2024-03-01

To Skog

 

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We are proud to announce that we will be in residency at Dansplats Skog outside of Söderhamn March 4-22. Artists from different genres from Sweden, Norway, France and Japan will meet and work together during 3 weeks. Much of the work will be related to our project Zygote that we run together with Vision Forum. There will be a public presentation on March 17.

2024-02-15

Zygote at Höjden

 

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- Welcome to a Zygote performance at Höjden, in Årsta on February 17, 2024 at 20.30.

Zygote is project where performance artists, fashion designers, musicians and researchers in foetal development are working together. Zygote is a mobile laboratory that moves between different Swedish urban and natural locations. The work is a collective investigation, where the audience is actively involved in shaping the results. The process does not result in a final performance, instead the working group conducts a series of ongoing investigations together with different audience groups. We call these proto-performances. This makes the work an ongoing and investigative process.

Please join us for a Zygote proto performance at Höjden, in Årsta on February 17, 2024 at 20.30.

2024-02-01

CM in Mexico

 

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Curatorial Mutiny and Vision Forum returns to Queretaro for one more residency at El Dia D. This time most of the work is being carried out in Tequisqaiapan and brings together Swedish, Mexican and Canadian artists from multiple genres who will work together. The work will culminate with performances at the beautiful Museum of Contemporary Art in Santiago de Queretaro. The program starts at 6pm, February 9 and entrance is free.

Liminal Beauty is a dance performance based on the Nobel laureate, Elfriede Jelinek’s feminist drama “Sleeping Beauty.” The drama describes Sleeping Beauty’s subjective experience of being a prisoner in a liminal state between life and death and wakefulness and sleep. The performance uses the play to address important metaphysical questions about the constitution of reality through movement and dialogues between film, dance and music. In order to investigate these questions, the performers uses bodily movements on stage and in the projected moving images that examine what it means to be trapped, in limbo, between different bodily stages. The use of film, dance and live music allows her, as well the audience, to get a different understanding how the mysteries of the human condition and the potential of the human body.

In the performance Trickster Ceremony the performers investigate the relationship between the inner and outer worlds of humans. How do the processes inside the human body affect how we perceive and understand the outside world? How does the outside world impact what happens inside us? As the performance commences, the audience is offered a specially developed drink by the artists. They then invites the audience to make a short introspection exercise with them.

After the exercise they will watch a film which is accompanied by digital live music. For the performance they use repurposed neuroscientific technology developed by the EEGsynth to externalise the activity of the human brain so that its activities can be seen and heard by the audience. In other words, the sounds and moving images in the performance are influenced in real time by signals from a performer’s brain activities. For this purpose a performer wears an EEG (electroencephalogram) cap on her head. The signals from the cap is sent to a computer which analyses the data and sends it on to a digital musical instruments and software that influence the film’s images in real time.

Tricksters are often boundary-crossers of world-views and can travel into parallel worlds. They cross and often break both physical and societal rules and violate principles of social and natural order. Tricksters often disrupt normal life and then recreates it in new shapes and forms. The film depicts a modern day trickster going through such a transformation.

Welcome!

The Swedish artists travel to Mexico is supported by The Swedish Arts Grants Committee

2024-01-09

PalaeoFaeces in Stockholm

 


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Curatorial Mutiny is part of the team that is starting up a new project called “PalaeoFaeces.” In order to develop the project, members of the working group meet in Stockholm January 23-27. Here is an introductory text to the project:

Throughout our evolutionary history, the human microbiome has gone through some significant changes. Examinations of paleofeaces (human excrement that is thousands of years old) suggest that there has been a major extinction event in the human gut. The ancient microbiome contained 40% of species that were previously unknown to science. Furthermore, the ancient microbiomes had a higher number of transposases which contain elements of DNA sequences that can change location in the genome. So, the microbes might use this much larger collection of transposases to grab and collect genes that could help them adapt to different environments. One species, Treponema succinifaciens, was found in all of the ancient microbiomes but is completely absent in the modern western microbiome. In the words of researcher Aleksandar Kostic, “These are things we don’t get back.”

These changes to our microbiome go hand in hand with technological inventions and there are four major changes that altered our human microbiota significantly. The first of these was the discovery and use of fire. Although it is hard to pinpoint exactly when this occurred and became widespread practice, it is usually estimated to had happened around 2 million to 400 000 years ago. The second big change was the process of developing agriculture, which happened over 5000 years and that was fully in place approximately 10,000 years ago. Pre-agricultural societies had a much higher microbial diversity. The reason for this is most likely the more diverse diet of hunter-gatherer societies. Compared to agricultural societies, the hunter-gatherers traveled over a wider area. But even the traditional societies that rely on agriculture have a higher microbial diversity than their modern western counterparts.

But the most significant change occurred over the last 300 years or so, with the start of industrialisation. This process was intensified after the 1950 with what has been called The Great Acceleration. During this time the invention and use of antimicrobial agents, such as biocides, disinfectants and antibiotics has increased, exponentially killing off, not only the “bad” microbes but also the ones who are beneficial for human health. The increased use of pharmaceutical products has also had a negative impact on the microbes in the gut. There is a paradox in all of this. For while we, in western society, have the opportunity to have a diet that is much more diverse than the hunter-gatherer could only dream of, and thus have an even higher microbial diversity, we simply don’t. Why is that?  One of the main differences between ancestral human microbiome and those of humans in the developed world is that the ancient population were exposed to the microbiota from a relatively small geographical area something that would change during the age of exploration.

