11:30-12:00: ice-breaker session
12:00-15:00:
satellite meetings 1: Ioanna Gerakidi
bend or break
What does it take to exist through or across writing—to use it as a tool to claim space, to turn it into a means of refusing productivity, attempting consolation, or finding another kind of numbness? How can this very inertia—often demonised or excluded from our haptic and immaterial vernaculars—speak of resilience when tearing language apart, only in order to recompose it? How can bodies that are physically injured, overused, or invisibly wounded utter their exhaustion when the world tells them otherwise? What is at stake when lives are maintained in states of preservation and precarity, neither fully cared for nor allowed to heal or disappear?
Bend or Break focuses on these inquiries through poetic and performative, lyrical and abrupt, theoretical and speculative approaches, drawing on the work of Dodie Bellamy, Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Daisy Lafarge, Hélène Cixous, Annie Ernaux, Deborah Levy, and Anne Boyer. It aims to explore their resonance with late liberalism and its multifaceted connotations and applications in relation to labour, disorderly manifestations, and diverse methodologies.
The workshop centers on a series of collective reading and writing exercises, reflecting on the texts as well as on the discussions that emerge from them.
bio
Ioanna Gerakidi is a writer, curator, and educator based in Athens. Her research interests think through the subjects of language and disorder, drawing on feminist, educational, and psychoanalytical studies. Poetry and other diaristic and archival schemes are often embedded in her practice. She has curated exhibitions and programs at and for: Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), 2023 Eleusis, Nicosia Municipal Arts Centre (NiMAC), Athens Biennale, State of Concept (Athens), Theocharakis Foundation, Hot Wheels ATHENS/London, among others. Her words have been presented at Kunstverein Amsterdam, Stroom den Hague, Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, CAC (LT), the Montez Press Radio (UK), Carlos/Ishikawa (UK), Hangar (Spain). Her work has been included in international platforms and publications such as: Collecteurs, Artnews.lt, Athinorama (GR), the catalog of the Greek Pavilion under the title Xiromero for Venice Biennale 2024, The Glenkeen Variations of Crespo Foundation, and more. She has lectured or led workshops, talks and mentoring schemes for Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Piet Zwart Institute, Design Academy Eindhoven, ATHENS School of Fine Arts, Rupert Residency, SAHA Association, Onassis AIR Residency, and ARTWORKS by SNF. She is the founder of CHEAT CODE, a platform dedicated to alternative knowledge production and artistic development.
15:00 – 16:00: lunch break
16.00-19.00:
satellite meetings 2: Μarta Keil
What if we imagined casting a spell on tired art institutions?
We live in exhausting and extractivist times. As a result, many artists and art institutions seem utterly depleted. Navigating unstable working conditions, funding cuts, relentless competition, and political urgencies, they are too tired to imagine they could not be. While operating under constant pressure, our bodies often remain malnourished and drained. Yet, we barely meet in this exhaustion.
The institutional bodies are often frantically busy with protecting their imaginary of being stable, solid and change proof. The precarious bodies of art workers often do not have strength anymore to move yet another institutional wall again. What can we learn from these tired bodies? What might more regenerative institutional practices look like? And what must we let go of to make space for them to emerge?
In the first part of the workshop, we will discuss the conditions of exhaustion in performing arts and explore the concept of ‘open source instituting’ as a potentially nourishing practice, as proposed by Marta Keil and Alexander Roberts in their recent article Art Institutions under the Spell of Exhaustion: Reimagining instituent practices. In the second part, we will write a spell for a more regenerative institution.
bio
Marta Keil (she/her) is dramaturge, curator and researcher, currently based in Utrecht. Her curatorial and research practice focuses on institutional dramaturgies and ways of re-enchanting modes of working in performing arts. She works as tutor at DAS Theatre, Academy for Theatre and Dance, Amsterdam University of the Arts and as an associate curator for Zürcher Theater Spektakel. At AP School of Arts in Antwerp, Royal Conservatoire she runs an artistic research projectDramaturgies of Withdrawal: On Gestures of Refusal in Search of More Nourishing Artistic and Institutional Practices. Marta edited several books on curation, choreography and performing arts and holds a PhD in Culture Studies and is a member of the Performing Arts Institute (InSzPer) collective in Warsaw.
