is that you talk about »other« universes as if, at the bottom, this »real one« was always ours. … And on the contrary, very likely, this strange, absurd world is … a dream of no one. Storia di Nessuno
The various possible answers to the question seem scripted in advance – like we are arriving at this question too late. In the second half of the twentieth century, the domain of politics was imagined to have shifted from a rarefied space (however historically constituted, i.e., the polis, the public sphere, etc.), to a decentralized and »capillary« operation within all spaces. This led to a significant blurring of boundaries, most clearly elucidated in the key mantra of Second Wave feminism: »the
I came to Akademie Schloss Solitude in the summer of 2015 as a fellow in the field of architecture. I wanted to do some historiography about early solar and eco-architecture in Stuttgart and the surrounding region. One aim I had in mind was to broaden the history of recent German architecture, the history of ecological, reflexive (post)modern developments in South Germany, along with the social conditions that framed them and their impact. At the same time, I wanted to complement
I would not have been able to complete my book on Vincent Van Gogh if it had not been for the residency grant I was awarded by Akademie Schloss Solitude in 2014. The four winter months I spent there were extraordinary for me, coming as I did from my home country of Bahrain, where the temperature in our area reaches 50 degrees centigrade in the summer, and where we are not befriended by any winter in the true, seasonal sense
During my stay at Solitude in the summer of 2014, there were two events that were related to my work. A year later, in the spring of 2015, I was on a journey through the Balkans on the same path refugees took a month later. I was in the Budapest Keleti railway station as well, where the refugees started to walk west toward Austria and Germany, and change European history. I started writing essays about all this, because sometimes I
In the following lines, I will describe Radio-Lumières, a project in public space in Lyon that reflects on participation, inverts the usual way participants are involved in an artistic project, and also twists the idea of democratic representation. Commissioned by the macLYON, Museum of Contemporary Art, the project is linked to the retrospective Yoko Ono staged from March to July 2016. The request was a participatory work echoing the show because public participation has always been important to Yoko Ono:
Schloss yearbook: Would you say that your (artistic) practice is political? Jelena: It is sometimes political, but I would rather call it politicizing. Schloss yearbook: If so, how would you describe its political dimension? Jelena: As looking behind the curtain of representation. »Paint what you love and love what you paint«Tom Roberts, 1890 »Your money or your life!« – was a threat or a false pick that the nineteenth-century bandits, just about the time when Roberts wrote his credo,
The political dimension of my artistic practice has slowly expanded in the past few years, so that if it only encompassed a one-way relationship in the beginning, it now consists of an interweaving, two-way flow of influences that moves from socio-political situations to my compositional process, and vice versa. Not far from Luigi Nono’s treatment of the choir’s part for the words »é stato un assassinio tutti morti« [1] in Diario Italiano, the pitch
»Would you say that your (artistic) practice is political? If so, how would you describe its political dimension?« My practice is mainly connected within the realm of digital politics. Somewhere in 2003 I found my way into the Bulgarian open-source community, mainly because of my experiments with digital media. Fast forward two years, and this connection evolved into the establishment of Open Projects Foundation.1 We picked November 1 as our founding date, symbolically following in the footsteps of the founding
»You forgot your swimsuit!« Before she can make up her mind, the dry gravel will giggle its heat under her soles like acid. She will not giggle, because she never giggles like the other girls whose polyphonic perfection tautens across the pool like a white summer sheet. He tautens muscles across bone and tautens and tautens like a fishing net across the blue bed that sloshes restlessly over the edge. Swish and swash, that giggle again, swish and swash. Flex
Translated by Katherine Vanovitch (German to English).
… often walked through the forest behind the castle, wondering what could survive the apocalypse. Love? Art? Individuality? The very wealthy? During my time at Solitude, I worked on a novel about a collapsed and desolate future and often walked through the forest behind the castle, wondering what could survive the apocalypse. Love? Art? Individuality? The very wealthy? It seemed like a romantic and self-consciously literary gesture for a writer to mope around the winter trees frosted with morning ice
My artistic practice has nothing to do with politics. It connects to personal historical experience within changing surroundings and society. It’s more about how I deal with the materials, objects, and surroundings in the physical and emotional dimensions.
YOU = Sound intervention for Intercom, 5 minutes. Concept, direction and composition: Myriam Van Imschoot. Performers: Louiza Amghizzar, Fatiha El Mrabet, Caroline Daish, Nezha Haffou, Myriam Van Imschoot, Fleur Khani, Suad Khelifa, Khadija Lazaar, Malika Mderreg, Anissa Rouas. Recording: Kenny Martens.
As somebody who deals with philosophy and would describe himself as being influenced by thinkers like Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Paul Feyerabend, or Theodor W. Adorno, the very simple answer would be: »Yes! My practice is political.« But actually the question strikes into the very heart of doubts I have. And maybe not only into my personal doubts, but to the more general question of what the term »political practice« could or should mean in the horizon of philosophy. Which
AMERICIUM Completion date Summer 2017 The film weaves a story around a mountain in the Nevada desert, planned as a nuclear waste facility for radioactive matter and located on Shoshone Native American land. The narrative is partly told through oral storytelling of people living in its proximity