So, what is a historical microbiome? What can we learn from what we have lost? Is there a historicity to the microbiome?

2023-11-20

Glittering and Sparkling Conversations

 


2023-10-14

Do Trees Dream, Mother Earth's Inner Organs and other stories

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Curatorial Mutiny participates in an event Wednesday, October 18th, 2023 17:00-20.00
at Archipelago Centre Korpoström
Korpoströmsvägen 832, 21720 Korpoström

There will be a break with refreshments, and the event is held in English.

Maria Ångerman is the current artist in the Pro Artibus Korpo Archipelago Residency. For a special gathering she has invited a few artists whose practices consider more-than-human communities from diverse perspectives.

The first mountains that the Amsterdam-based Colombian artist and filmmaker Ana Bravo Pérez saw in the Netherlands were black. Mother Earth’s Inner Organs is a journey from Amsterdam to Wayú territory in the North of Colombia following the smoke, the rotten smell of burning Mma – meaning Mother Earth in Wayuunaiki. Bravo Pérez weaves a narrative that goes from the surface of Mma to its depths. From the experience of the Wayú people and the filmmaker’s reflection on extractivist practices to plastic experimentations that create a lucid dream, an eye opener to how extractivism of coal affects life.

Researchers have learned that plants rest at night, in a similar way that humans and animals do. But do they also dream? What is their nocturnal existence like? Which similarities and differences can we find between them and us? Do Trees Dream of CO₂ is a Franco-Swedish collective that has been developing technology and artistic expressions to facilitate interspecies dialogues between humans and trees for two years. The audience is offered an opportunity to get a glimpse of the technical, scientific and artistic developments that the projects have made to date.

Humans have traditionally ignored plants’ ability to solve problems. Biology has recently acquired important knowledge about plants and their perception and problem solving skills. In Do Trees Dream of CO₂, artists and researchers investigate what art can learn from this new and exciting research and how it can be used to create new and visionary art. Visitors are invited to participate in a practical demonstration where they can try to dialogue with a tree. In case of bad weather, the demonstration will be made indoors. In any case, participants should bring a yoga mat (and a blanket and warm clothing).

Ana Bravo Pérez is a Colombian artist and filmmaker based in Amsterdam. Her work draws on migration, memory and violence. She uses her own migratory and diasporic experiences as a starting point for her artistic projects investigating suppressed narratives and collective histories. Her experiences have been crucial for building an artistic practice in which personal, decolonial and geopolitical questions merge.
Karine Bonneval is a French visual artist. Her transdisciplinary practice offers alternative ecologies for breathing, moving and listening with the plant world. By invoking popular and scientific culture in her pieces, she invites humans to “phytomorphism”, to experience a moment of shared time with plants, in dialogue with the air, the soil and gravity.

Per Hüttner is a Swedish visual artist and musician who lives and works in Stockholm and Paris. He’s the founder and director of the international research networks Curatorial Mutiny, Vision Forum and a member of various musical and  performance collectives. He has been part in developing the EEGsynth which a tool to use brain activity in performance art.

Maria Ångerman is a Finnish artist and filmmaker whose practice examines inter-species relationships. Her work moves in a delicate territory between documentary fact and poetic fiction.

Entrance is free, everyone is welcome.

2023-10-07

Book Release: Governing Bodies – A reader on Microbes, Art & Identity

 



- October 21, 19.30, Verkstad konsthall, Norrköping

Since 2018 a group of artists and researchers from half a dozen European countries have met, discussed, cooked, eaten and made interdisciplinary art events about the microbes that humans live in symbiosis with. Together the members of the group share a deep interest in how humankind’s growing understanding about the microbes in the human body influence humankind’s understanding of itself and our place in the world. Their collective experiences form the basis for a new publication that shed light on how microbes influence our health and our personality. It is also an exploration of what happens when different forms of knowledge come together and investigate a subject from different angles and new perspectives. It was created to inspire new thinking, new eating habits, and new perspectives on art and science. The contributors offer inspiration for our daily lives by reflecting on what happens when we see ourselves not as individuals, but rather living, walking ecosystems.

Each human being lives with 1,5 kg of microbes. They live in and on our body and because they are so tiny they outnumber the amount of cells that make up our bodies. The increasing knowledge about our interactions with microbes is shifting our perception of who we are and how we understand the world. This also raises questions about how humans should act in the light of these unfolding discoveries about the importance of the more-than-human world. The new knowledge also offers opportunities for new technologies and at the same time forces humanity to make complex ethical decisions. Research about microbes is therefore not only a question for microbial scientists. It is important for everyone on the planet, human and non-human alike. Today’s research and technological advances are not only changing science, they also affect the environment as well as influence the humanities and the arts.

You are invited to the release of the book where you can meet some of the writers who have participated in the process.

You can meet Freddie Ross, the editor of the book and Per Huttner who has organised the workshops and public events that lay the foundation for the book (The two will also make a performance on the topic.). You can also talk to researchers Giada Lo Re and Elias Arnér whom have both participated in the book and in the workshops that led up to the publication.


Welcome!